Mandalay

We arrived at the international airport of Mandalay on a sunny afternoon beginning of December. Immigration with the e-visa was quite smooth and we hopped on a shuttle bus for the 60mim ride to town. The countryside on the way looked beautiful in the light of the setting sun, but we were not yet too impressed by the bustling and seemingly hectic city.

As it was already dark, we checked into our hotel and headed for our first dinner in the streets of Mandalay. We did not have much expectation in regards to local food and were very positively surprised by our first Burmese curry. And contrary to accomodation, which is quite expensive compared to other Asian countries (and our standards), food is ridiculously cheap!! While we thought Myanmar would be the most expensive country in Asia, it ended up being by far the cheapest. The fact that transport is reasonably priced, food and activities are super cheap and many sights are still accessible free of charge (monasteris, temples, caves, waterfalls,...) allowed us to live on a budget of roughly 20€ per day and person.

But back to Mandalay: after a good night sleep, we headed out the next morning full of energy to explore the city. Our first destination was the old royal palace. Soon after we left and walked along the outside of the fortress that housed the palace we realized that we had understimated the size of Mandalay. What looked really close on the map was actually kilometers away. It took us a good hour by walk to reach the gates of the palace and we were once again boiling in the midday heat.
The palace itself was nice to look at, though not comparable to the splendid royal palace in Bangkok or the amazing wats we had seen in Laos, but it was still a nice visit.

Before lunch, we quickly sorted transport for the next day to go to Hsipaw about 5 hours northeast of Mandalay. Then we had lunch at one of the local restaurants to regain some energy for the afternoon walk :). We strolled up even further north to reach Mandalay hill. On the way we passed many monasteries and pagodas. The most impressive ones were close to the hill itself: Shwenandaw Kyaung, a teak monastery with very detailed and  beautiful wood carvings as well as Kuthodaw Paya, a very special and magical place that is often referred to as "the world's biggest book'. Around a beautiful golden guilded stupa there are 729 text-inscribed marble stones, each housed in its own small stupa. All together the stone inscriptions represent the entire 15 books of the Tripitaka. As Kimg Mindon was afraid that all Buddhist teachings would be affected by the British invasion, he organized to build this stupa with all teachings of Theravada Buddhism written in stone.

Once we had wandered around this large book and the splendid stupa, it was time to climb the Mandalay hill for sunset. A staircase leading through various temples brings you all the way up to the top (if you are lazy you can also grab a taxi ;)).
In Myanmar, by tradition you have to take off your shoes whenever you enter someone's house and it is strictly prohibited to wear shoes or even socks inside temples. This means we had to climb the 225m hill barefeet. As the temples and especially all the stairs in between were not too clean we pretty much had dirty feet all throughout Myanmar :).

As you can imagine we were not the only ones up the hill for sunset, there were tourists and monks with mobile phones and cameras alike. As it was a clear day we enjoyed a nice sunset over the Irrawaddy, Myanmar's main river and had a good view on the royal palace and all the stupas and temples we had visited before.
Since we had been walking something in between 15 and 20km that day we were too tired to walk all the way back to town and took a taxi to drop us at our hotel.

After the first "so lala" impression we had we actually did like the city of Mandalay, especially the corner with all the beautiful temples and golden stupas.
Unfortunately we did not have unlimited time (and only a 28 days visa), so we decided to move up to the northeastern Shan state and its capital Hsipaw to do some more hill tribe trekking. There would haven been lots more stuff to do around Mandalay, but we can always to that next time ;).

The next morning we had a confusing surprise when we checked out. The receptionist gave us an envelope which we thought contained the hotel bill. However, when we opened it there was a handwritten message by Jasmine (still no clue who that is) and some money saying that they were sorry for taking our money.
We kind of figured out it must have been the agency that we booked our transport with, but we still don't know whether they overcharged us and someone got a bad conscience or... No idea! Whatever it was it was nice to get some money back for once ;).

And then the minibus brought us to the wild, yet very interesting Shan state in the northeast of the country. You will find more details and the story about our trekking in the coming article.

Hope you all survived the cold waves in Europe. We are thinking of you and sending you some sunshine from the south.

Take care and talk to you soon,
Alex & Moni