So here I am in Chiang Mai, Thailand sitting on a big bean bag chair gazing adoringly at a couple of black puppies playing at my feet while Jamie is in our hostel bathroom vomiting up a storm. This is her second bout of food poisoning since we've left Korea and the poor thing has probably lost about 10 to 15 pounds from it. It has definitely put a lot of dampers on our traveling having to postpone treks and trips out of town but I guess we are on vacation so I could afford to chill out a bit.
Anyways, Myanmar was nuts. It was relatively untouched by a lot of tourism unlike the rest of SE Asia. We landed in Yangon after 2 too many long layovers in China and were hot, tired, and flustered. We got to our hostel and the streets reeked of latrines and they were covered in red spit from the Tabacco stuff the locals chew. It's truly nasty stuff, it stains their mouths and you constantly hear someone horking loudly somewhere.
Anyway, we were advised to take out all our cash we'd need for our trip prior to arriving because ATMs are not good with international cards in Myanmar. Also, theft against tourists results in the death penalty so we figured we were safe. Well, low and behold- within 1 hour of being in Myanmar, I was skillfully pickpocketed of 450$ US. Awesome. We decided to leave Yangon after one night.
We took an overnight bus to Bagan which had people sitting in the aisles for "cheaper seats". It wasn't a great ride and we arrived at 5am with a bombardment of taxi drivers clamouring over each other trying to take foreigner customers since they could charge them more than the locals. Jamie was kind of hilariously mean to them and grumpy. So many of the hostels were full or way over our pice limit. After an hour of searching we, with teary eyes, explained to a hostel owner that we were robbed and had half the money we budgeted. He kindly drove us to another hotel where we stayed in the staff quarters of the hotel for $7.50 each. Next we spent the next few days renting bicycles and bopping around the stupas and climbing the amazing structures. I can't begin to describe how beautiful this place was. Every direction you looked there were hundreds of old stupas, most red brick but some were white or gold painted. We definitely got lost a few times in farm fields and joked around saying "I think we turn left at the stupa" (since there were about a thousand).
After a few days we took a bus to Mandalay which was cleaner and less hectic than yangon but we still had a sour taste in our mouths from our first city experience and decided to only stay for two days and one night. Again, our overnight bus to Mandalay had dropped us off somewhere at 2am. Flustered, tired and a bit scared again we asked a nice hotel to sit in their Lobby to drink coffee until the sun rose. We walked around the city all day which was good and tried some cheap street food.
The next morning, we took a mini bus to the small mountain town of Kalaw. By supper time, Jamie got her first bout of food poisoning. She was up all night getting sick so we decided to hang around for an extra night. I wandered around the small sleepy town by myself and set up our 3 day trek to Inle lake for the next morning.
With Jamie strong enough to go on the trek we headed out with our guide, a young French couple, and an older French woman. We soon found out the solo French woman was one of the most difficult people to deal with- very slow at walking and a very picky eater. We would have to stop every 20 minutes for her to catch up to us. When it's hot and sunny, you kind of want to get to the nearest rest station as soon as you can. We were also doing about 22km a day up small mountains and crossing over rivers by way of a tree trunk. We made it to our first village stay though. We stayed in a barn where our guide and the family cooked us a big Burmese meal of fried vegetables and rice. During the night one of the highlights was when a baby Buffalo escaped from its pen beside our barn in the night which led to the family running around chasing the thing in the middle of the night. The next morning we started out again at the crack of dawn and made our way to the next village. Halfway though the day Jamie and I had to trade shoes- she was wearing converses and I had nice comfy shoes that my korean co teachers bought me as a going away present. Jamie's poor toes were all bloody and blistered so we were lucky we wear the same size.
The second night stay was somehow more eventful than the first. We all wanted to have a shower and our guide showed us a little hut with a terrifying black pool of water completely open to the yard. We took turns holding a rattan mat over the doorway for privacy while about 20 Burmese villagers gathered to watch us and talked to each other. Apparently it was either very strange that we all had a bucket shower or that we were using their cooking water.
It was hilarious and stressful to say the least. We hen decided that we all deserved a beer before dinner so we met some other Trekkers ( a German man and an English man) who were middle aged and doing the shorter two day trek. The German was an international businessman who had been living in Asia for over a decade and he shared amazing stories of when he went to North Korea ten years ago for business.
After a very cold night in a bamboo built barn with thin enough floors that we could see the hogs sleeping under us, we ate breakfast and started out on our last 20km of the trek. When we arrived at inle lake we were exhausted, covered in red dirt, and so proud of ourselves. We ate lunch with our guide for the last time and took an hour long boat ride to the town of inle lake. That night we ate dinner and had drinks with other Trekkers. We spent te whole next day recuperating and wandering around the town lazily. The next day we took a boat with the French couple on the lake for sunrise, then to see the fisherman, the floating market, the floating villages, and the floating gardens. With a lot of persuasion, we managed to avoid the majority of ploys that the people do by bringing tourists to their friend's shops and workshops. That night we rode up to a winery for wine tasting which were a surprising mixture of decent to revolting wines. The sunset over the vineyard was worth the trip.
The next day was my turn to suffer (mine was a hangover of epic proportions).
We then decided to take the 30 hour train from inle lake to Yangon. The other option was a 20 hour bus which we decided we hated the buses in Myanmar. Also, the train was only $9.40 each. The old wooden thing crawled through the countryside, the mountains, and jungles. Every small village would have people waiting to trade bags of produce with someone on the train or have snacks to sell to the people on the train. Every child gaped at us when they saw us on the train or platform. In more affluent towns the teenagers would ask to take pictures with us. By 9pm, we stopped to have dinner at a train station. The burmans all crowded around us smiling as we ate a 50 cent dinner under fluorescent green lights and giggled furiously when a kitten sized rat scurried over my foot and I jolted in fear.
The rest of the train was comically bouncy. Monks were watching and laughing with me as we were jostled so hard that it felt like an amusement park ride. Jamie didn't find the bouncing as hilarious as the monks and I did.
Back in Yangon, we wandered around a bit more than the first time in the parks and markets. We took a restaurant recommendation from my friend, Grace, who had spent the summer there. We had some cheap 2 for 1 mojitos and packed it in early. The next day, we flew to Chiang Mai through Bangkok which is where we are now!
More to come but my thumbs are cramping up.
