Myanmar

It has been 3 exciting and exhausting weeks in Myanmar.  The fast paste, the sleepless nights during night bus rides from one place to another, and stomach aches from terrible local food have been draining.  The excitement of going 100 years back (that’s how we felt after arriving in Myanmar) wore off after the first week or so.  We felt always dirty surrounded by dust, taking off shoes to go into the dirty stores or climb the dirty cement stairs to the top of the Mandalay Hill.  We had stomach aches most of the time.  At some point, I stopped eating dinner, and just drinking a glass of juice without added sugar.  I lost more weight than doing a month of yoga in Thailand.  

Yangon had a few better, but overpriced restaurants to offer with small portions.  At the end, we chose to eat at places like that.  The tourism in Myanmar has a lot of room to grow still.  So far, we get a tourist price for everything, making Myanmar an expensive place to visit.  We had to pay a fee to enter Bagan and Inle Lake zones.  We even paid double for city bus.  It would be interesting to see the reaction of some tourist in US having to pay double for the color of their skin.  For example, our Chinese friend managed to get a lower price sometimes.  Even though we were warned to reserve the hotels and guesthouses few days in advance, we managed to find a place to stay without much difficulty having no reservations.

  

The hotel in Mandalay was the most expensive: $25 per night.  The hotel was the best part about Mandalay.  Even though it is the second biggest city, and we stayed in the center, it was dirty and there was nothing to see, besides more pagodas.  We only stayed 2 nights in Mandalay.

We arrived in Kalaw at 2 am.  We did not get much sleep on the bus, and we did not save on the hotel that night.  Kalaw is the base camp for all the trekking to Inle Lake.  Since we did not get much sleep that night, we decided to stay one more night in Kalaw.  We signed up for 3 day trek to Inle Lake.  We were a great group of 6 people: a Finish couple, a French guy and a Chinese girl.  Our group got a 19 year old arrogant and ignorant guide and 2 quiet assistants.  We also had a cook, but somehow our food was always cold.  Our stomachs did not like the food at all.  The views on the first and second day were nice.  

The most exciting part about the trek was meeting people from different tribes on our way.  We even spent the first night in somebody’s house in the village.  The second night we got to sleep in some building of a monastery.  The walls had gaps, the window could not close, and the blankets were too short and falling apart.  Even though I took 3 of those blankets, it took me awhile to fall asleep because I was freezing.  In the morning we were woken up at 6 am by a cook talking to himself and singing, while preparing breakfast in the building next door.  The cold breakfast was not served until 7:30 am, since our guide was nowhere to be found until then.  He was probably sleeping in a warmer building somewhere. Walking the last day was difficult after the terrible night we had.  We were ready to be done with the trek.

I managed to take a little nap during a boat trip to Inle Lake.  I was so tired, and the sun was warm.  We found a nice guesthouse on the lake.  After taking hot showers and eating, we only wanted to rest.  The rest of the time in Inle Lake we spent in a guesthouse, chatting to our French and Chinese friends from our trek.
Once we arrived in Yangon, it took us another 2 days before I felt rested.  Dangis’ body finally could not handle any more stress, and he got sick after our last night bus ride.  We are ready to leave Myanmar.