 Our time in Bagan started in the same way as many of our travels - with a long and horrible bus journey. Given we arrived in Inle overnight and that we were both half asleep, it was easy to forget that we'd actually travelled up through the mountains to get there. The way to Bagan, which is west of Inle, involved driving down the steep roads that had led us there in a bus which can only be described as aged.
0 Comments
 Inle Lake is quite rightly one of the main attractions of Myanmar. The expanse of water is home to many villages on stilts, where lake residents still practice traditional handicrafts such as making lacquerware, hand-weaving with lotus and silk and rolling tobacco to make cheroot (basically cigars). Cue a picture of Joe making his mother cry by smoking a crazy Myanmar cigar filled with tobacco, banana, honey and star anise.
Picture the scene… It’s Friday the 13th (a bad omen already). We’ve been on an overnight bus that was delayed meaning instead of 12 hours it took us 16 hours to reach Inle Lake in Myanmar. We’re tired, have headaches and are feeling just generally dirty, but are looking forward to showers and freshening up. Joe decides to cut his hair (we invested in a shaver in Chile and Joe has been giving himself free haircuts ever since). He disappears into the bathroom and starts shaving. All I hear is ‘wow my hair is longer than I thought!’ before a series of confused noises and exclamations. He walks out looking like this:
His hair was not longer than he thought, he was actually just cutting off more than he meant to after putting the wrong attachment on his shaver! Cue laughter and crying, shrieking and general hilarity. He ended up having to give himself a number 2 all over and now bears a striking resemblance to a Buddhist monk.
 We knew when we booked our flights to Myanmar that we had inadvertently timed our stay to coincide with one of the country’s major celebrations – Thingyan and the Burmese New Year. Running for about a week in April, the Buddhist water festival of Thingyan is celebrated across the country in what can only be described as a giant water fight, and which culminates in New Year festivities. Our schedule was pretty tight so we had no choice but to come to Myanmar at a time when all buses and transport grinds to a halt as the people take to the streets to dance and fling water at each other. We ended up in the Inle region for 6 days, staying in a village outside of the Lake area called Nyuang Shwe. We were lucky enough to have chosen an absolutely beautiful family run guesthouse (the Golden Empress), which turned out to be a perfect place to shelter from the water throwing. Our double en-suite room was gorgeous and the included breakfast was absolutely to die for - juice, coffee/tea, mountains of fresh fruit, toast with butter, jam and marmalade and the option to have eggs in a variety of ways or a banana and chocolate pancake! Given the festival, many of the activities and top things to do were closed, so our days focused on sampling some of the most highly rated lunch and dinner spots in Nyuang Shwe. We had some seriously delicious North Indian food (one meal of which was actually in a bizarre Eminem themed restaurant), amazing dim sum, some pretty good Italian pasta and incredible grilled vegetable sandwiches on homemade bread. We've since decided that getting fat from delicious food tourism is actually the best.
 Arriving in Yangon was definitely different. The crazy, rabbit warren streets and organised chaos of the downtown was something of a fresh culture shock for us, which we thought we’d be over by now! It has similar vibes to La Paz but in many ways felt a lot safer – this is something that we have found is a pretty big difference between South America and South East Asia across the board.
|
Authors
Hi! We're Alice and Joseph, currently on a year long RTW trip :) Archives
September 2018
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
All content and images copyright © Alice Stephenson & Joseph Lidbetter 2017-2018