In which Roz and Layla cycle far and admire 8800 Buddhas

By Roz

The next day was our first big day of cycling and both of us had some nervousness - particularly about the heat and humidity. But it turned out to be fine. More than fine.  Mostly. We cycled along pretty country paths, along the side of the lake, and then by streams (passing water buffalo being ridden by tiny boys and being washed in the river and the like) and farming land. We passed monks on motorbikes, schoolchildren on their way to school in addition to the expected passing mules, cyclists and cars. People of all ages seemed truly delighted to see us - possibly connected to the fact that we didn't see a single other tourist. A lots of the time we were cycling alone (and not because we were last!) which was jolly. As we cycled along dirt paths that turned to gravel and tar, we were charmed to find development in action as the road was actually being built beneath our feet on occasion, by groups of locals. We initially reveled in it as a sign of how much the country is changing now - but then as the road building occasions became more frequent, the temperatures higher, and the cycling diversions onto makeshift paths through red sand to avoid the putative road more challenging, we became less charmed and more disappointed whenever we spied a road being built ahead. As the sun blazed down and the hills became more numerous, we soldiered on, and when the end came into sight, we agreed we were very glad it was over - but had had a jolly time nonetheless. 

Lunch turned out to be at a lovely looking place by the river. Somewhat to my sorrow it turned out to be owned by the same people who owned the restaurant we'd been in the night before, with the same menu. But we managed to find something different to eat - as well as consuming numerous strawberry juices (delicious). Then it was a short-ish boat ride to Inthein, site of hundreds of stupas (mini shrines, built by the powerful over the centuries - the oldest being 13th century). We walked up to the site past a million souvenir stalls, showing tourists are not unknown in Myanmar... we then got to the stupas. In parts overgrown, it was fun to wander round, admiring the hundreds of pretty stone monuments, each containing a Buddha artifact or teaching within. We then walked back through the woods, past bright blue water, and hopped on to our boats, and had a delightful hour long boat ride back to our hotel. Layla nodded off in the hot sun every now and then, whilst I read (Bonfire of the Vanities) whilst glancing up to look at the occasional passing foot-rower and the pretty scenery.

After a shower we were in the hotel bar (this is a very kind description) with books and gin. We contemplated our plans for the evening and, when we heard the guide say that dinner should be at one of the two places we had already been to, decided to make a break for it (despite being urged not to go to any other venue in town) and headed to the delightful  Viewpoint restaurant which we'd seen from a distance, looked pretty and was recommended in Lonely Planet. I certainly felt a little criminal / rebellious that we had broken from the others so soon. On the other hand, the restaurant was packed (indeed we had to work hard to persuade them to give us a table, and we only succeeded by introducing them to the concept of two seatings for dinner a night). We then had quite the best meal we have had in Burma so far - a delightful avocado salad (really interesting to taste something I am so familiar with prepared in an Asian way), a tofu dish and something lovely with butter beans as well as some crackers - and the piece de resistance, banana flambé for dessert. All washed down with the same wine we had in Monsoon on our first night. We sat overlooking the river and felt very happy indeed. 

This morning we were up even earlier (alas). I note, though, that though we are undoubtedly the last people to get out of bed in the morning, we are never the last to be ready to go. People can be such pfaffers, and with 18 of us in the group, this is one element of the holiday which I am not enjoying... Our day started with an hour long drive (to reduce down the mileage we would need to cycle) into the mountains and we spent the journey in some fear, given that we had been told that the entirety of the cycle would be undulating. 50 miles of a hilly landscape - however pretty - is not either of our favourites... Surprisingly it turned out to be fine, and involved going through a very different kind of country to that we saw yesterday. Then it was all lush and green (other than roadworks). Today it was much more stark - sometimes almost other worldly - with fields and hills, and it was hard to believe it was the same country. Though cheery to stop for green tea and local snacks in little roadside tea shops, and fun to happen upon a village initiation ceremony celebrating some local boys going to the monastery. After a LOT of hills, we both felt very proud of ourselves as we made it into the town where we will be staying the night.

Lunch was delightful if small (pumpkin soup) but it was very pleasing indeed to check into our surprisingly nice hotel. I used guile to nab us a double bed (homosexuality is illegal here so we have been a bit cagey about demanding one with vigour) and we then settled down on a delightful wooden balcony overlooking the hills to read and sip beer (and eat trail mix, still feeling hungry after lunch). Then it was over to see a giant cave. Filled with stalagmites and so forth it would have been worth seeing anyway, but in fact it has been turned into a Buddhist site and contains 8800 Buddhas (and counting). It was fun meandering through them and getting lost in the "maze" which pleasingly did have a giant Buddha in the middle. And it was also fun to see who had commissioned them - lots from narcotics police(?!) as well as a fair number from outside of Burma. My personal favourite being the one commissioned by a chap in Illinois who had given his full address on the plaque...

And now we are back on the balcony, and I am reveling in the breeze that is coming over the mountains. And my legs are quite stiff. 

In which Layla and Roz get on our bikes and don't see jumping cats at the floating monastery

By Layla

After another lovely swim in the Chatrium Hotel pool (and a sneaky partaking of high tea in the club lounge - for we are fancy, don't you know), we bade goodbye to glamour and somewhat shamefacedly asked for a taxi to the Asia Plaza Hotel - an establishment bearing significantly fewer stars, the site of the start of our tour. We checked in to our perfectly adequate if basic room, then met our 16 tour mates for the next two weeks: all British except one American, mostly couples, and nobody who is obviously a kindred spirit. But all pleasant. Except for the Scottish couple who claimed I no longer have a Scottish accent: I was speechless with horror. A man then turned up insisting he wasn't our tour leader, and caused much confusion and angst, including trying to insist that a random fellow bike person was the tour leader, despite her protestations. We extracted ourselves with another four people and went for a walk through the streets of downtown Rangoon (or Yangon, as it's now officially called), past street markets selling everything from fruit to plug converters, and lots of people sitting on the pavements on tiny plastic chairs eating dinner from the numerous stalls, to a tea house, as identified from our trusty Lonely Planet guide. We sampled extremely sweet tea (condensed milk was involved) plus more green tea-ish tea (when you order tea they bring you two types, inexplicably), then Roz and I left the other couples and wandered off for dinner. 

We ended up going to several places, not liking the look of them, going into one place, having suboptimal food, and feeling quite ratty. Then Roz had the inspired idea of the cool bar in the fancy Traders Hotel, where we had G&Ts, bruschetta, potato tapas things, and much cheeriness, which turned the night around and had us strolling back to the hotel feeling cheery, despite the lack of tour leader or organization.

The next day our trip to the airport with our group in a giant bus inexplicably took 4 times longer than our trip from the airport (okay, there was more traffic). Was quite exciting to go past Aung San Suu Kyi's house, where she was kept under house arrest for so long. Of course she isn't there now because she now has a government role and the government relocated to a newly designated capital city, Naypyidaw, a few years ago, leaving Rangoon/Yangon as merely the commercial capital. We lunched in the Green Elephant and the food was very nice... But I couldn't help glancing at my watch. Sure enough we made it to the airport at 1.55 for a 2pm flight. Me being me, I nearly had a heart attack. Luckily it was a very small airport and they gave Roz the boarding passes to distribute, we ran straight in, out, onto the runway, and were soon zooming towards Heho on a plane small enough to have turbulence that made us clutch our armrests in terror. 

We were all delighted upon arrival in Heho to be met by a grinning guide holding an Exodus sign. At last there was order to the chaos! He took us to a nearby cafe for drinks and planning before we set off on the hour-long drive to our base for the next 3 days, Nyaungshwe, bitterly complaining that the scheduled flight time had made it impossible to go on the planned 20km bike ride the itinerary promised. Delightfully though, once we'd checked into the basic-but-adequate Hupin Hotel, we were given our bikes and along with another friendly tour person, we set off for 40 minutes on an idyllic cycle along the canal (which leads to Inle Lake), on a dirt track peopled by locals grinning, saying hello (Mingalaba!) and going about their business, to a backdrop of fields and water. Glorious. We returned, grinning, for an orientation meeting, a cheery group dinner of multiple tasty vegetable items, some Myanmar beer, and a shameful bedtime of 9pm.

This morning we were up bright and early for a speedy pancake-and-omlette breakfast at the hotel before a 7am start. It was perfect weather for cycling at that time and we zoomed happily along a flat back road, alongside locals on bicycles, motorbikes, and only an occasional car. The fields, villages, houses, schools, and temples flashed past. We stopped at a sugar cane farm and watched them extracting and boiling the juice, which was very cool. And then we left our bikes, changed our clothes, strolled through a random village, and boarded 5-seat dugout boats moored in an inlet so filled with lotus leaves that we didn't even realize at first that it was water. But soon enough we were off, onto Inle Lake, one of the biggest tourist draws in Burma.

The 16x6 mile lake seems split into 3 main parts. First there's the open lake, beautiful and blue and populated by fisherman, perched upon their dugouts with old fashioned nets, and a very specific way of rowing that involves wrapping the oar round their ankle rather than using their arms. And incongruous modern tracksuit garb... Photographs were snapped as we zoomed past, the sun sparkling on the water. There are 'floating gardens', areas where vegetation has accumulated on top of the lake and somehow been farmed, eg tomatoes. Then there's the floating villages, more than 20 apparently, made up of houses on stilts. We visited a cotton, lotus, and silk weaving workshop in one of these buildings, where we had tea and read our books after a cursory appreciation... and also had lunch at a nice restaurant (it was actually called 'Nice') in another stilt house - quite fun to go to these buildings whose only access is by water. Indeed the waterways are full of boat traffic, mostly of the wooden dugout narrow boat variety (and some replicas in plastic), with a motor at the back. As we chugged through picturesque villages, seeing local families washing their hair or their clothes in the river, or sitting on their balcony with a cup of tea, I couldn't help but feel sorry for these river-dwellers for the ubiquitous motor attached to these otherwise traditional boats, continually roaring past by their front doors. The tourist traffic was high, but so was local traffic. Happily the water is still clean and blue...

After lunch we went to a temple, which was a little interesting, but we did glance at each other and wonder whether the 'temple fatigue' we'd heard about as afflicting Burma visitors could reasonably commence at essentially temple visit number one. Essentially, there is a lot of gold, and lots of Buddha statues. At this particular floating temple (the fanciest of quite a few we saw on the river) there were four gold lumpy things on a platform in the centre of the temple. It transpired that, as with similar temples, the lumps had originally been Buddhas, but it's tradition for local Buddhists to buy an extremely thin piece of gold paper and paste it on whenever they visit, thus gilding the Buddhas into gold-plated lumpy oblivion. What was even odder was that even though according to our tour guide Buddhist teachings say men and women are equal, this is apparently a men-only activity: signs all around the platform firmly declared: 'Ladies Prohibited'...

We then floated off to another floating building, thus one the very famous cat jumping monastery. Just as it sounds, this monastery is famous for the resident monks having taught cats to jump through hoops. It's all over the travel guides as a must see activity. However, when we got there we found that two months ago the Abbot had died, and when he did, the cats stopped jumping. It was unclear whether this was because they were in mourning, or because nobody else knew how to get them to jump (or perhaps the other monks decided to take the opportunity to stop their monastery being a circus show), but the cats lay sprawled on the linoleum in front of the gold Buddhas and could not have looked less like they had ever had the inclination to jump. Alas. 

A long, sunny, and beautiful cruise down the lake and into an inlet took us all the way back to the hotel, where Roz and I decided that even at this early stage of the tour, it was high time we had a jailbreak. We were told of a vineyard and hopped in a tuk tuk bus type thing and were conveyed up the hill to the Red Mountain Vineyard, where someone (allegedly French) in Burma had clearly decided to dedicate themselves to creating excellent wine. Well, wine anyway. We had a delightful hour at a sunny table at the top of a hill, overlooking vineyards and fields, and sampling five different wines as the sun started to set and we reluctantly took the tuk tuk back into town for the next day's orientation meeting, and an unremarkable group dinner of potato curry (Roz) and pizza (me - the shame) at the Golden Kite restaurant. We promised not to go to bed so early tonight. Ahem...

In which Roz and Layla touch down in Rangoon

By Roz

The flight to Burma from DC takes 24 hours and so I had swept aside Layla's objections to expense and booked us into a fancy hotel for our first two nights in Rangoon.  As it happened, the flight wasn't particularly bad.  Or no more bad than being on a plane for 24 hours is required to be. But with a time difference of 12 hours and the prospect of staying in some very dodgy hotels the rest of our time, I was still very pleased to be starting off our holiday with more than the required glamour.  We arrived at midnight, and did little more than stagger into our Chatrium Hotel room, gaze at the pretty view of the lake and pagoda, note the enticing looking swimming pool, and have a beer before finally getting into the bed we had been dreaming of for at least the last 12 hours. 

Next morning we were both awake disgustingly early, at 6am. Most unsatisfactory, particularly given the comfortable bed, and ended up heading down to the breakfast buffet earlier than either of us had hoped. But we told ourselves that calories were almost as satisfying as sleep as we tucked into omlettes and cheese and bread. We'd anticipated having a quiet day reading our books by the pool but neither of us could resist the lure of Rangoon and so headed off on our Lonely Planet dictated walking tour around half 9. 

Deposited at a roundabout by our taxi, we looked around trying to get our bearings.  But before we had done so, Layla gave a squeal of delight, having spotted a watch repair shop across the road, just below a big gold temple. She had failed to get a new battery for her holiday watch (ie "doesn't matter if it gets too bashed about" watch) despite the fact we live no more than 5 minutes from three different watch repair shops. She'd brought her dead watch anyway, despite my scoffing, and was smug that our first proper thing in Rangoon was a practical transaction. Fastening her newly working watch to her wrist, we set off for our wander through Rangoon. The first street the walking tour took us down turned out to be full of book stalls. It was fun to see the reading material of Rangoon, which seemed very far from the western world (no translations of Dan Brown, the Twilight series or The Hunger Games so far as I could see). And there was a striking focus on learning, with textbooks on pretty much all of the stalls. We headed down to the river, which sadly we couldn't see due to all the construction work, passing lots of colonial buildings - the Telegraph Office, the high court and the city hall - and the famous Strand hotel built for the visiting rich (and too expensive for us - $600+ a night!). We stopped off for a drink at the Parisian Cafe - less French and less nice than it sounds - and read for a bit whilst drinking lime juice. Outdoors again, I was struck at how "heavy" the air seemed - not just humid and hot (though it is) but also carrying a range of smells (mostly nice). Continuing through the streets of Rangoon, we passed more and more people selling things outdoors - indeed I can't imagine that anyone actually buys anything from any indoor shops (except watch batteries!). Throughout, we were quite a spectacle, curiosities to all.  Though we spotted the odd other non-Asian, usually in the distance, they were generally older and usually men. Starting to fade a bit, we ended up in a fancy cafe where we sort of had lunch (since neither of us felt absolutely hungry, though we knew it was the right sort of time for lunch) and made good progress on our books before heading back to the hotel in the early afternoon.  

We then headed down to the hotel's very good pool and swam (slowly) a few lengths whilst watching the hotel staff prepare for a poolside wedding reception, constructing giant glittering hearts, a fake car, and suchlike.  Before any sign of the wedding guests, we headed upstairs to the spa and booked body scrubs and massages.  Both of which were excellent, though we were bemused to be treated in the same room - and to find ourselves asked to shower at the same time in what was just a normal sized shower. But it was certainly jolly. Back in our room we succumbed to a short nap before heading for our free gin and tonics in the hotel bar where we vigorously discussed whether (as atheists) we hoped the next pope would be a progressive type. We then headed out to dinner at a lovely restaurant called Monsoon, which was in an old colonial building. We drank local wine (which was surprisingly lovely) and had a pumpkin and coconut curry (Layla) and a tofu and mushroom curry (me). Also dessert and a mad cold chocolate drink (for Layla, naturally). We headed back to the hotel to find the wedding reception finishing (quite early) and went to sleep.

This morning we were again awake early, though I had the good luck to end up dozing off again. Breakfast was followed by another nap (it was a long journey, ok?!) and we are now ensconced by the pool and about to have a swim - our last taste of luxury this holiday, as we go to meet our holiday companions this afternoon.