Week 20: Myanmar

I am writing this week’s post from the comforts of a lounge chair on a boat travelling up the Irrawaddy River from Bagan to Mandalay, Myanmar. Life is feeling SO good!

We began this last week in Inle Lake. While we were there, we did a daylong boat trip, which took us all around the lake. The lake is about 22km long and 10km wide, so we needed some time to check it out! We watched fishermen leg rowing and casting nets, and saw boatloads of young monks. We travelled through floating villages and gardens, where locals were growing tomatoes under water. Our day included a few stops, where we learned about silver and local jewellery making, weaving with lotus fibers, and traditional boat making. We met a few Padaung women, who are better known worldwide as ‘long neck’ people. We learned that these women start off wearing four rings during adolescence, and eventually move up to wearing 24 rings that weigh a total of 8kg! We also stopped off at a couple religious sites, including the ‘jumping cat’ monastery. There were a lot of cats around, but unfortunately for us, none of them were jumping. We also had the opportunity to stop off at Shwe Inn Dein for a few hours of exploration. We loved this place! We climbed in amongst all of these old pagodas, admiring how much they varied in size and shape, and how well some of them have been preserved. We were overwhelmed by how impossible it was to try to capture this place with a photo. Near the end of the day, our boat driver found a beautiful spot for us to watch the sun set. The perfect end to a great day!

While we were in Inle Lake, we also visited Innlay Hut Indian restaurant. Twice. We HAD to return- not only was the food absolutely amazing, but the owner/waiter/cook was so ridiculously entertaining. This guy was totally obsessed with the rapper, Eminem, and he played the part of a die-hard fan extremely well, complete with quotes from songs on all walls and rapping orders. I would go back just for this restaurant.

We spent another day exploring the streets and shops, meeting up with other travellers over meals, and having a long, leisurely chat with a local girl who works for a Myanmar airline. We love learning more about the people, the culture and the history here!

We then took a night bus from Inle Lake to Bagan. Unlike our first night bus, this one was very bumpy and rough. I was able to sleep a little bit, but Will wasn’t so fortunate. We arrived in Bagan at 4:30 am and tried to check into our hotel early to let him get some sleep. When we were told the room wouldn’t be ready for a few hours, we took advantage of the early hour and set off in search of a good spot to catch sunrise. We then had a lengthy breakfast with a couple of travellers from Spain, and tried to forget about how much Will needed to get some sleep. He was finally able to get a few hours of shuteye in the afternoon before we set off for dinner and a night walk around town.

We spent three days in Bagan. It was pretty cloudy and a bit rainy for most of our visit. This made it a lot cooler than it would have been in the sun, but also meant that we didn’t see any hot air balloons floating above the temples. I reassured myself that the many photos found on a Google search would trump the ones I would take anyways, and just enjoyed exploring the 2000+ temples scattered around this area. We rented an ebike for two days, and this allowed us to zip down the many roads and dirt paths leading to these temples. We found many similarities between the temples, but many distinguishing features as well. We loved the detail work preserved on the outside of the temples, especially the faces. We saw more Buddha statues than we could ever count. We did run into a few tour groups, but we didn’t find it overly crowded at any time. Many of the large temples are having reconstruction work done, so they were surrounded with tarps or bamboo scaffolding. Some temples have been damaged by earthquakes and heavy rain, while others have just deteriorated over time. Just like everything else in South East Asia, nothing was made for tall people, so Will got lots of squatting practise going up the temple staircases. Even though we had cloudy skies, we still found great spots to enjoy sunrises and sunsets. Our experiences with great food and incredible service continued in Bagan as well, and we loved trying more of the local dishes.

It’s shocking for us to think that it’s already mid-December. We are reminded that we are coming up to the holiday season by friends and family back home, but there is no sign of those holidays here. We have been away for the holidays before, and even been in places that don’t really ‘do’ holidays the way our shops and streets do in Canada, but this feels very different. In an odd way, it’s nice. By removing ourselves from what we’ve come to see as the norm around the holidays, we realize how much of this craze we’ve created for ourselves. Don’t get me wrong- this girl LOVES everything related to a theme, so holidays where people decorate and bake treats and celebrate with fun traditions are definitely up my alley. However, along with all of this fun sometimes comes stress and worry and frantic, busy, anxiety. We get feeling like we need to do all of these things. Being away from every bit of that makes me think about how important it is to keep the focus on being present, making happy memories, and sharing love. Full stop.

Top 10 for this week:

My type A personality loves these lists. At the beginning of the week, I thought I would make notes about each stop along our boat trip on Inle Lake and write 10 things we learned about on the trip. Instead, I sat back and enjoyed every moment, taking in this diversely different environment and it’s inhabitants. So then I thought I would take notes about the different temples we visited and keep track of which temple was which. Nope! We just putted along on our bike, stopping when we saw a temple we wanted to explore or a road we thought we should check out. We slid along muddy trails, drove into farmer’s fields, and got caught up in thorny bushes. By taking ourselves away from the map, we lost track of temple names and details, but we found some hidden treasures along the way. And now, instead of spending any time thinking about a top 10 list for the week, I’m letting it go to enjoy an amazing riverboat ride instead. Maybe it’s my subtle way of sending a message out to my fellow Type A’s, as they prepare for the holidays with lengthy lists of “to do’s”. What might you let go of this holiday?

Today, as I mentioned above, we are travelling by boat from Bagan to Mandalay. We are really enjoying the scenery- long stretches of sandy beach, boats hauling huge loads, small huts on the waters edge, people washing clothing and laying them out to dry in the sun, and of course, lots of shiny temples! The boat trip will take about 10 hours, and with only 9 other people on board, there’s lots of room to move around and enjoy the sunshine!

Random act of kindness: I would love to say that our ebike experience was without any hiccups, but this was not the case. On our first evening with the bike, we set off for sunset with a half charged battery. The battery did not have nearly as much juice in the second half as the first, and the bike died on our way back from sunset, 8.5 km from our hotel. We managed to combine our efforts of pushing it and just one of us riding it with the other running behind in flip flops for 3km. At that point, a local guy pulled over and came to our rescue. He called our hotel and told them what had happened and where we were. The staff were then able to pick us up and get the bike back to be charged. We were so thankful to this man for taking the time to stop and help us!