Monywa

Dorotka and I had planned to go to Monywa over the weekend and so we started our trip on Saturday morning by picking up our bus ticket and going to the bus station of Mandalay. Even though it really didn’t occur to me on the first sight, there has to be a certain and clear structure at the station, as we were directly led to our AC-Bus – which turned out to be a (big) car with opened windows. When we started soon afterwards we were only 6 people in it, but through the driver’s assistant permanent “Monywa, Monywa!” –shouting through the still opened doors, we picked up another 10 people throughout Mandalay. And they had told us that it was essential to book tickets at least one day before the trip! It is quite an achievement in itself to get 16 people into a car and even at this point they tried to offer even more people a ride. Most of them got off in smaller villages soon and by the time we stopped for lunch, everyone had a seat for themselves again.

In Monywa the two of us were welcomed by a group of eager taxi-drivers and after we bought the tickets for our return (which cost half the price to come here) we took a Tuck-Tuck and went out of town towards two of the biggest Buddha-statues in the world. On our way we stopped at a pagoda built for world-peace in which more than five million small Buddhas are praying for the humans on earth. Afterwards we climbed the hill of the two giant statues – quite impressive to be looked down on by a 114 meter high Buddha! Inside it the walls are full with paintings, through which one gets the impression to go from hell to Nirvana on the upper floors. So we started to climb those stairways to heaven but unfortunately we weren’t able to reach the top floor as they turned on speakers announcing that they were now closing the building and everyone should leave it. We tried to ignore it (we don’t speak Burmese either way, so why should we feel included?) and ran up another three floors, but eventually got stopped by a Burmese family. They told us that they were on their way down and we too really should do the same immediately. After getting out and enjoying the view in the golden afternoon light for a while we went back to town.

 

We had some delicious pancake-dinner at the night market later and were also quite successful in shopping very nice tissues. Monywa is the hottest and driest place in Myanmar, but it started raining at night and didn’t stop the whole next day. This wasn’t even too bad as we had our soft and comfy bed, a good breakfast and REAL coffee and cake for lunch in a bakery. The ride home was alright (real bus this time and it didn’t even rain in!) and at our arrival it even stopped raining for a while! So the whole trip has really been a success and very nice ;-)

Now it’s raining in Mandalay for almost three days with hardly any interruption and the strange thing is – it’s cold! We’ve only got a few degrees above 20° and even if I’ve been glad about the fresh, cool air at first, it would be nice if everything wasn’t that soaked and cold all the time now. Let’s hope it stops soon, because otherwise the water on from the balcony will flood into my room…