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

Sick of being sick @ Inle Lake

One of the five or so tourist spots in Myanmar, supposedly very beautiful lake high up the mountains. Yet Nina and I had a little problem. We both got severe food poison which started after three hours in the night bus... and the bus ride still was 8 hours long. Imagine the shit.. we were in. The Sickness made us homesick. Missing the nice home comfort, clean food etc. A hard few days. We read online that if you did not get food poison in Myanmar, you haven't been in the real Myanmar. So we had that going for us which is nice.

We've wanted to go hiking from village to village. unfortunately the food poisoning had us down for nearly 4 days. We did do a long-tail boat tour the last day. The scenery was super and again, the low season gave us some first row spots of the local fishermen live. 1 feet in the air paddling forward, one feet on the boar, 2 hands for the fishnet.  Looks amazing.

 Inle Lake is famous for handmade cheroot cigarettes with Anise and Cinnamon. They were not that good for our still sick stomach.

Myanmar - traveling back in time

Before going to Myanmar we couldn't get a real feeling about the county. Everything seemed so strict, tourists are just allowed in certain areas and you have to bring crisp brand new dollar bills, there won't be many ATMs, the accommodation is too expensive..... Well this might have been true 3 years ago, today you can find ATMs in every city, the accommodation is affordable, dollars are not really needed, everyone accepts their own currency but still: tourists are not allowed everywhere (we learned that soon enough, but this is another story).

Our first stop in Myanmar was Yangon, a city that still tells it's history. Everywhere you can see old British houses, which are either deserted or not taken care are off. These houses must have been amazing in the past, today they just show us how much things have changed. 

We walked around the old town, where you could still find remains of the British colonialism with the old city hall and street structures. We had a break at a tea house and just watched people walking by while drinking our tea and eating some noodles. We feel in love with this country right there. Everybody smiles at you, people ask you where you are from, they are happy to see you. This honest smiles is someone that we didn't see so often in Asia in the past months, however in Myanmar we can see them everywhere. Despite Yangon being totally dirty and the poverty you can see everywhere, Myanmar got us in its ban. 

On our second day we took a train ride through the outskirts of Yangon. This was one of my favorite parts of our trip. There were no tourists, only locals in the train which costs about 20 cent for 3 hours. To get to the right train we just had to cross the rails right after the train came in the station (this just feels wrong haha). Deutsche bahn does not agree! During the ride we saw markets, villages and just the normal live in Myanmar, everything feels like we are traveling back in time. The train is so old and moves so slow, the farmers working on the fields using wooden "machines", woman carrying heavy stones or vegetables on their head and just children playing in the dirt. Nobody is using a cellphone or something like it, we felt so weird with our big camera and and iPad in the bag, suddenly you are the rich person who is able to travel and see other things while all these people sitting next to us are worrying about clean water and enough food for the day. However, all these people here are so happy and you see nobody complaining. This is something we have to learn: we always complain even though we have enough of everything - just be happy and take you life easy!

Furthermore we walked around in the city and relaxed in little dirty but most fun teahouses and nice little bakery's which Burmese people seem to love. Ending with a sunset visit to the gold pagoda in Yangon.