Hpa-An

We left Kinpun village in the morning, had to go down to the valley with a little pick-up bus and change to a proper bus there. As so often in Asia, they heavily overbooked the bus and all 8 people that boarded at the same point like us had to get litttle plastic chairs (a 4 year old kid would already be too big to fit in) from the driver and sit in the alley. Really comfy :). At least after 2 hours or so other people started to get off the bus and we managed to grab a row with real seats for the remaining 1,5 hours. We arrived in Hpa-An at around 13:30 and went to find accomodation first, then grabbed a quick snack for lunch. As the town itself is really not too inspiring (the main attraction is a 5 m high clocktower), we rented a motorbike to explore the supposedly beautiful countryside in the afternoon and the following day.

As usual, some words of traffic in Myanmar: all vehicles drive on the right-hand side of the road. This hasn't always been the case as Myanmar had been colonialised by the Brits. However, to make a statement and to distance itself from the British colonial times, the military government ordered an overnight switch from the left to the right in the 1970ies. As, however, all cars still date from either before 1970 (scary, no?!) or are Japanese low-cost cars (not much better, is it?!), they all still have the steering wheel on the right side. This isn't quite handy, especially in the process of overtaking. To not blindly zoom to the left, at least busses and minivans usually have a co-driver with them that keeps watching the traffic on the other side of the road to signal if overtaking is possible or not. Apart from that there is much less traffic than in Vietnam or even Laos and people drive a bit more civilized :).

So that first afternoon we headed south of town to see Kyauk Kalap, a Buddhist temple standing in the middle of an artificial lake. It is actually a finger-shaped rock and on its top sits a tiny pagoda. You can walk up there and enjoy beautiful views of the countryside and look at impressive and steep Mt Zwegabin. On the shore of the lake there is a monastery that houses around 30 monks.

After that we took some dirt roads through the rice fields and arrived at Yathaypyan Cave, one of the several free-of-charge caves in the area. As usual with religious sites in Myanmar we had to remove our shoes at the entrance of the cave and walk in barefoot. Around the cathedral style entrance there were lots of Buddha statues in all sizes and forms as well as religious mural paintings. One could cross the cave (still barefoot), there were some bats (and batshit) around in the dark and at the end of the cave was a little viewpoint with views of the rice fields, a little pond, some monkeys and the limestone karsts in the background. When we came back to the motorbike there were some cheeky monkeys around looking for food everywhere, so it was best to hold on tight to things that looked or sounded like something potentially edible :).

For sunset we went to the amazing Bat Cave just across the river from the entrance of Hpa-An. What a show! We were once again walking barefoot on a path through a monastery and sat on some stairs in front of the cave and waited. At exactly 17:40 all the bats that were living inside the cave started to get active and fly out of the cave in hords. It really looked like masses of flies, but it was little bats and they kept flying out for about 15min, so we suspect it must have been minimum 150.000 bats.
By the time the sun was gone, all the bats were out in the night as well and we went back to Hpa-An for dinner at a cute and very good Burmese curry restaurant.

The next day was a big day again. As usual when Alex sees a mountain, hill or any kind of peak he gets excited and wants to climb it. Therefore we went to Mt. Zwegabin (720m), the steep mountain we had seen from Kyauk Kalap, with the intention of climbing the stairs all the way up to the monastery that is sitting on top. As usual, we had the French timing and started the climb at around 11:30 and the sun was mercilessly shining on us. At least we had made one good choice: there are two ways to access Mt. Zwegabin, one from the east and one from the south. The southern route was the more classical one, but as we found out later as well the harder and longer one. The eastern route was a lot faster and it took us only 1:45 minutes whereas the Spanish guy that we had met on the bus told us on top that he had chosen the southern route and it took him 2,5 - 3 hours to reach the top. A tiny relief for Moni :).

The views from the top were stunning, you could overlook the whole plain with rivers, caves and some limestone formations from the eagle perspective.
Other travellers had told us that it was possible to stay overnight in the monastery, which we originally wanted to do, but ran a bit out of time and did a day trip only. When we arrived on top we were actually glad we had decided against the overnight stay because the monastery and the whole grounds up there were really filthy with lots of garbage and monkeys roaming around. Even though it would have been amazing to see both sunset and sunrise from the top, we were happy we did not have to spend more time than necessary up there. We had a quick vegetarian lunch in the monastery, paid a fortune for it and climbed down to our motorbike again.

The next and last stop of the day was Saddan Cave a bit further south. It seems like the tyre-god does not like us too much as just about 500m from the cave we hit a rusty nail on the dirt road and our back tyre got completely ruined. We went up to the cave to see if someone was around to help us and some shopkeeper told us to go back to the last village (about 20min by walk) where we would find a "tyre shop". Being a gentlemen Alex left while Moni stayed around and about 30min later he came back with a young guy from the "repair shop" who obviously had not quite understood what was the problem and needed to see the bike himself. With hand and feet he signalled Alex to follow him back to his garage with the bike. The tyre tube was really completely ruined and needed to be replaced. Moni was a bit worried that we might not have enough cash with us, but the guy seemed quite honest and did not charge the tourist price (or if this was the tourist price it is fine as well) and we paid 2000 Kyat for the new tyre tube (~1,5€).

Once Alex came back, we were about the last ones to enter the massive cave. In the football stadium-sized cavern we were greeted by - what else? - dozens of Buddha statues and there were again some wall clay carvings around. Saddan cave was much longer than any of the other caves and we kept walking for a good 20-25min to reach the other side. The inside of the cave was quite muddy and the noise and the excrements of the bats living in the cave were everywhere. And mind: once again we had to walk barefoot ;).

At the other side of the cave was a tiny pond and another small cave with a big Buddha statue. As it was sunset time, the light and atmosphere was very calm and peaceful.
We had the choice of either walking back through the cave or take one of the local fishermen's boat to row us through another cave and a tiny canal across the rice fields. We shared the boat with a Spanish couple and enjoyed the landscape and serenity of this beautiful place. The boat could of course not bring us back to the carpark and we had to walk about 10min back on a gravel road - still barefeet with our muddy feet, so  they got dusty on top and both our feet and our trekking sandals (at least we were not wearing socks and sneakers) needed a big scrub that night :).

After the visit we had to go back all the way to Hpa-An to return the motorbike. As in all Asian countries they have an "empty tank regulation", so when you get your motorbike there is just enough fuel inside to reach the next fuel station, but you can as well return it empty. It is unfortunately very hard to estimate how much fuel you have left and we never managed to return it very close to empty, except in Hpa-An. We did not have much fuel left and knew it would be very tight to reach the city center with the leftover of fuel, but we tried. Alex was driving slower and more economical than usual and we both kept watching out for fuel stations or remembering the little shops around that were selling bottles of fuel. The needle was on "empty" for pretty much the last 20 kilometers, but we managed to get back to the rental shop without refilling. What a success :)!

After a shower and dinner we packed our bags as the next day was again a travel day. We had decided to make use of the close Thai border crossing in Mae Sot to reach Bangkok for Christmas before flying to Indonesia on the 25th December in the early morning. In all other Asian countries, cross-border journeys are something very common and agencies usually sell through tickets to your final destination. Not so in Myanmar! We were asking around a lot, but all they could offer us was a bus/shared taxi to the border without any information on travel beyond the border... And it was the 22nd December :)

As we knew it would still be a good 8h drive from the border to the capital we decided to take an early morning bus from Hpa-An to have the chance to reach a day bus down to Bangkok as we did not want to spend another sleepless night on a bus.
We had excellent and incredibly cheap breakfast at a small teashop in the morning (tea, coffee, roti and freshly baked naan for take away for alltogether 1€) and then our shared taxi picked us up. We shared the cab with 3 local women on their way to work and yes, you counted right, we were 1 too many in the car. One of the women was sitting in the trunk next to our backpacks and with the trunk door open - very convenient :P.

We reached the border at around 10:00, exchanged our last Kyat to Thai Bhat and proceeded to the immigration counter in both sides (exit Myanmar, then enter Thailand). On the other side of the bridge we caught a shared pick-up that dropped us off at Mae Sot bus station and there we figured out quite quickly that the only day bus connection to Bangkok had left at 10:00 already (it was 11:30) and all other busses were night busses as of 20:00.

As we were not too keen on spending the whole day at bloody Mae Sot bus station, we asked around for alternatives to reach Bangkok and stumbled across the option of taking a 4h minibus ride to Nakhon Savan (half way between Mae Sot and Bangkok) and getting on another minibus there. Once again, nobody knew at what time onward transport was leaving from Nakhon Savan, but we tried our luck and well... No worries! As soon as we arrived in Nakhon Savan hawkers (they find you before you find them!) were already waiting outside the minibus and asking us whether we wanted to go to Bangkok. When we said yes, one of them was dragging us to the counter to pay the tickets and the other two were already carrying our luggage away. We bough the tickets, hopped on the minivan and it was leaving straight away. What a smooth transfer :).

We were quite happy as we reached Bangkok in the late evening and went to our "base hostel" to check if they had rooms available. It looks like Christmas is a busy time for high end hotels, but not for hostels as the 12 bed dorm was more or less empty. There was only one guy (he had already been there the two times we had been travelling through Bangkok before) and us so it was very quiet.

We spent the 23rd of December sleeping long, working on the blog, doing some shopping for stuff we still thought might be useful, got a massage, a pedicure and ate our way through Bangkok's foodstalls - all some of our favourite activities :).
We did not at all feel in a Christmas mood with constantly 30 degrees outside until we went to a Swiss restaurant for a cheese fondue dinner. They were playing all the Christmas songs and we were both intensively thinking of and missing our families back in Europe. Back at the hostel we had a Christmas-Skype-call with both our families and then it was already time to go to bed as we had to take a taxi at 4:00am the next morning to be on time for our 6:00 flight to Denpasar.

Our next destination was Indonesia and we can already tell you that our first stop left an incredible impression on us. So please, be patient, the next article will be a big and hopefully interesting and rewarding one.

We send you sunny greetings from West Coast Australia and hope you are all doing fine.
Cheers,
Alex & Moni

Bat cave near Hpa-an