Lashio, Myanmar

4am at Mandalay station. I feel exhausted. The first-class carriage has covers on the wooden benches! This was to be my home for the next 18 hours (320km), but at least I have a whole bench to myself. The train is quite empty, there's no other tourists here. As soon as the train whistles out of the station I curl up on the bench and grab three hours sleep. I'm woken up by hot beams of sunlight and general noise as the train pulls into a station. I get off the train and blunder about amongst the chaos looking for something to feed my western caffeine habit. There's school kids everywhere, laughing and running about. Food and drink sellers push away hungry dogs.

The long journey to school

One stop wasn't a station stop. I leaned out of the window to see what was happening and heard clunking and scraping noises. Shortly afterwards we started going backwards, and uphill. I noticed that we were leaving the other line we'd arrived on. Assuming this was a one-off I sat back down, but 10 minutes later we stopped, clunked and groaned and started going backwards (forwards), and again steep uphill. This zig-zag continued up the side of quite a large, steep hill! An hour later we plateaued and the view down the valley we'd climbed was magnificent! We continued on through countless villages with amazing names, dropping kids off as we went.

Me taking a picture of Chris taking a picture

My favourite station name, containing my favourite Burmese character

Monks and horse-cart taxis at Pyin Oo Lwin

The workhorse train - this thing is noisy

The train slowed right down to a crawl for ages. We were in a carved valley, barely wide enough for the train to fit through. Out of the window in the distance I could see two men down by the side of the tracks. As we got closer I could see that they were inspecting the tracks, as the train went over a ditch. I can only assume the old tracks were replaced and they were using us as a guinea pig! The train creaked and rocked safely over and the view opened up revealing an enormous gorge, spanned by the even more enormous Gokteik viaduct (the largest in the British empire when it was built in 1901). As we rounded the corner we passed a soldier (who refused to smile or wave) in a bunker, guarding the strategically important viaduct with a large fixed machine gun! The train once again slowed. Over the bridge everyone leaned out of the windows for a glimpse into the chasm! Far below is another track, possibly the old line before the viaduct was build - or a secret military line to somewhere unknown :)

Crossing a huge canyon

Zzz

Cutting through the bushes

We past many villages and got further and further east. The train was now cutting through jungle, if no train were to come I'm sure the tracks would be covered in weeks. Most of the foliage was coming into the car and landing at my feet. The train was also now rocking and jumping a LOT. At times you could leave your seat or get thrown into the wall - a couple of times I was convinced the train had left the track! We cruised into Lashio at 10pm and a tuk-tuk driver took us to Thi Da Aye (Cool water). The room was dirt cheap at $5 each. It was a tiny, dim room, in the basement of a posh business hotel. It was right next to a squat toilet! Completely tired we took the room and crashed.

Next day we wanted to hire motorbikes. Asking around it was clear that there was no tourist rental places (or indeed tourists). We asked some locals but they were reluctant to lend us their bikes. We were told that we would attract a lot of attention on bikes, and we wouldn't be able to go far as there were military checkpoints to the east on the road to China. We bailed that idea and went for a walk instead. Possibly every person we passed said hello and wanted to talk, or just looked on like we were two aliens fresh from Mars! There's not exactly much in the way of tourist attractions in Lashio, and we  noticed a sign for an amusement park!  Entering the park kids scattered into groups and laugh-whispered about us. There's was a tiny pirate ship, a large statue (which we climbed), an amusement arcade with some seriously old games in and a roller-skating rink!! We popped on some boots and prepared to break our legs, or arms, or both. The local kids were highly amused and raced us, winning every time of course. My boots were so old and worn that the wheels each wanted to go different directions, which meant I did also! Battered and bruised and extremely sweaty we got talking to a local student called Wai Yan Moe Tain (English name: Terry), who wanted to practice English and show us around his town. That afternoon he took us to some of his favourite food haunts.

My second travel mascot, Woody, was abducted by a little girl from a wedding - I didn't have the heart to take it back from her, she liked him so much.

The girl on the left - Woodys new owner

Next day I woke early - Chris wasn't in bed. I went to reception to see if he was there and the receptionist said he'd come in the middle of the night and wanted a room with toilet, the only one they had was a $30 room and he took it! I went up to see him. He was violently sick in the night, and had spent hours in the small dirty squat toilet next to our room before deciding to get an en-suite! He was still feeling rough so I got him some water and salt-powders. He slept most of the day, checking out of the $30 room at the last minute - any longer and he would've been charged another night. 

Conqueror

English name "Terry"

Lasho rollerskating park

Yan time Aung Pagoda

Mandalay, Myanmar

I got on the overnight bus (10,000 Kyat), found my seat and got comfortable. The bus didn't sound too healthy but we lurched off anyway. I knew I would get no sleep; for me it's impossible on sitting buses so I plugged myself into my mp3 player and closed my eyes. I've almost developed a musical meditation state that gets me through the night.  We travelled not 100 metres when the engine groaned and we stopped in a cloud of brown smoke. For an hour the driver, conductor and technical passengers crowded around the stricken engine, banging stuff and trying to start it. At one point someone actually climbed into the engine bay. Eventually it roared to life, everyone jumped on and we quickly set off! Everything was sweet then for hours until we hit the hills, when the engine sounded awful, like two very old, rusty, robots arm-wrestling. Stopping at a service station it decided it'd had enough and again everyone crowded around the back of the bus, this time for many hours.

We arrived in Mandalay only three hours over schedule. Extremely tired I asked the tuk-tuk driver to take me to the cheapest room he knew. At the ET hotel I shared a twin room with a 19 year old English journalist, Chris, for $5 each. Many people told me they didn't like Mandalay, that it was dirty and busy, with nothing to do. I really like it! For one its drier than Yangon, and less busy. The roads are in an interesting grid formation which looks easy on a map, but the amount of times we got lost is ridiculous. I called MandalayMotorbike@gmail.com (092014265) to get some out-of-town action but they were $5 more than some bloke on the street, who offered his motorbike for $10 a day. My motorbike had no speedometer, no mirrors, and didn't like the electric start, but my journalist buddy's bike was good. Biking around Mandalay itself is intense, and for Chris this was baptism by fire - first time on a motorbike, ever! I felt a little responsible and kept an eye on him (being the now experienced rider I am - ahem), but he quickly picked it up and before long we were out of town and cruising brand new tarmac, completely devoid of other traffic. We had no maps, and got lost several times, but the beautiful people of Myanmar happily pointed us in the right directions, or literally jumped on their bikes and told us to follow them down winding dirt roads and riverside paths! Stopping at a village cafe for snacks we were soon surrounded by what seemed like the whole village; they sat and watched us eat. I'm guessing not many tourists have ever been here. We found the snake temple, the teak bridge and the other tourist sites, but the best thing was just being out there in the wilds, meeting the people!

Sunken temple

Curious village kids 

Are you sure we should ride these bikes through the river??

Maybe you'd like crab for lunch?

Who lives in a house like this?

Beautiful wilderness of Myanmar

Back in Mandalay we dodged the busy traffic up to Mandalay hill. A wonderful and never-ending set of steps through Monasteries and Shrines to the top of the hill gives some spectacular views of the flooded plains and distant hills. The sun glimmering on the Buddhist gold and jewels on the Temple at the top is blinding.

Breathtaking views and shimmering gold temples

Chris, as he's just here for a few weeks writing about Myanmar, came straight from England. He wasn't particularly interested in Burmese food, partly because the chances of getting sick are quite high. For this reason we ate mostly at Western style venues; burgers, chips and coke (I've never seen anyone drink so much coke) being the main diet. In Mandalay there's a place called V-club that caters for the weak-stomached!

We both wanted to get as far away from the main areas as possible (even though there was hardly anybody about anyway). Lasho is the furthest east you can possibly go before you get to military checkpoints, and ultimately the Chinese border; we decided this was the place to go. At Mandalay railway station we find a train to Lasho and tell the clerk we'd like to go there. The journey will cost $30 (one-way) and will take 18 hours. He suggested we take first class. I pulled out a $100 note and he inspected it at great length, eventually deciding that he didn't like the serial number sequence. Bewildered, I offered others, but being in the same sequence range he refused them also. We had enough money if we used all of our Kyats and a $20 note that Chris had. Unfortunately the $20 note had a slight mark on it and he refused that also. He told us to come back to the station later; I had no idea why this would be different but we huffed and left. 

Back at the station at 8pm and the same clerk straight away accepted my $100 bill. I wondered what sequence of events had occurred since. It can only have been government decided. Maybe they needed to check something, maybe us? Was it to do with the distant destination? We now had our tickets and were to catch the train at 4am the next morning.

Sunset from the hotel roof