Ssshhhtupas!

Opting out of another bus we took the 5:30am boat to Mandalay and despite it being 12 hours it was surprisingly enjoyable. The boat was big, comfortable, empty and served beer - need I say more? We hung out on the outside deck most of the day soaking in the sun and stupa spotting on the shore until arriving in one of the dustiest cities I've ever been to. Unfortunately Mandalay is another city in which the government picks you off for another ten USD for seeing some of the main sites. Aaron and I avoided this junta donation by hiring a sly trishaw driver Jojo who knew which sites they didn't check for the tickets, which sites didn't require a ticket, and which sites a tickets check could be avoided by a back or side entrance. The locals seem to take a liking to you when they see how you try to avoid anything government as they do as well and Jojo was a heap of information on the extremely taboo subject of government happenings. As he said, it was a relief to get some feelings off his chest and vent a little as talking about it to other locals is forbidden and subject to fines or jail time. As an example, the day before Jojo was stopped by the police at the local market who then held his trishaw licence hostage until he ran around and paid a lawyer to get a statement and ran back to the police and paid them off 8,000k - triple of his earnings of a 12 hour day of work. Corrupt? Noooo, not at all. It's terrible for the people who work hard pay mounds of taxes and see nothing of their money except for the 60 airports around their country - 20 of which flights actually go to on occasion. As one guy said: "Our airport? It's for show. We don't get flights here".

With Jojo we toured around Mandalay seeing more Payas/Pagodas/Stupas, a monastery, a gold leaf factory, and in the evening climbing up to Mandalay hill where we were stopped at the final step for a ticket check - ouch! No worries though, we were still allowed to watch the sun set 10 inches below the ticket holders...that evening we went to the home of the famous Moustache Brothers, a comedic group that historically has pushed political jokes to the limit - so far that two of the three brothers have been jailed (one for 7 years!) for their views on the junta. Well, they've done their jail time and now pushed us for five bucks each to watch their show which has turned from a raging political rant (in Barmar) to a never ending list of English cliches and celebrity name dropping mixed in with some sexual innuendo. Mixed into the slurred Elmur Fud English was some traditional dancing by the Brothers' entourage of wives and sisters one of whom was the 1978 Lonely Planet cover girl for Burma - no doubt they were very proud and only mentioned this fact, I don't know, about 75 times? Needless to say we would have been more impressed if they didn't ding us for so much money - half would have been of value as there were a lot of people there watching - they're bound to be making what most locals do in a month every night! That night we avoided another meal of oily curry and found a Nepali joint that brought back the memories of dal bhat, parathas, and masala tea...mmmm! The next day we took a taxi 11km out of town to see the longest teak wood bridge in the world. It's still mainly teak but a few restorations have been made and some parts are now concrete. But it was long and it was teak and it was pretty neat.

Mandalay is home to about 60% of the Burmese monk population so the red robes are everywhere. Many of them come to the old capital to study which leads to many of them wanting to practice their English skills with tourists. Some are really cute, as when I lost Aaron in the "no women" section of the Mahamuni Paya I was scooped up by a monk who toured me around for a good half hour all the time talking. I understood about 1% of what he said all the time nodding and telling him how much I loved Buddha.

To our surprise, while we were trying to find a travel agent (that now doesn't exist), we stumbled upon a non-government shopping mall which had a grocery store on the lower floor. And now I know that Malaysia and Australia both provide Myanmar with it's chocolate needs - although not very affordable. We splurged of course and I got a little chocolate fix from the cheaper Malay version of "fruit and nut" which should hold me over until Thailand where chocolate roams freely! We also indulged in a few more giant avocados "toe-pa-di" and a pineapple "na-na-di" from the local vendors on the street who are practically giving the fruit away.

Mandalay was great but we could have used 3 or 4 extra days to explore the outlying towns by boat, but of course with only 28 days you have to pick and choose and we moved on. We made the mistake of letting our guard down and not throughly researching the bus options to Kalaw and ended up getting ripped off on our bus ticket that we bought from our hotel. It included transport to the bus station which took an hour and half hours to cover maybe 4km, the most cramped bus with no working parts and being dropped on the side of the road in the cold at 2:30am without a place to stay. We found a nice guesthouse but of course had to wake everyone up so we're slightly annoyed as we were told we would be arriving at about 6am. We got over it...although it took Aaron a little longer (and I think he's actually still a bit bitter). From Kalaw we arranged to trek for 2 days into Inle lake as the LP suggests - "it beats the bus" but really, anything in Burma beats the bus. So a night and a half in Kalaw later we were set and ready for some walking...