Snakes and Bridges

Today is a difficult day.  I just realized that I've never spent Christmas alone.  I've been away from home, but I've always been with a friend - the singles from church one year, the Evil One another, and Curly Sue on the last.  It's enough that even without a rough start in Cambodia, where I'm writing this from, I'd be having a hard time.  However, I have to remember that a difficult day in which I get to see Angkor Wat is better than an easy one a lot of other places.  So there.

I've gotta take you back to Myanmar for two more posts, so don't get lost.  It was only during my third day in Mandalay that the city started to reorganize itself into something cohesive in my mind.  On one hand, it's sort of disappointing that it took so long for it to feel approachable to me, but on the other, it means that I have reasons to come back, if I run out of other places to go to.  I mean, I missed the world's largest book!  For a book lover like me, that's pretty much sacrilege!

I asked the staff at the Royal Pearl Hotel to book a driver to take me to the Snake Pagoda.  I like to check in with Atlas Obscura occasionally because they tend to have more interesting sites pegged than TripAdvisor, and this was no exception.  The world's biggest book and a teak temple can't really compare to the story of this temple outside Mandalay in a little village called Paleik.  Bonus: almost NO foreign tourists and nobody asked me to pay $10 for photo privileges (which they do at Mandalay Hill and other sites).

Here's the story:  apparently one day the snakes - Burmese Pythons, of course - just showed up.  The monks who ran the temple tried to take them back out into the wild, but they came back.  They took this as a sign of divine favor and kept them.  These aren't the original snakes - the Burmese Python lives about 30 years in the wild - but after the original snakes died (and were stuffed...they are in the pagoda and look kind of creepy...) patrons donated new snakes, and the beat goes on.

The hotel staff I talked to told me to plan on leaving around 9, so that I would be there for the snakes' "shower."  Each day the snakes are brought from the Buddha statue they normally wind themselves around to a tub, with about 6 inches of water in it, filled with flower petals.  A silver bowl with offerings in it floats on the water, although I'm not sure what that's all about...maybe the snakes bless the money that way?  Anyways.  They spend some time undulating through the water, and if they don't climb out on their own, their handler brings them out, and rinses them down before drying them off and feeding them scrambled eggs (obviously not cooked ones...raw milk and eggs).  Visitors can help by pouring the mixture down the snakes throats from a silver pitcher.  Based on how the handler had to hold their mouths open, I'm guessing they'd rather be feeding themselves, but otherwise they seem well cared for.

After hiring a driver but before actually setting out, I looked at a map and determined that I could probably combine my trip to the snake temple with a visit to U Bein Bridge.  Kristen had been trying to organize it for sunset the previous day, but it didn't happen.  I asked my driver if it would be okay, and he said he'd take me.  U Bein Bridge is the world's longest teak bridge.  It looks rickety as all get out, but seemed sturdy enough once I was walking on it.

One end of the bridge is tourist central, lots of stalls set up selling schlock to the sightseers, but the majority of traffic was locals.  The other side of the bridge lets you out by one of the universities, so I guess that could have something to do with it.  Although I'm sure the sunset is nice out there with all that water, I'm kind of glad I saw it during the daytime; fewer tourists.  Although I'm glad the tourists come here, because I got some awesome souvenirs - a teak relief carving, a painting of the bridge, and a hair pin thing made of - get this - watermelon seeds.  Along the way my driver pointed out the Moustache Brothers and I ended up with a huge question...did I go to see them, or the puppets that evening??? 

Monkey-See, Monkey-Do

My phone has been acting weirder and weirder, and the weird thing it did yesterday was not save the photos it took, the result of which is a post without pics.  Totally old school.  I'm kind of okay with this, since yesterday was the kind of day that photos can't really show you about.  UPDATE:  I figured out what happened.  My phone - which I named Kyu-Jun because it's as big a pain in the ass as the other Korean I know with that name - decided that day that it was the first of January, 2000, so the photos were not where I expected them to be.  I'm adding them now, at the beginning of February.

I got into the Mandalay airport at around 9 a.m.  It struck me on my way through to Bagan as about 20 years behind the times - I got a hand-written ticket and boarding pass, for crying out loud.  Since I hadn't made prior arrangements to be picked up I marched past the touts looking for the taxi queue...only to find there was no taxi queue.  So I turned to ask the one who'd followed me how much a ride to my hotel in the city center would cost.  All the other touts descended on me to tell me how much their services cost, which basically got them yelled at for their trouble, since I couldn't hear the one I was actually asking.  It wasn't exactly a great start.

The drive into the city was nice - between fields being threshed by hand - and then we got to the city proper.  I don't know what I was expecting Mandalay to be like.  Quaint old buildings, perhaps, maybe kind of like Kathmandu?  Whatever it was, it was wrong.  Mandalay is teeming, crazy traffic, a million motorbikes, loud noise, a feeling of decay in some buildings while others are shiny and new.  Brand new streets that have been covered with sand that shop owners have to wet down each morning to keep the dust from blowing onto their wares.  It was kind of an overload.

As I mentioned a few days ago, my friend Kristen was back in Mandalay, and I called her after I got settled at the hotel.  She made arrangements with some friends to come pick me up and go on an adventure.  I'm pretty sure without her I would have had a dismal opinion of Mandalay, because I really didn't want to go back out into that.  I probably would have anyway, since the internet was so slow in the hotel (in all of Mandalay, it turns out - it takes a lot to make me think Shanghai internet is fast, but you've managed it, Mandalay!), but I wouldn't have been in the proper mental state to enjoy it.

She introduced me to Wayan, Jess, and Robin, with whom I'd be riding, and then we set off for lunch.  I was a little nervous about being a passenger on a motorbike.  I haven't done it since I was probably 8 years old, and then it was either Shaggy or my Dad driving.  I kept an eye on Kristen to see what she was doing, and as a result I neither fell off nor gave Robin the impression that he was carting around a Burmese python.  We drove a short distance and had a ton of food.  Burmese food shares a lot in common with cuisine throughout the region - spicy and saucy, but with more oil than maybe other places.  We all had a good laugh when Robin ordered us mutton, since I'd just mentioned that Mongolian food was basically mutton, mutton and noodles, or mutton in dumplings, but this mutton was tender and hardly muttony at all.

Then we rolled out of Mandalay proper for a little hike.  We drove past a lot of construction - the Chinese on the move - and through small villages.  We even got to see the parade of offerings - including young boys and girls, cleaned and dressed in new finery - going out for a donation ceremony.  Kristen later explained that families give everything to the monasteries - there is gold everywhere while the people starve - and this means that when there's no food for one of the kids, they may enter the monastery or nunnery, which will at least guarantee them two meals a day.  It's kind of strange, seeing so many monks.  I've seen them in Mongolia and other countries, of course, but never so many.  Never so many young.

Eventually we made our way past small pagodas and a series of statues of monks trailing down the mountainside to the "monkey temple."  The place was absolutely infested with monkeys.  My new buddies had told me we were going to see monkeys, and I thought, "Oh goody."  Except not really, because I'm always afraid I'll end up with one of the vermin on my head.  They're essentially small children, but with fewer manners and more fleas.  However, they are photogenic little bastards, and I took photos and even a video, which my phone ate in its sleep.  We biked up the mountain a little further before turning back to do the essential Mandalay afternoon thing - hit a tea shop.

Tea shops actually have a plethora of refreshing beverages.  Jess started talking about avocado juice long before we got there (which made me think, "Avocado juice???")  I followed Kristen in getting a strawberry juice, and the five of us sat talking across from the palace moat, sipping on some delicious drinks as the afternoon wore down.

On the way up: a spread-eagled eagle.  Kristen is the kind you can take outrageous pictures with.

Finally, seeing the sun start to change color, Kristen asked her friends to drive us to Mandalay Hill, which she had informed me we were GOING to hike to see the sunset.  She forgot to mention until we were actually taking off our shoes that we were going to be doing it barefoot.  Along the way to the top pagodas are scattered, and since you can't walk in a pagoda with shoes, you go without.  Luckily it was not a terribly strenuous hike, although I did huff and puff along the way (which is not enough to put off the locals who had been told to go there and practice their English).  You could tell when you got closer to the top, because the architecture got more opulent and the souvenir stands more frequent.  My favorite purchase was three ink paintings by a local artist, for which I paid a grand total of five dollars.  In fact, the entire Myanmar portion of my trip has been ridiculously cheap.  I spent $350 during the seven days I was there.  I'm a pretty high-roller when I'm on vacation, so that's kind of crazy.

Finally...FINALLY...we got to the top of the hill, just in time for the sun to go down and the concentration of tourists to hit its peak.  The monks and other English students that we'd managed to politely put off had found other, juicier prey - older men and women from other parts of the globe, who must have been thrilled to be chatting with a monk.  The sun was blood red and the whole city was on fire.  We could see everything, and Kristen explained parts of the city to me as we walked around the top of the hill.  Once the sun had disappeared and some of the tourists had left, we joined the throng trickling down the hill.  We made lots of stops for souvenirs, and eventually found ourselves wondering why we were the only people walking down through the dark in our dirty, bare feet.  The answer, of course, was that we were travelers, not tourists, and travelers take the long hike, while tourists drive to the top.

Barefoot in Bagan

(alternate title: I wonder when my last tetanus shot was*...)

When I announced that I was going to Myanmar during my Christmas vacation, Engrish's input was solid.  She'd been to Bagan, a city that had about a billion pagodas, and encouraged me to do the same.  My first instinct to visit Myanmar came from my feisty little friend Kristen, who had lived in Mandalay for a year and would be returning in time to see me when I got there.  She had posted photos, a long long time ago, of herself doing wacky things with pagodas in the background, and I decided this was where Engrish was talking about.

A long time ago when I went to Egypt with Belynda, we did the only logical thing to do and got up at the buttcrack of dawn to go see the sites of Luxor.  This meant that we beat the heat (yes, it is still hot in November in Egypt) and a lot of the tourists.  I used the same tack with Bagan.  The dudes at the fabulous Bagan Umbra Hotel (officially 3 star, but 5 star in my books - great service, comfy, awesome pool) told me breakfast began at 6 the next morning, which gave me plenty of time to scarf down some eggs and roll out.  I rented a bicycle for the day (the second day I rented a scooter, because while I am in shape, the shape I happen to be in is round), and only got about a couple of blocks away before I had to stop and play photographer.  Another couple of blocks and the sun started to rise, so of course I pedaled to the nearest pagoda to take some photos of everything washed with golden light.

I just happened to pick a pagoda that had access to the upper levels.  Not all of them do - many are getting close to a thousand years old, and protecting them is a priority - but I saw other tourists up there and started trying to figure out how to get up there.  It turned out you have to climb up tall, narrow stone stairs, barefoot...

...oh yes, did I mention the bare feet?  Because in whatever kind of Buddhism this is, we don't wear shoes or socks inside.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoy going sans socks and shoes, but it's not like going into Seoul's Mormon temple, back in the day where they had us take our shoes off, and we walked on plush, pristine carpet.  The pagodas are open to all elements - heaven only knows what I was stepping on at any given moment.

The bare feet were not even the scary part, though.  The scary part was coming back down.  I'm not claustrophobic or acrophobic, and those were facts that I had to keep telling myself on the way down.  "I'm not scared of heights.  I'm not scared of small spaces.  This is fine.  I'm not going to fall."

Well, I made it out, and moved on.  Some people might tell you if you've seen one pagoda, you've seen them all.  While I can agree that there is a certain similarity, especially between the smaller ones, if you are really looking (as might someone who has a camera attached to her face, for example), you'll see how individual each one is.  Some have lost most of their details, while others are stunningly well-preserved.  Some have much of their paintings intact.  Some may not be impressive by themselves, but are grouped together with many other pagodas, or their surroundings makes them stand out.  And at least one has bats...when I realized that's what that sound was, and that was the source of the various fluids on the floor, I refused to go any further.  If you're the kind of person who likes knowledge, learning about their history probably helps.  Dougie-Poo suggested this to me.  Since I like to see and feel my way around, I printed a barebones amount of information off Wikitravel, glued it into the Book, and then totally ignored most of it.  That's just how I roll.

Sadly, I didn't stay out on the bike very long.  This thing happened called "Eating lots of fruit and coconut product."  I'll tell you that coconut is a natural laxative and leave it at that.  Once I got back to the hotel, I decided I needed lunch and a nice relaxing afternoon, and didn't go out again til the evening.  I took a horse cart to the palace, where they are putting on a dramatic interpretation of Bagan's history.  Since there's not much else to see in Bagan in the evening (or, really, at all, besides pagodas) I dropped some money on a ticket, and wandered around nearby, waiting for the show to start.  The sun went down, which means a neat thing happened - I got to see the pagodas in a new light (see what I did there?)  Actually, they look pretty lit up at night, but I'm thanking my lucky stars it was just a nice, tasteful glow...now that I'm in Mandalay I've seen atrocities committed with LED lights that I can't even.  I just can't.

Finally it was time for the show to go on.  I was hoping for something fabulous.  The ads make it look just marvelous.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the dancing, and it was alright...but oh good grief, it was just ridiculously camp.  And the voice acting just hurt - it was so fake.  Not that you can't make that work.  As a Mormon, I know that it can - I've seen the Nauvoo pageant.  But they should've had an LDS consultant on this one.  If you're going to go cheesy, make it that good French shit.

*In 2004, unless I'm mistaken.  We had to have one for Anasazi.