In which Layla and Roz see their last temples, eat a lot of ice cream, and fly back to DC early

By Layla

With the taste of that glorious cashew nut vanilla ice cream still in my mouth, Roz and I persuaded each other that we should definitely return to Black Bamboo for dinner. And so we did. I proved a poor dinner companion, as I was immersed in a book, but pre-prandial G&Ts and tzaziki enabled me to polish most of it off and pay attention over our tasty tomato tofu curry in the pretty garden restaurant. 

As ever, it was an early bed and an alarm of 5:45am as we hauled ourselves sleepily out of bed, via the omelette maker, to the van, and as the sun rose over the temples, we speeded up by van to Mount Popo, one of the holiest sites in Burma, though it seems this particular brand of holiness was not Buddhism but Nat. I think they said there are 37 different Nat (people turned into spirits/ogres) and one worships them along different themes depending on what you need. So for instance there was an education Nat to worship before a big exam... There was a gambling Nat to worship if you're off for a spot of Las Vegas action, etc. The mountain itself was quite scruffy and jumping with ratty-looking monkeys. Fun to see a gold temple perched on the very tip of the mountain, like a fairy tale. But frankly I was distracted by the imminent long cycle home. Sure enough, before long we were zooming down the hill by bike (though there was a surprising amount of uphill involved too, much to my sorrow). The roadside children shouting "Mingalaba!" here were less impressed with us and more tourist-savvy, with their additional calls of "Money money money!" And attempts to knock us off our bikes. Someone did actually fall off their bike, but due to not noticing a speed bump rather than the local children's antics, and had to be conveyed to hospital - luckily nothing worse than a black eye, some scrapes, and a chipped tooth, but a bit scary, especially when I (who I admit had taken to the van halfway down due to my own injuries playing up)heard someone was badly hurt and didn't know who it was. Meanwhile, the object of my concern, my dear wife, had taken advantage of my absence to cease pottering slowly along the road to keep me company, and was now zooming right up at the front with the very fastest riders. Apparently going at 26kph steadily all the way home, she beat me in my van by some way! Her smugness was vast.

We jumped in the pool for a quick swim (me swimming with one arm above my head to protect my healing arm wound), and then headed off for lunch to the delightful Black Bamboo for sandwiches and lassis and book reading. Before succumbing to the heat (and the intermittent nature of the electricity powering the fans) and taxi-ing back to the hotel. We had another dip in the pool, then, realising it was our last night in Burma, headed out for a romantic sunset ride to the temples of Bagan in a horse and carriage. This would have been quite nice, had we not feared for our lives as the precarious contraption negotiated its way around giant lorries and buses, and then across sand, to deliver us to the first temple we visited yesterday. We climbed up just in time for sunset, and watched the thousand of temples forming numerous tiny peaks along the 360 degrees horizon turn pink as the sun dropped down.

We returned to the hotel in time for the farewell meeting (the tour doesn't officially end till Saturday, but our bike guide left us in the questionable hands of an outsourced Yangon agent for the last bit), so there were lots of thanks, after which Roz and I, upon hearing plans for a group meal, fled to Black Bamboo (there are only 2 great restaurants in Bagan, I think, so their choice of Aroma 2 made ours for us). Embarrassingly, one of the tour helpers spotted our abdication, thought we'd done it in error, and raced after us to bring us back to the fold. The shame! We made our excuses and had a lovely meal together, musing that we are probably not cut out for tour groups...

The next day was a glorious lie-in: we didn't have to set off til 8am! We reveled in the luxury, had our breakfast outside in a pretty poolside garden (instead of a rushed early affair in the miserable dining room as usual), and soon were off on a rather nice 10km round-trip cycle to a couple of obscure temples. If only every day had been 10-20km, and started at 8am, rather than 6:30am and up to 70km... We were back by 9:30 and found a poorly planned day by our tour, where we had to check out of the hotel and return bikes by 12, then leave for the airport by 4.15... Cue most of our group sitting in reception all afternoon. We used the bikes for a final Black Bamboo lassi, tzaziki and sandwich, then returned, had a swim (arm in the air again), and read our books in the shade til the bus drew up and our 30-hour homewards journey commenced.

When we touched down in Rangoon and everyone else boarded the tour bus back to the original hotel, Roz and I took a taxi to the Green Elephant restaurant. This turned out to be a stressful drama when the taxi driver didn't know where it was, then got caught in horrible traffic, but it did mean we had a lovely last Burma meal in a romantic, twinkling light setting, and of course a final glass of Aythaya wine. Well, not quite final. We eventually got back to the airport in time to check in for our flight. Then we went through customs, with two passport officials examining our passports, side by side, when the airport tannoy started playing a Burmese song. Without any self consciousness or even seeming to notice, the two men started singing along, swaying cheerily in time, as they stamped our passports. Roz and I studiously kept our faces straight, then grinned as we were waved though and gazed back at them, still swaying away. Very jolly indeed. We bought our absolutely final Aythaya wine at the rather nice airport bar, and mused that it had been a rather jolly place to be, even if it wasn't as interesting as we'd hoped, was a lot more touristy than we'd hoped, the biking wasn't quite as enjoyable as we'd hoped, and being in a tour group had made us feel less connected to the country, and less prone to adventure than usual. We were unanimously glad to have chopped two nights off the end of our holiday - and I can't remember ever feeling like that before! But we haven't really chopped it off; merely relocated. After this interminable, Groundhog Day-ish journey ("What time is it? 8:30pm on Thursday. But I distinctly remember it being 8:30pm on Thursday when we had dinner at the Green Elephant, long ago?" We will be zooming home, changing our packing clothes from scorching to freezing, and boarding the train to Philadelphia for the culmination of our holiday - and of course the final blog. Stay tuned!