All roads lead to Mandalay

Day 39 - 26/12/2015
Chokdee guest house - Chiang Mai - Thailand

Hello folks !

It's been exactly 2 weeks since our last post and to be honest we didn't write a single line even to our internal diary ...

However all important memories are still very alive and not important ones are not worth mentioning :)

Our last post was written on a bus from Rakhine state to Mandalay, 14 hours comfy journey with bitter-ish arrival at 4 AM to sleeping city.

Accompanied by our new Russian friend - Anton Antonovskyi we all checked in to Garden Hotel for reasonable price matching reasonable room.

We almost made it for the sunrise :) underestimated distance to Mandalay hill only by 2 hours of walking :)

Anyway street Mohinga and massive Papaya shared between three of us served as great start of the day and only meal till late afternoon.

Main tourist attractions in Mandalay include - Royal Palace (occupied by military and can be missed),

Moat and Palace walls are the heart of modern Mandalay

Inner Palace grounds viewed from watch tower

Main entrance

Kuthodaw Pagoda - in the surrounding area one can find the largest book on this planet

Each pagoda protects one stone carved chapter of Tripitaka 

Inner Yard of Kuthodaw pagoda complex

Sandamuni Pagoda - newer copy of Kuthodaw with the Teravada books transleted to Burmese script.

Burmese Tripitaka translations

Endless field of white pagodas

Atumashi Monastery - Rebuilt and renovated lately - very impressive feeling inside

Detail of inner staircase

Atumashi pagoda in full glory

Shwenadaw Kyaung - old teak monastery saved from the bombs of WW2 allies only because it was relocated out of the Royal Palace

Impressive detailed carvings

Inner walls are covered with gold and used to serve as king's chamber 

Last but not least to mention is Mahamuni Temple complex on the bottom of 84th street surrounded by stone carving industry where you can see Buddha statues of all shapes and sizes.

Golden face of Mandalay, all statue except the face is covered with golden leaves 

Modern handwork

Face comes last as it's most difficult and only some masters can do it correctly

Another one bites the dust !

It's possible to score all of these sites within one day, but it's a little bit tiring :) we started at 7 am with long walk around the Palace walls - one side of the wall is bloody 3 kms long ! and just before the sunset we were leaving Mahamuni complex.

As mentioned earlier, Palace is not as attractive as one would expect, Kuthodaw Pagoda area is incredibly calm place where locals come to chill in shade of little pagodas protecting book fragments, Large trees are full of birds and you can easily fall asleep even in the midday heat :)

Mr Anton Antonovskiy having a nap :)

Mandalay hill is a hike which might be worth it on clear sky day for sunset / sunrise (wondering when this happens in city with such high air pollution), we started climbing around 3 pm and it cost a lot of energy.

Nirvana awaits  much higher in the heavens than you can see !

Endless steps take you around beautiful viewpoints all the way to the heaven and the last step leads directly to NIRVANA !

View south east from mid Mandalay Hill - Left is Kuthodaw and right is Sandamuni complex

Next morning we rented bikes and leaving early to avoid morning peak hour traffic we set off south direction to Amarapura and Inwa.

Things do not go by the plan all the time and Ganesha was obviously not on our side that morning.

Firstly we almost had a collision with a lady on a motorbike heading straight at us in 10 km/h speed, after 3 maneuvers trying to avoid inevitable crash on completely empty street our back wheel betrayed us, skid on loose rocks of dirty road and we tasted the force of gravity ! Nothing serious happened to either us or bike, minor scratches on our hands, little bruises and broken driver foot rest on the bike. We exchanged the bike for older more resistable model explaining that the footrest just fell off :) wrapped drivers hand in few bandages and set on the journey again.

Tarmac tattoos couple of days later 

Don't buy fuel from unknown strangers unless you have cheap shitty chinese bike which can run almost on pure water ! Mr Anton's bike (Honda) stopped running at the end of 84th street and further bike exchange delayed us by more than hour.

By 9:30 we finally made it to Amarapura and after brief walk on the longest teak bridge in the world we had amazing Mohinga again (How I miss Mohinga these days.... Mohinga, Mohinga, Mohinga !!!)

Longest teak bridge in the world - Amarapura

Business as usual in Amarapura, new harvest is coming soon !

Stop in monastery to see lunch procession of monks took us some time as we got into few conservations and at the end we got stuck sitting with one monk inside his tiny room discussing basics of Buddha's teachings. Sure he wanted donation for his studies at the end :)

Patient queue for lunch at 10:30 - last meal of the day

Ancient city of Inwa spreads over the plains south of Myitnge river and it's hard to imagine full size during the main glory period. These days remains consists of many pagoda ruins and few monasteries, all vedged into beautiful landscape of lakes, rice paddies and banana plantations.

Earthquake surviving watch tower

We spent the rest of the day wondering through this vast area and even on the way back we're discovering many more ruins of grand scale.

Even monks act as tourists sometimes !

Inwa - Brick monastery

Buddha exchanged Boddhi tree for Toddy Tree :)

RaT watching bright future !

Concentrating since 1623 !

Oldest still working teak monastery in Myanmar

Pagodas lost in the rice fields

Tati awaiting moto-taxi back to Mandalay :) Good luck on this busy highway !

Teak monastery hidden in the palm trees and lotus filled lakes 

Pagodas, Payas, History etc ...

We expect this to be earthquake surviving entrance to huge building !

To get back to Mandalay centre we joined Transoriental highway from Yangon and killed 35 kms distance in very short time. We joined dusk peak traffic and enjoyed it to the maximum. Anton was singing his favourite song half the way surrounded by 3 lines of motobikes and further 3 more lines of trucks, vans and cars.

Where are the girls ???

At the end of the day we got fairly used to simple asian driving rule - Don't think, don't look left and right too much and keep your pace in straight direction, everything works out on its own :)