Children of Lao!

Here we share Nina's new " ahwwww so sweet" moments. Everywhere in Laos are some many children. Villages with 20 adults have atleast three times as many children. While crossing through these villages the children are so welcoming and sweet. They come up to you to say saawaaadeeee (hello!). And waive to you for their goodbyes. 

Trapped in tourist rules - mandalay

After getting some 'freedom' in Bagan with our ebikes, we were curious about Mandalay. However, we were again locked in a tourist route. In the beginning it sounded great when a taxi driver approached us and offered to take us around the outskirts of mandalay for one day. We wanted to see the famous bridge there anyways, so we took his offer of showing us the outskirts.

What we didn't know: every tourists takes this tour with a different taxi and everyone goes to the same places. Tourists are not allowed anywhere else so when we asked our driver to show us villages and nature, he refuse because he wasn't allowed to. We saw a lot of nice things, but again this isn't real myanmar, it was a typical show off tourist tour. 

Our highlight was the lunch break: after visiting a mountain our driver told us we can get lunch at the "viewpoint restaurant" - this name sounds already expensive. It was probably full with all the other tourists that we met at every sight during that day. So we asked to get lunch at a cheap place (luckily our driver did - We still paid the tourist price but that was ok). 

I'm happy to get to see parts of the real myanmar in Yangon and Kalaw and I'm hoping for changes in the government to make it possible for the locals to get their business going with the tourism. Today, too much money from tourism goes to the government and to locals suffer. Myanmar is a beautiful country with amazing people and I hope we get to see more of its beauty soon.

However, we still had a beautiful day:

 

Right out of a Disney movie - Bagan

Bagan, a small desert area of a few squire kilometer with no not 1000 pagodas but 4000! pagodas of all sizes. 2500 are still intact after the earthquake in the mid 90's.  After arriving in the extreme heat we went to see some pagodas, after a minute walk you'll see the first ones. It seems unreal that the place is covered with them. Now you may think what's the beauty of many pagodas on a small place. Well, I hope the pictures cover that! Even if it's impossible to capture the view with a camera we did our best to do so. And to do so we had to climb and search a lot of pagodas to get the best view of Bagan!

First day we took a horse car to ride to all the famous pagoda's, most of them are rather big and unfortunately not aloud to climb up to the top to see the view. while the ride was very nice it is t he main tourist thing to do here and you get to the same pagodas and temples as the Chinese/America tourist bus does. So for the other days we tried to find our own temple with the E-bikes!

 

 

 

If someone thinks a Prius car is lame, try a E-bike. I guarantee you, it's lamer! But a foreigner is not aloud to ride a scooter or anything with a petrol motor in it for that matter. So an E-bike is a nice maze in the law. Even if the bike is quite a slow form of transportation it brought us everywhere while driving the desert roads through the pagodas. It brought us to monks who live next to pagodas and who points you to places where you can climb up for stunning views over the area.

Our mission was to find the best temple for sunset. The last day we hit the jackpot. We found a pretty high pagoda, easy to climb the start, bit harder to reach the top. This is perfect so the "others" won't go all the way. Cause if you think you can find a deserted pagoda for sunset... well good luck :) And we were right! around sunset time we arrived at the few hours before deserted pagoda and now a tour bus arrived, but no problem! as most of the people were not able to climb all the way up. This resulted in some awesome shots. Bagan, a really magical place. Unreal!!

The walking speed train - Kalaw

The initial plan was to hike from Kalaw to Inle Lake (3 days). Unfortunately it was not possible due to the lovely clean Myanmar food and our European stomachs. But all well! We found another great way to get there. Not by bus, but by the local train in a village just outside Inle Lake. the trip is normally 3 days of hiking, 1 hour bus ride. But the train is a special thing in Asia, why? it takes 5 hours longer than the bus. But the ride is most of the time spectacular, and it surely was. We wanted to sit with the locals but they only let us in first class ("upperclass"), which we did not realize when we bought the ticket because it cost 50 cents.. the agony. At first we did not like to be first class (we were sitting there almost alone), but a small wooden bench for 5-6 hours is not everything.

The tracks were from WWII and made by the Japanese after England lost Myanmar as a colony.  It circles on walking speed around the mountains one so small tiny bridges that you do not even see the tracks beneath you anymore. There were a lot of train markets along the way. Train markets are right at the tracks, here you can shout of the window to someone what you want and you can buy it through the window. Very convenient as there is no glass in the window anyways.

Kalaw itself is quite high up the mountains, which makes the surroundings really cool. How I've missed normal cold weather. Sometimes I wish I was in Iceland, or iceskating in the Netherlands. All well, I miss the cold. To get to our guesthouse in Kalaw we had to find a taxi but there were none! A really old men came to us and asked: Taxi? We said yes and followed him to a place were only a horse stood. Tada, our taxi hahaha. I was in love right away with this place.

In Kalaw itself we walked around had some food and didn't do much as we were still recovering. But at one point we were walking to a cave which is said to be nice until 3 military people came to us and said NO NO NO, Go back, No way. Seemingly we walked in a restricted area were no touristst are aloud. While being escorted back into the umm Tourist ok zone? I wondered what was there. What is so horrible that no one can enter. Myanmar government is hiding more than half of it's country for the outside world and no one seems to really care. A shame