Free Birds: Myanmar - the new Burma

One of the craziest and unrtouched by tourism places we went to was Myanmar...which is also known as Burma. I don't think I'm alone when I say before we went there I knew very little about this place. It actually has some of the craziest history out there. In fact, much of the turmoil in this country is still going on or at the least the people are still recovering from it. Since their independence in 1948, the country has been in the longest Running civil wars that remains unresolved. The country had been completely under military rule until recently (2010) and in the process has to led it to be one of the least developed countries in the world. Because of this, when you go there you feel like you are stepping back into time! In fact up until a few years ago, most other countries had a ban on their citizens traveling to Myanmar at all. The military Leaders in Myanmar had their country in such distress, forcing things such as child labor, random take overs, and even forcing people to leave their homes and communities to start over elsewhere. Their country was essentially run by the military and not by the people whatsoever. Now that they have somewhat started to get way from military rule and have experienced some tourism, the country is getting a little more up with the times, but in most cities you still can't find an ATM anywhere and many times a horse drawn carriage is considered their taxi service. It's really interesting to see a country that seems to be decades behind the rest of the world and to be able to experience their culture firsthand.

Can't touch this

Typical

Robby hailing a taxi haha

Because tourism is new there, planning for Burma can be a bit of a hassle, but a worth while one! Although they have their own currency, most hotels will accept brand new, crisp US dollars. So plan to pack a briefcase full of brand new unmarked bills. And most hotels don't accept reservations so you just have to show up and hope for the best! The bad part about that is that their supply of hotels in Myanmar has not been able to keep up with the demand since tourism came so fast! So it can be tricky, but we were lucky and we never had to sleep outside.

Two things about Burma that you'll notice right away. 1) the people have red teeth and 2) they wear paint on their faces. The red teeth isn't because they are cannibals biting into each others flesh, rather it's a seed they chew on and then spit out on the road. Sometimes with tobacco sometimes without. But most Burmese people have red stained teeth and the streets have red spats all over them from the spit! Kind of disturbing if you don't know what it is before showing up. The paint they put on their face is actually a smashed plant root mixed with water. They put it on their face believing that it protects them from the sun. Does it work? I don't know, although I did have a Burmese woman pull me aside and paint up my face! It's funny how different sides of the world can have such different views on beauty. Here we all want to be so tan, but most other places they want white skin. We even saw face and body washes all over Asia claiming to have bleaching qualities that would whiten your skin! Crazy! We definitely stayed away from that, we are trying to work on our farmers tans!!

Robby refused to have his face painted

Yay now I will stay pasty white!

Our first stop in Burma was a city called Bayon, known for its massive amounts of temples (aka pagodas) in the area. Literally there are over 2,000 of them in the old city, which is only probably about 3 square miles! These temples were built thousands of years ago, and many of them look very similar, but the fact that there are so many of them dotting the countryside is what truly makes this place different! Some of the temples are made of old stone or brick while others are golden temples, but most have some sort of Buddha statue on the inside. We had a horse drawn carriage "taxi" take us around town to see as many temples as we could and then climbed to the top of a temple to watch the sun set behind the other temples. It was one of the coolest sunset spots, and by now we are sunset experts!!

Temples galore!

At the top of a temple

Hangin out with these guys

Chillin in our ride

Awesome sunset with temple silhouettes

Some of the temples even glowed at night!

Typical inside of the temple

The gold temples are my fav!

Cute little baby monks in front of this temple

After a couple days in Bayon we took a night bus to our next stop in Burma, Inle Lake. We had heard awesome things about this mystical lake and had to go! Our bus left at 7pm and arrived to Inle at 3am!! I don't get this about night buses...why not leave later and get us in at a normal hour, I mean at least 5am?! It's funny, so a bus load of people are dumped off at 3am and everyone scrambles trying to figure out what to do and where to go! We were lucky, the hotel we found let us in out of the cold and even put a mattress down in their lobby for us to sleep on until our room was ready. Now that is hospitality!

After a few hours sleep in the lobby we woke up and decided to get started! We rented bikes for one dollar a day and explored around. We heard about a cool Monestary that was supposedly 1.5 KM outside the city...so we headed for that. But after about 30 minutes of peddling and no signs of the Monestary we started to question that. The scenery by the riverside and the jungly fields were so cool we didn't care we were lost so we just kept going! Eventually I saw this really cool looking gold temple on a hill that looked super far away. I told Robby "I want to go there!". We had no idea how far it actually was or if we could even get there, but we decided to just keep biking towards the golden target and see what happened. And after probably a total of 10 miles of biking through small authentic cities, watching the beautiful sky over a cool river and getting extremely thirsty, we got to the hill! We climbed to the very top to find this temple that appeared to be abandoned and an amazing view! Victory!!! Such a cool day. We still had 10 more miles to bike home, and we actually ran into the Monestary on the way back. but we were kind of happy we got lost and had decided to bike to the temple instead, the temple was way better than the Monestary! Sometimes it's good to get lost.

Just biking around in nature