After another day in Chiang Mai I flew straight to Mandalay (Myanmar). It seemed to be a "flat" country, I walked around in Mandalay in the evening to find something to eat, trying not to stumble in the dirty dark streets ( electricity is rare in Myanmar, most of the time the power is off due to energy restrictions, lucky who has a generator ), finally I made it to a foodstall filled with locals, loud and busy. I shared a blue taxi with some others the next day to explore the ancient cities in the surrounding of Mandalay. We stopped at a snake temple, where they fed and bathed their 3 snakes. Close to it was a monastery full of little novice -nons, they were excited to have visitors, they offered us litle snacks to try and we watched them praying and learning, we took some pics and were quite flatened when a guy arrived on a motorbike with a huge thing wrapped in a blanket behind him - it turned out to be a high tech printer- they printed some of our pics right from our cameras and framed them into plastic for them to remember - just the thing you would expect to happen in a little monastery in Myanmar, right? We took a little ferry to the old city of Inwa, which is surounded by rivers, and over there we got around in a horse-cart to see an old mighty wooden monastery and a watchtower that could almost keep up with the tower in Pisa. ( There my sandal broke again, but unwilling to give up on my forth pair of sandals on this trip that easily, I fixed them with superglue later on ) We had a tea in a local "teahouse", another thing I became addicted to ( why only ramble about food when you can ramble about drinks, too? ), as the tea -served in small cups- consisted off approx. 1/5 of condensed milk - YUMMY! I rented a bicycle to explore the city-centre the next day, we stopped at the home/theaterstage of the famous MoustageBrothers - comedians who are not allowed to perform in their own language or at any events in Myanmar anymore and only perform in english for tourist nowadays, their popularity with tourists kind of keeps them alive and afloat. I decided to take the overnight bus to Bagan- the aisle up to the seats (and higher) and the roof of the old bus was packed with bags and packages of rice, mangos and whatever you could think of, I could hardly believe that this bus would actually move, but they called anybody by the name ( my name was tourist, being the only one with this name on this bus I had no probs to get identyfied by the driver ) to board the bus and we did move- at least till we had made it about 40 k's out of town, where we stopped. Dozing in my seat, I saw someone shifting packages to get to the tool-box. Later on I wondered where all the people were gone- most of them had fled the heat of the bus and were sitting next to the roadside, I realised that we stood there for 2 hours already, so I thought I might as well try my luck to find someone who speaks a little english to find out what's going on. At first nobody seems to be able to understand me, but they seemed to be quite amused, laughing and making jokes about that bloody tourist in their row - in the end a woman with the name ThinThin turned out to speak pretty good english: she told me that we were waiting for some people from Mandalay who would come to check the engine again as the driver/owner was pretty concerned about it because of the huge amount of freight...we sat down on the hot asphalt of the road and talked for about 2 hours about everything we could think off, beginning with the obsession of Myanmar-people with "thanakha" ( kind of yellowish sunprotection / makeup that almost everybody wears - that makes them look like actors in a stage play), about the government, we joked about our great bustrip and after learning as much burmese phrases as I could handle at midnight we compared the few words french we both knew. Well, we started off again at half 1 or 2, doing fine till about 8 o'clock...suddenly the bus got tired and decided to lay down for a nap...we left the street and tipped over..I've been dozing again, all I remember was hearing a long "OOOiii" uttered by someone, I opened my eyes while we were already tipping over, and then the frame of the bus hit he ground - anyway, as I was sitting on the left hand site of a bus that tipped over to the right, I somehow found myself standing upright very fast. Somewhere below me I saw 2 women, one of them ThinThin, between the seats, I pulled them up/out, then I realised that everything was a blur because I had lost my glasses, luckily they hadn't made their way through the whole bus yet and were somewhere nearby, I found my small backpack and my shoes aswell and we climbed out of the front of the bus. Most of the people weren't hurt, just a few scratches and bruises. Some people climbed out the sidewindows and sat on top of the bus in shock and disbelief, some tried to save some freight, that way Teddy made it to the surface eventually, and after answering some questions of a police officer me and ThinThin headed off to the next town to catch another bus to Bagan/Ngaung U. Bagan and surounding is filled with temples and stupas, climbing up on one of the temples you have an amazing view over the flat land filled with them...I cycled from one padoga to the next, lots of people tried to sell me sand paintings, some of them really good ( I resisted nevertheless-ha!) , while the sun burned down on me without mercy. After my bicycle trip I visited ThinThin at work in the market, she invited me into her house and we had a good laugh about our nice busride the day before and the busowner who tried not to cry. Another day, another bus: I went on to Kalaw the next day , where I made a 2-day trek through the surounding hills ( Yes, Myanmar has mountains after all!) , visiting different villages for tea and gosip, most of the people were busy selecting dried tea-leafes and packing them into bags to carry them down to Kalaw the next morning to sell it at the market. We stayed overnight atop a mountain in the house of a nepalese farmer family and stopped at the house of a sharmane (healer) well known in the area the next day, he and some men were sitting in his hut, smoking cigars and chewing betelnut, spitting the red saliva they produced by chewing it through a whole in the floor. I went on to Ngaungshwe, a bigger village in the north of the Inle lake. We took a little boat to explore the lake and it's suroundings, had a look at dozens of old stupas at Indein and jumping cats at a monastery, saw fisherman stirring their boats with their feet while their hands were occupied with nets, some of them collecting algae from the bottom of the lake (to use it as a foundation for new tomato fields). I traded a 20-hour busride down to Yangon for another day at the lake, amazing what distances you can travel within an hour in a plane :o). I had a last day of funny sightseeing in Yangon ( I accidently took someone for a taxidriver that wasn't one, but he took pity on me and drove me around the city for free, pointing out all the sights on the way) before I flew back to Thailand today, first to Bangkok and then straight on to Krabi, didn't take much time, althrough the last flight was almost twice as longer as planned because of the bad weather ( monsoon time ), it's been quite a while since I heard people clap in a plane after a landing.
