Day 6 – 8 – Mandalay

After the stresses of Yangon and the 15 hour train trip, Mandalay seemed such a pleasant place to be. There’s not a lot to do there really, but at least you don’t kill yourself trying to do it.

Our leisurely itinerary of two days in Mandalay involved hiring a couple of rickshaw drivers to pedal us around on the first day. There’s certainly no shortage of these around, and we were able to hire a couple inside the palace compound to take us to a temple area on the local map for 1000 kyat each. Rather embarrassingly, it turned out that we slightly misunderstood the map scale and ended up paying them the equivalent of 80 cents to ride us about 10km.

Now, I’m not exactly svelt and the sight of some poor Burmese man struggling towards an acute coronary as he tried to pedal my ample frame up a hill, is literally the only thing guaranteed to guilt me into opening my legendarily tight purse strings. Therefore, when the guys offered to ride us around for the rest of the day, we readily agreed. We settled on a price of 5,000 kyat for 5 temples that were marked on our map.

One of the unwritten laws of haggling in Asia is if, when you name a price, the other person immediately says deal, you know you’ve made a mistake. If the say it with a slight smile, you’ve really made a big mistake. So, when our guys started to dance around and hug each other, letting off fireworks, my suspicions were slightly raised.

Nivea’s new “leather visage” cream has so far failed to take off outside Myanmar

It turned out that all 5 temples were within about 30 metres of where they had just taken us and that we had effectively paid 5 times our original price for them to lounge around on their bikes. Still, you gotta give something back….

The temples were nice, without being anything too spectacular. Probably the highlight for me was two young girls who were incredibly keen to sell us some ink paintings (which we had seen at numerous other attractions). They followed us around the pagoda saying “You buy, we happy” with big, infectious grins and cheeky laughs. We decided that as we weren’t going to buy anything from them, we would give them a couple of crappy clip on Koalas that I had bought in Australia (admittedly for probably 5 times what the girls would have been willing to accept for their pictures). Then, as we were leaving, without a word of a lie, the cheeky little buggers tried to sell the koalas to us!

That’s them officer!

That night we went and watched a marionette show. The theatre was a charming little place, run by an old man who didn’t look strong enough to lift a puppet, let alone perform with one. In fact, if I’m being honest, the puppets actually looked stronger than he did. If he was working on Thunderbirds, the world would have been destroyed before the Traceys even made it out of the pool.

Take that Hans Brixs!

The next day, we had arranged with the driver of our torch lit bemo to take us to some of the sights outside of Mandalay (and preferably return before nightfall). The most impressive of these sights was a monastery where 300 monks line up simultaneously for lunch.

Please Sir, may I have some more?

It was quite imposing and well worth seeing. Unfortunately, the whole mystic essence was ruined by a Spanish tourist who actually got in line with the monks and followed them with his video camera. And they say tourists don’t respect other cultures!

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience. Register three is now open

We also had lunch in a local, and I do mean local, restaurant. For approximately 6,000 kyat, we received approximately 80 dishes of approximately 7cm diametre, filled with, approximately, food.

The food was a heady mixture of the delicious and the suspicious. For every bowl of succulent chicken curry, there was another, containing beef lard soaked in toxic waste and baby vomit. Still, well worth the experience and the possible chronic bowel complaints later in life.

Botulism – thy name is Myanmar!

That night, we went for a swim in the hotel pool and got chatting to a couple of local fellows who invited us out for dinner. Our plan that night had been to go and see the moustache brothers, a political comedy troupe who are famous for standing up to the government (I have since heard that Par Par Lay has be arrested again). However, we agreed to have dinner with the family from the pool, thinking we could make it later. Halfway through our noodles, the boy casually announced that Than Shwe was his grandfather through marriage. This was basically akin to sitting down to dinner with a man who says, “Oh, and by the way, my uncle is Idi Amin”. After that gem, it seemed somewhat inadvisable to tell them we were off to an anti-government production. So, we succinctly bid them good evening and slipped out to try and find a taxi.

I guess someone’s going to San Francisco

Unfortunately, due to the wonders of Myanmar technical expertise, Mandalay has no streetlights at night, and we were unable to find a taxi. So we missed the show, possibly the only thing my sister really wanted to do in Mandalay. We couldn’t stay though; we already had a boat booked for Bagan the next morning.

Next week – Bagan and Kalaw

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 8:49 am and is filed under Outside Tokyo, Way, Way Outside Tokyo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.