Mandalay, Myanmar

We arrived at twilight and just as were trying to figure out how to get to our prefered guesthouse a man comes up to us holding a sign that says “Royal Guest House”. Perfect! We jump in. Half an hour later we are dropped off at the guesthouse to find it is full (?), and now we have to pay for the ride (we assumed it was operated by the guest house, and therefore free). We walk onwards and find another option (“E.T. Hotel”). But our room is good value, and has air-conditioning (a treat) so we crawl back into bed to catch up on the z’s we missed the night before.



A classic example of a well-organized intersection in Myanmar. No traffic lights or stop signs, just a free-for-all. Horns are used almost continually, and helmets are usually worm but rarely done up.



After a long nap and a shower the three of us (we are now travelling with Maria, an Estonian who we met in Yangon) set out to explore. First stop is a Lashio Lay Restaurant where we have a shan-style buffet. You point at the dishes you want from a couple dozen options and they bring these to your table, along with simple salad (green cabbage, iceberg lettuce, cucumber) and plenty of rice. Meat dishes were about K1000 (~1.20) and veggie dishes around K500.

We enjoy it because it is tasty and we are starving, but in hindsight it was very oily (like all the food in Myanmar) and it may have been the source of some later G.I. upsets, but we're not sure. Later on in the trip, we learned that the excessive oiliness serves a few functions; it rests in a layer on top of the food and acts as an environmental barrier (against flies), keeps the food "fresh" and also signifies prosperity (oil means wealth). It is tasteless palm oil, and we quickly started to search for any kind of food that was less oily.

After lunch we venture into the zeigyo (central market); a large multi-story indoor market.  Here we find mostly local necessities (including hundreds of shops selling cloth for longyi). Maria and I decide we need a longyi if we are going to be visiting temples so we buy a few meters of fabric for a couple dollars each and head upstairs to have them tailored (for about a dollar). A longyi consists of about 2 meters of fabric sewed together at the ends to form a tube, with a black waistband. You step into the tube (which is about ankle length), wrap the longyi around your waist and tuck the excess into the waistband. They are a bit cumbersome to walk in, but I'm sure you would grow used to it. Myanmar is by far the most traditional country I've been to in the sense that a good 90% or more of the adult population still wears the traditional longyi (as opposed to Western-style clothing) as everyday attire.

There are also some stalls selling antiques and various trinkets, including these brass figurines and monkey-skull necklaces, which supposedly protect the wearer from bad spirits.

Later that evening (after another nap, haha) we arrange with a taxi driver to take the three of us up to Yankin Paya, a hil about 3 miles east of Mandalay Palace with good view of the city. By far the most famous hill is Mandalay Hill but in order to climb to the top you likely need to purchase the “$10 Combo Ticket”. We were trying to boycott doing so because the entirety of that $10 goes to the corrupt military government, not to the people. Yanking Paya on the other hand, is far less touristy, and free. We had negotiated with the taxi driver to take us there, wait for us to climb to the top for sunset, and drive us back for about $5 a person. He didn’t tell us how long it would actually take to drive those three miles (weaving through markets and neighbourhoods, and stopping to show us a pagoda) so by the time we reached the top it was essentially dark. The last colours of the sunset were just beginning to fade so we could get an idea of the view from the top, which was fine.

 

On day two in Mandalay we set out to explore some more of the city. We made the mistake of putting a water bottle (which was nice and cool from being in our air-conditioned room) inside the day pack with Dewey’s camera. The water bottle began to sweat from the huge temperature difference and we nearly ruined Dewey’s camera. We took the battery out and dried the camera off, and luckily about 24 hours later everything seemed to operate as usual. We explored the “gold leaf district” where 70 or so shops make gold leaf. The hand-pounded gold leaf is primarily used to adorn Buddha images across the country. Maria and I bought about 10 small sheets of 24K gold (about 0.0005inches thick) for about $6 between the two of us. As a fun fact, gold leaf is also “edible”; likely because it is so thin there is nothing there.



Workers pound the gold (between sheets of bamboo parchment) by hand into increasingly thinner waffers.



Ladies then cut and paste the thinly pounded gold into small squares, andywhere from 1.5" to 3" squares.



This day also happened to be my birthday (funny that we found this well-suited banner for a photo-op). I celebrated by having two freshly squeezed orange juices instead of one at my favourite juice shop: “The Pyay” on 32^nd & 80^th street. That night we had a nice dinner of chapatti and dal at a little street stand. We love this street stand because the chapatti are fresh and delicious, cost  K150 (20 cents) a piece (and two or three will fill you up for dinner), and the joint appears to be run by an enthusiastic 14-year old boy who in everyway runs the show.

At some point I managed to pick up ringworm, and the infection identified itself shortly after arriving in Myanmar (coincidentally ranked 190 out of 190 by the World Health Organization in terms of quality of available health care), which was at it's worst during our time in Mandalay. For those who don’t know, ringworm is not a worm, but in fact a fungal infection which about 25% of people living in developing countries suffer from. Fortunately, due to it’s prevalence it was easy (and cheap) to buy some medication to take care of the problem. However, the biggest problem with fighting ringworm in a hot, humid country is the challenge of getting the infection to dry out. It was on my lower leg so I lightly covered it with a bandage to keep the filth out but this made matters much worse. Without going into too many details, I did eventually manage to get the problem to go away, but a month later the “rings” are still visible.

We decided to continue northwards, eager to get out of the cities, the pollution and the heat. The three of us book a bus ticket for the following morning on a local bus to Hsipaw, about 200km (7 hours!) north of Mandalay.

To leave you with some words of wisdom...

"Food Machine & Other Food Machinery"