After a busy but fairly awesome morning, the Myanmar Crew ferried back down the Irrawaddy River to Mandalay and made our way to Mahamuni Temple and U Bein Bridge. Some sights along the way: creepy faceless Buddha statues, neglected but really amazing art, sunset, reflections, and a Burmese fire station.
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| Our favored but not quite preferred form of transportation in Mandalay. |
First up after the ferry was a quick stroll through a market. Then there was a pit stop at our hotel and a truck ride to U Bein Bridge. "Oh, but wait, Neal! You said you went to Mahamuni Temple first?" Calm down, audience. I'm getting there. Basically, the men driving the truck stopped at almost every intersection to try and pick up more people, and after we realized we were only halfway to the bridge after 45 minutes of stop-and-go-ness, Borut and I (the navigators) decided to check our maps. Discovering that we were only two blocks away from a major temple, we just hopped off and walked over.
Our route took us through a creepy kind of Buddha production plant. There were several white plaster Buddhas in various stages of finish, the scariest of which were faceless and just sitting there next to their faceless friends.
Anyway, we found Mahamuni temple, which -despite its vendor-filled entryways - wasn't too terribly touristy and was actually pretty astounding. The long entry hallway was broken up by small square rooms full of beautiful but poorly lit paintings. I have no idea how old anything was, but at that point, it really hit home that I was in a country very different from my own. Souvenir stalls lined grimy, dirt-encrusted and cobwebbed walls, hiding vibrant blues and yellows. Cracks, brick revealed, script broken by age, art and history, and all around are mass-produced trinkets and people just trying to make a living. It was a revealing, surprising moment, but did not at all dampen my experience in this beautiful country.
The temple itself was a welcome sight full of gold, red, and shiny things. There were several locals, some male monks in their dark maroon garb, and younger female monks in pink. The courtyard surrounding the temple ushered the coming sunset light inside, a fitting advantage to all of the gold. We roamed and gawked and watched for only a little while before departing for another attempt at U Bein Bridge.
This time, we skipped the truck nonsense and boarded a bus instead. It was full of very helpful locals who saw us off of the bus with lots of emphatic pointing, assumedly in the general direction of the bridge. The small, house-lined roads and the train tracks we had to cross didn't seem too promising, but we eventually came to a lake crossed by the one, the only U Bein, famous and frequently touristed as the longest and oldest teak bridge in the world.
The time was sunset and the sky was a living, breathing thing. The water was still. We had cut it pretty close, so I was running around in a light state of shock trying to figure out what one does when they want to take awe-inspiring photographs of something like that. There were all kinds of people standing on these dirt paths reaching out into the lake. They were pointing their cameras towards the bridge, and for whatever reason, it never occured to me until after the sun had set that they were getting pictures of the reflection of the bridge. I guess I thought they were just trying to get more of the bridge in their pictures. Maybe they're cameras wouldn't let them zoom out very far, right? Wrong. I took a few pictures of Kaley and Anja and a random lady, along with their various reflections, but it absolutely did not at all spark in my head that if I just stood where they were, I could get the reflection of that cool bridge and that whole sunset thing going on behind it in the very same water. Silly, silly me.
The sun finally left us, so we crossed the bridge and met many, many mosquitoes along the way. Dinner was served on the other side of the lake, and then we crossed back in the dark on a much less crowded bridge to catch the bus back. But there was no bus. There we were, five foreigners, standing on the side of the road looking longingly for that large motored thing that was surely on the way, when a guy rides up and gestures for us to hop on. What we hopped on is best described as a riding lawnmower retrofitted with a short truck bed for passengers. I'm not kidding. We joined his one passenger and made our slow but surprisingly enjoyable way back to our hotel. He picked up a few other people on the way. The woman that was already aboard flirted with the driver the entire way, then there was an old, talkative man chewing betel leaves and spitting the red juice along the road, and finally a woman and her two very cute children. Entertained, happy, and full of a wonderfully sunshiney day, we foreign few arrived back at the hotel to prep for the journey to Old Bagan in the morning.
This isn't an appropriately Thanksgiving-ish post, but I hope you all have a great Thanksgiving. Avoid whipping out the Christmas music too early. Enjoy the break from work. Enjoy that way-too-much-food feeling. Enjoy the silly arguments and all of the "I'm thankful for"s with your families and friends.
Happy Thanksgiving and I'll see you next time.
