The Eclaires

My sole experience of India was nearly twenty years ago in transit to and from the UK to Kathmandu. We had had one full day in Delhi. So naturally we spent four hours each way in a taxi to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. One day a week entrance is free and we had, by luck, hit that day. Bad luck – it was absolutely heaving.  We had also had just long enough to catch the shits.

Naturally to get from Guangzhou to Bangalore you have a night in Kuala Lumpur. This was distinctly unmemorable – beer cost 9 euros for a decent sized bottle in a shop – I am used to paying about 60 cents in Guangzhou.

Got to Bangalore OK and got 1,000 rupees at the airport. I wasn’t sure of the exchange rate but went to the pre-paid taxi place and got asked for 1,500 rupees. I realised that I had made a decimal point error and had changed 12 euros.  I went back to the ATM and got another 10,000 and then got the bus into town.  The bus dropped me off at the wrong place but I found the hotel after a bit of wandering. This was easy because, to my surprise, English is almost universal in the city.

Off for a bit of a wander and found the crowds, the cows in the streets and roads packed with tuc-tucs (they are called auto-rickshaws here but there are no manual rickshaws). Not really what I had expected in the IT hub of India – there are no skyscrapers. I am told that all the big companies have their own compounds out of town where people live and work in a western style with western facilities but I didn’t see any of that. I was ambling along when I heard this cry of “Ed” and saw Ed the Wiser waving from a tuc-tuc but they didn’t stop! Bastards.

The reason for choosing Bangalore as my destination was to spend a bit of time travelling with Ed the Wiser and Claire D – hence the title.   When I got back to the hotel I realised that the reason that they hadn’t stopped was that there were three of them and lots of luggage in the tuc-tuc. Since arriving in India, Ed and Claire have had a continuous stream of visitors and there was another one (Louise) leaving that night.

Worryingly, on my wanderings I hadn’t located a bar but E & C are old Bangalore hands and that was soon remedied. Ed is a real veggie so food-wise he is in the ideal country. Claire is a coeliac so places with lots of rice dishes suit her. Dinner for three (no booze) - 7 euros. I think that China is cheap but it ain’t that cheap. The next day E & C both had organizational things to do so I wondered off to the big botanical park (“The Kew Gardens of India”). Kew it isn’t but it is still worth a visit. There are lots of different types of trees with some good flower displays. It is well used too, lots of people (most of the women in traditional dress) picnicking on the grass, a few monkeys and black kites everywhere. Black kites are fairly common in the tropics but I have never seen anything like the numbers that there are in Bangalore.

Oh, I didn’t mention the traffic. The roads are narrow and full of potholes, there are approximately  equal numbers of motor bikes/scooters, autos (I still think of them as tuc-tucs) and small cars (fortunately there are few Range Rovers and other such revolting tanks that are so popular in Guangzhou) – there are virtually no push bikes. This makes for interesting driving as everyone jostles for position constantly – there are, naturally, no lanes - and all drivers must know the exact dimensions of their vehicles to the centimetre. I am used to similar jostling in Guangzhou – the main difference (apart from the aforementioned absence of revolting tanks in Bangalore and the absence of motor-bikes and tuc-tucs in Guangzhou – banned, of course) is the speed. The jostling in GZ can be at anywhere from zero to 100 kph, in Bangalore it is from zero to 15 kph.

Claire decided that she had things to do – that was her excuse anyway – so Ed and I were off on a night bus to Kerela. This is the most south-westerly state of India and has a good reputation as a nice place.

I haven’t done a night bus for a while and I know why. We had acquired a small quantity of rum and coke to encourage a bit of sleeping. There were two buses that left at 9.00 and we had deliberately chosen the slower one so that we didn’t arrive at our destination at 3.00 a.m. Instead we chose to arrive at 7.00 a.m.  The difference being largely accounted for by the bus pulling over and stopping for a couple of hours or so. An excellent chance to sleep! No. An excellent chance to listen to myriad different snoring tones.

When we arrive at our homestay our overly solicitous host gives us breakfast and a rest and says yes you can get an “auto”  to some caves and walk back – 15 kilometres.

Sounds OK. The caves are a bit of a disappointment – some rock carvings from 3,500 years ago but hardly caves, just small areas that might provide a bit of shelter from the rain and, because of their location, from some enemies.

There were some nice things about the walk back – did you know how lovely and sweet coffee flowers smell? – funnel web spiders are ridiculously common – convolvulus of many colours etc. Bit of a problem though - it was all roads of various grades. If they were fairly narrow you only had to leap out of the way when vehicles were going in both directions otherwise you can poodle along at a reasonable pace. On the bigger roads there is constant traffic in both directions so you just have to put up with walking in the gutter (there are no pavements worth the name, even in Bangalore) enjoying the sounds of constant horn-blowing. I should mention that rubbish bins are rarer than new ideas in India. In any Chinese city street they are every fifty metres but still the assholes throw their fag-packets on the ground so there is an army of street-sweepers. In India it is simpler – there are no bins and no street-sweepers so  everything lies comfortably on the ground – for years.

Ed is commonly known as Ed the Wiser because he is wiser than me. So this sage informs me that Kerela has ambitions to become a completely “dry” state – I have no idea why, there are a few Muslims but not a significant number. What this means is that you are constantly on the look-out for bars (even in January walking in Kerela is pretty hot) and you don’t find them. After 4 hours walking we were in this rather mundane town but it had a bar. This is a dark dinghy affair (typical I am told by the fount of all knowledge. I can understand where the term “dirty drinking hole” comes from now) so we down a couple of large Tuborgs and go looking for the local “wine shop.” You don’t go to such places to buy wine but to buy local rum, whiskey and the like.  These are cheap. I should explain – the Eclaires have been on the road for nearly six months travelling from London to India without flying – buses, trains, ships, hitch-hiking all the way – so, although India is cheap, money is not to be thrown around. I have no problem with concurring with that attitude. After a bit of effort we found the wine shop but, and it was a very big, but it had a massive male, of course, queue outside. This queue was not moving so we guessed that it hadn’t opened yet. We realised why the queue on the morrow.

If you want to understand one of the key differences between India and China walk around when schools are closing for the day. In China many kids are picked by their parents in cars or grandparents to take them to the bus or metro; you will see a few kids walking home in ones and twos with maybe a couple of different school uniforms to be seen – and that is in the cities. In India at 4 or 5 o’clock the vast majority of people on the streets are school kids. It clearly illustrates the success of China’s one child policy and the fact that it was persisted with for about ten years too long. It also illustrates that India has need for a couple of decades of such a policy.

After another hour or so we came across a “Toddy Shop.” These are excellent institutions that take the sap from coconut trees and let it ferment during the day and flog it the same day - you can see the stuff fermenting in your glass. Nearly forty years earlier I had tried something similar in Tanzania and that made us very cheerful, very quickly. The Indian version had the same effect. So, after consuming a litre and a half between us we bought another litre to take away but found no other wine shops.

Ed and I had had the impression earlier that white people walking down country roads is not common. Walking down them in the dark is certainly not common. We were late for dinner, so chickened out and got an auto.

The following day it was off for a mountain walk. I won’t dwell on the walk but there were several things about the day that were very educational. Public transport. Chinese cities have superb public transport in the cities but not in the countryside. In India you can get buses from anywhere to anywhere – you just have to change a lot and it takes a long time. Our homestay really is in the middle of nowhere and it is a good twenty minute walk to the local village. It was then three buses and one and a half hours to do the 30 km to where we want to go to get a tuc-tuc up the mountain to start our walk. After our walk, we could not get a tuc-tuc down the mountain because there was a road block. We did the seven km off the mountain in eighty minutes with no sign of a road block.

We were also back into the problem from yesterday – where to get some beer etc. On the walk to the village in the morning we had passed the local toddy shop and I had enquired on Ed’s behalf about closing time - 9.00 p.m,. so a backstop.  We enquired in the various towns where we had to change buses about wine shops and they were all closed for “the holiday” (We later discovered that  it was Mahatma Macoat Day and the old todger was famously abstemious from anything that sounds like fun).

So a dry day! Santosh to the rescue. We had begun to warm to our hoist quite a lot. Me - “Santosh, how do you stop the birds eating the rice?  Santosh - “How much can they eat?” Santosh is a non-boozer but he produced a quarter bottle of his father’s honeybee brandy which seemed to have the desired effect.

At 5.30 in the morning I set off with Stephen, another resident, for the wildlife sanctuary. Ed isn’t called The Wiser for nothing - he went back to Bangalore. The sanctuary was shit. I saw much more wildlife in Santosh’s father's farm later in the day. However, if you like to see a chained up elephant the “nature reserve” is the place for you. The vehicles took us out too late, they have rooves too low to look out of, the guides didn’t give a shit. We were back in one hour having seen a few buffalo. It was a disgrace.

However, it turned out to be a fun day. Back in the nearest town I was looking for a wine shop to replace the honey-bee brandy when I wandered into a local “Jain” place. Don’t ask me what “Jainism” is all about – it is some religious nonsense.  Anyway, in I went . There was not much too see but it emphasised the overwhelming nature of the demographic. I was seized by three 15-16 year old girls and quizzed about where I was from, where was my family etc. to the extent that they forgot to take their shoes off when we wandered near the inner sanctuary. The guy told them off (but not me, obviously, even I could draw the relevant conclusion) and opened the inner sanctum – not much to see. An easy morning - probably only twenty photos taken of me. Why am I not considered handsome in the West? (No answer required.)

Anyway, the wine shop must be found and, after a lot of farting about, asking directions, autos (yuk) etc. I got to the place in time for the midday sun.

Did I mention a queue a couple of days previously? Well that was nothing. I had to join to replace the stuff that we had drunk the night before. Initially the queue did not appear to move at all but after about twenty minutes there arose the idea that I should go to the front of the queue. Why? There were quite a lot of other old men as well as me (naturally, there were no women). So I stood in my place but they all pushed me forward. Inverted racism is an odd thing but I have seen quite a lot of it on my travels.

There is no honey-bee brandy but I get the next best (plus a spare – obviously). The oddity was that the guys who I had all delayed clapped, cheered, shook my hand and hugged me

 Question one for you. Is the fact that I was pushed to the front by the oppressed minority racist? Easy answer, I believe.

Question two? Was I right to accept? Trickier!

 

Back to the farm and what do I do?

Well, obviously, I visit the toddy shop on the way, refuse a lift from Snatosh’s neighbour and thoroughly enjoy looking at stuff. Stuff consists of birds that I don’t know, plants that I, mostly, don’t know and people doing things that I do not understand.  When I venture forth on the farm I am in a birders paradise. I guess that I saw thirty different species in half an hour – naturally I could identify none of them unless they have cole tits in India.

The brandy had proved a wise investment as when I got to the Toddy Shop the next day they had sold out by 3.30. I was in the company of a couple of Americans (technically he was Chinese). Jasmine had had an ambition to milk a cow for three years.  Today was her day.  She asked a local who took us off to an old lady’s farm where the deed was done. I have to say that Jasmine was pretty crap. When we got back to the farm Santosh, without hearing the full story, immediately set about arranging cow milking for the morrow. BTW he had already got in the man that morning to demonstrate tree climbing and coconut cutting. The coconut juice was especially welcome that evening for the brandy.

The Americans were a late booking so I was moved downstairs into the house proper so I could drink brandy and coconut juice with Santosh’s dad. Bed and board was down to five quid a night but this was mate’s rates – Santosh liked me and I like him. Will I be back?

The next stretch proved rather odd. Santosh had given me instructions about where to go next. He was a bit inaccurate but it didn’t matter. People just help and I got the next bus in the right general direction until I reached my goal and got a train. The oddity in the bus was that I was sat in a three people seat by the window. A young guy was sat on my left and, after the right hand seat was vacated, he seemed to think that it was OK to lean on my thigh with his right elbow. When his left hand also appeared on my thigh I made my feelings plain and he moved away.  Why should a young guy – no matter how perverse – be interested in a 63 year old man?

Well here I am sitting in an air-conditioned carriage on a train to Goa. There are sleeping places for six and, at least, room for twelve people to sit on the seats at normal level. This can’t be an Indian train. I have lashed out 8 euros on this 5 ½ hour trip. There is clearly something wrong.

I wrote that two days ago. The food in Goa was good and the streets quite clean but it is not India; it is the sanitized version like Hong Kong is the sanitized version of China. Maybe I should have ventured to the beaches where the westerners hang out to try a drug or few.

This train (with an upgrade) has cost me two euros for another five hours – I am sure that I will end up somewhere! There are loads of men wandering up and down the carriages selling shit. I am fairly sure that they are speaking some variety of English but I have no idea what they are selling.

The town I was heading for proved to be real wild west. There were loads of drinking holes.  The gin came with orange already in the individual sized bottle. You bought soda water (no tonic) separately. Naturally they cost pretty much nothing so I had a couple.

To Hampi. My hangover has gone and I am awaiting the Eclairs who are getting a night bus to arrive in the morning.  This is a real hippy tourist spot – with no booze! I don’t know how The Wiser will cope.

Well the Wiser coped very well. He bought a bottle of whisky and a bottle of rum which the three of us demolished in one night. We weren’t the brightest crowd today. Yesterday we cycled but were too rough to do so today so we hired little motor bikes and I used less than a litre of fuel and we probably did 35 kilometres.

Hampi is a lovely area. It is famous for temples but we spent more time looking at the rock formations and the incredibly green rice. There are lots of birds and Claire bought me the local bird book which was very useful.

 Obviously it was a washing day. The Eclairs had left and I wandered off to see a couple of temples but there was Lashme in the first temple. We had met her a couple of days earlier emerging from her bath. I stood and watched for a bit whilst she collected coins, ate the odd banana and tapped people on the head. She is 28 year old Indian Elephant. The tap on the head is thanks and the coins go into her trunk for here keepers to retrieve. The temple was mildly interesting but when Lashme was off for her bath I left. Indian Elephants are considerably smaller than African elephants – I doubt that she weighs three tonnes – and I have little experience of them. The oddity is that her back was humped whereas an African elephant sags in the middle of its back like most large quadrupeds. Still pretty tall though – 3 metres plus in the middle of her back but is she deformed?

Once down to the river the chief mahoot (elephant trainer) persuades her to lie down on her side and scrubbing commences. This isn’t a gentle tickle with a back brush but vigorous scrubbing with scrubbing brushes and rough rocks. Most of the time she is kept in the temple so tics are not so likely but the skin is very thick and peeling skin can be very itchy. Apparently, in the wild, Indian elephants spend three hours a day scratching against trees. 100 rupees (1 quid) to join in the process for the tourists and after 45 minutes it is time for her to turn over. This is a very slow process taking five minutes or so but even then when she finally dropped her head in the water there was a damn good splash. Her ears got particular attention and she certainly didn’t complain – an enquiring trunk was an obvious good sign. I didn’t join in the scrubbing but did rather regret not getting the offered ride back to the temple. (No photos, my phone had fried.)

This took an hour and a quarter. A bit of a wander round some obviously poor area plus a couple of temples and there was much more traditional washing with lots of beating against rocks by (mainly) women.

 A relief at lunch time when beer appeared but it was time to move to Hospet. This is close but not touristy – the hotel I am in is twice the price of Hampi but half the efficiency – and that is saying something. Yesterday in Hampi it had taken twenty minutes to produce an orange juice for Ed; two minutes to collect a beer for me today had turned out to be twenty and “half an hour” to prepare lunch had been over an hour.

I was wandering in to town when I came across a man waist deep in the river. He was washing his cow. And, judging by the fact that the other three cows were pushing close, it isn’t only elephants that enjoy a good, vigorous wash.

The last wash of the day was a man with his tuc-tuc (sorry auto) next to the river getting that good and clean.

OK I was the last wash of the day but that can hardly be classed as edifying.

Back to Bangalore. Travelling is a bit slow but the general principle is get on whatever bus or train is heading in the direction you want to go – don’t wait for a transportation device to your specific destination. This concept works quite well but I got caught out by not hurrying a bit. A night in Hospet, having arrived at 5 p.m. seemed like a good idea. It wasn’t. Hospet is a complete dump and if I had got the train to the next junction I could have got to Bangalore the following day in time for a good boozy night with the Wiser before I left.

In stead roll in near midnight and watch the Wiser working for much of the following day. Well actually that statement is not true. Brunch together for the three of us and then drag Claire off to the pub to talk about places to visit (on their way back to the UK) in Myanmar and China. I didn’t force her to watch cricket – honest – she was willing.

The Road to Mandalay

The Road to Mandalay

Kipling was it who coined the expression? Is there a song somewhere?

Well actually I had flown in so the road was pretty irrelevant.

I have long regarded Myanmar as off-limits because of the politics but it has been slowly improving and many people recommended it. I figured if Obama can go then so can I.

Mandalay is not the most beautiful of cities. It has something of an African feel to it. Bad roads, poor shops, that sort of thing. So why Africa, not Cambodia say? Now Cambodia is piss-poor but at least Phnom Penh has a few buildings over 10 stories high (and it is eleven years since I have been to Phnom Penh).

Tony Hawkes in a book called "Beating the Moldovan Football Team at Tennis" or something of that ilk goes on about the number of holes to fall down in the pavements in Chishenau - the capital of Moldova. I have been to Chishenau and all I can say is that Tony Hawkes obviously ain't been to Mandalay. The storm drains are under the pavements (sidewalk to the yanks) and you are lucky if you can go ten metres along the pavement without a decent sized hole to fall down – obviously with pretty stagnant water in the drain so the mosquitoes can breed.

It is not an old city - essentially it was created by the king of the day in the 1840s. He must have been some rich dude because there are masses of temples, stupas, palaces etc. dating from his time and that of his son. The British turned up and stopped all this fun in the 1880s. One of the famous temples is made out of teak; quite interesting with some nice carvings but only faint traces of paint so the wood is bleached on the sunny side and dark on the north side. The thing was painted all over originally so why don't they paint it now. Doubtless some idiots would say "Ooh, you can't do that you don't know what the exact colours were." So what - paint is to protect as well as decorate. The temple is a contemporary of the Forth Railway Bridge (near Edinburgh) and they have allegedly been painting that continuously since it was built. Imagine what state the bridge would be in if some idiot said - "Ooh we can't paint it because we don't know the original colour." They should paint the damn temple and who cares exactly what colours it was originally - they might have been horrible anyway.

The main road to Yangoon (Rangoon) is dual carriageway but it is difficult to find a stretch where the driver can get over 60 kph – the bumps.

Cheap! It makes China loook like Europe. On my first night I found this not to slovenly sort of place. Chose a few things to barbecue add fish soup and two 640 ml bottles of Myanmar beer (not bad) - $11. After Liz arrived restaurants had - of course - to be Lonely Planet approved with the commensurate rise in prices. Myanmar is not big on night life. We tried a couple of things - some dancing show - awful and some alleged political comedians - truly appalliing. They were not funny, had awful songs and dances and a fair amount of anti-goverment stuff but funny? In a foul mood with a hangover I can fart funnier stuff than they produced. However, they had referred us to a restaurant (not approved by LP). Myanmar food is mostly pretty poor but once it is affected by their neighbours, whether Thailand, China or India, the food can be pretty good and this was excellent.

Stupas everywhere. Stupafying - sorry. To give even the vaguest idea I was stood at some joint with loads of these looking across the Irrawaddy river so the far bank was about 2 km away, I had a field of vision limited to about 30 degrees and I counted eighteen completely separate stupas on the far bank. They take the old Budhist stuff quite seriously here; there are loads of temples and a significant proportion of the male population are monks. They are not intolerant of other religions - there are a few churches of various types in Mandalay plus a couple of mosques and a Sikh temple. Of course the chaps are only monks for a few years, most of them - it is not a lifetime occupation so a large percentage are not adults - many give the idea up when lust gets into their mindset. Budhists strike me as a pretty harmless lot - tolerant, peaceful, not prothelertysers etc. - unlike those people who subscribe to the three awful sanctimonious, smug, conceited Middle -Eastern religions.

The reason why there is so much religous stuff around Mandalay is that the capital of the "Burmese" state in its various forms has been in the area (i.e. withing 20 kms of modern Mandalay) for most of the 600 years before the Brits turned up,

Even in Myanmar's second city everything closes by 9.30 - you to have made sure that your room was adequately provisioned long before that time.

Out for a day walk with Wellington as our guide. He is even older than me but very knowledgeable and not afraid to say that he doesn't know - a good trait in my book. It is rather a disconcerting walk in some ways. Once out of the town/city of Kalaw you see a mixture of agricultural development and fire damage. The bottoms of the valleys (which are steep-sided) have plenty of water - even in the dry season - to grow a good variety of fruit and vegetables. The natural woodland on the sides of the valleys have been replaced mainly by tea but also oranges and other fruits but disconcertingly large areas have just been cut, burnt and left for the ash to wash down the hillsides in the rainy season to become fertiliser.

 All photos courtesy of Liz Hart who asserts her copyright.

We stopped for a cup of tea in a village. We went into a "house" to have tea which is free but of course we lashed out a dollar each to take away a bag full. The house was one room about four metres by seven in which two families lived - ten people. What do you do if you want a bit of fun and games with your better half?

I haven't read it yet, but Kipling's book was about going from Kalaw (a summer hill station in the days of the Raj) to the aforementioned Mandalay. It took him six weeks, we did the reverse trip in five hours in a shared taxi. This taxi had something which I haven't even seen in China. TVs are everywhere in China, including the back of the front seats in taxis and most people have them on all day every day in their houses. What I had not seen was a rear view mirror that can be turned into a TV. So MTV had been on during the straight stretches of road; the driver had turned it back to being a mirror on the twisty bits.

Sam's map has three categories of thoroughfare - path, bullock track and highway. Highway is anything that has, or has had some contact with, a metalled surface at sometime in its history. The classifications are accurate and this gives a good indicator of how poor Myanmar is. It must be twenty years since I saw the proverbial old woman on a donkey in Europe but in the country bullock-carts are normal although with a good spattering of little motorbikes. Out walking we went well over 24 hours without seeing a car and we went through several villages. Most of the buildings outside of the city have bamboo walls and a good percentage have mud floors. Village shops have little in them - and nothing costing more than five dollars - because the soil is fertile so villagers grow there own food and weave their own baskets and material for clothing. It is not quite the classic subsistence farming (they buy metal tiffin tins and corrugated iron for roofs) but it is as near as you are likely to see in the modern world in a country where they are not all killing each other.

For those of you not familiar with Asia but are with Africa the banyan tree is the equivalent of the baobab; it does not stand so tall in isolation in a dust bowl area. However, it shares the massive girth of trunk (10 metres plus) with the attendant mass. A baobab is largely trunk with a few branches growing out twenty or thirty metres off the ground to give a crown about ten or fifteen metres wide and high enough so Elephants can't eat them. The banyan is often no more than fifteen metres high but can have a spread of forty or fifty metres in diameter. I have seen many banyans before but not like these. Truly impressive and it would take a better mathematician/engineer than me to work out the tensile strength (or is it compressive strength) of some of the branches to support the moment derived from such massive horizontal branches less than two metres off the ground.

We had a contrasting guide from Wellington for a two day walk - she could have been his granddaughter - but also very good if rather less cynical and rather more politically correct. She got more beautiful as the day wore on! This is not the rantings of some stupid old man - for a change. The women put a big gob of what looks like calamine lotion on their cheeks each morning; this is to help their skin and make them look more beautiful. The first may be true for July - yes that is her name; Friday July Clever - does have nice skin but she looked ever prettier as the gunk got absorbed or got rubbed off or in during the day. She is a budhist; they have an interesting attitude to vegetarianism. You can't eat meat that you have killed, you can't eat meat that has been killed for you to eat but you can go to the market and buy and eat meat that has been killed for anyone.

There are no family names in Myanmar so if you don't know people are related you can't guess. You can probably guess where July's first two names come from. The last is added after a few months when the parents have decided the character of the offspring. July did confirm that nobody gets called Thursday May Stupid.

It varies from village to village but they don't really have our concept of a weekend but they do have the concept of festivals for the full and new (they say no) moon. We were having a "homestay" in a village but these are well organised - there are sleeping mats and blankets with a few separate rooms. Our guide brought the food with her and cooked our dinner (she had also done lunch in the same way) so we were well prepared for an early night. Fortunately, I had some rum and July made sure that I had a candle to read by when the lights went out so I was all set. Shame about the people in bed. It was two days before the full moon but there had been a procession from the temple to the middle of the village before dusk when the women disappeared home and came back with various plant offerings - sort of Harvest Festival type thing - and then it all went quiet. Until 11 p.m. when this awful raucous loud music started through a terrible speaker system in the middle of the village. We were a good 200 metres away so God knows what it was like in the middle. This went on all night until 7 a.m. but I had taken the precaution of having enough anasthsetic to allow me to sleep well. July told us that you always sleep outside the village the night before a wedding because of the noise. She said weddings have 2,000 guests but I find that a bit hard to believe; it implies that you go to a wedding every two or three weeks throughout your whole life.

If you are in a country where most "roads" are bullock tracks it makes sense to bum a ride on the back of a front-wheel drive pickup with shit in it that is powered by a belt-driven air-cooled engine. These wonderfully simple machines are common in East Asia and fairly common in South America. What was the need? Well Liz was told when we arrived at our hotel that the best view of sunset was at some vinyard but she hadn't realised that it was 4 kms out of town. Why it was so important to see this sunset I don't know. We were staying at the town next to Lake Inle but have you ever seen a sunset over a lake (Scottish Sea Lochs excepted)? Anyway it was in Liz's head so had to be done and I approved of the destination. Liz can walk quite quickly when there is something important to do and, apparently, this was important but we would be struggling to get to the vinyard with more than ten minutes to spare - hence bumming a ride. On the way back we were at about 2/3rds that pace naturally. However, the wine was not bad (I would say that after 5 months of Chinese swill) and the sunset was actually quite good with the clouds and the mountains.

Places to go.

Mandalay. OK - unavoidable really but use it as a transit station and do a couple of things if you have a half day or two there. Imwa and other places around are more interesting.

Kalaw - I really rather liked it - 1,400 metres up so nice temperature. The reason we went there was to go on a trek to Lake Inle but Kalaw is nicer; if you go, make sure that you have a walk or two around the area; it is a lot more interesting than the very easy walk to Lake Inle. And I say this despite the fact that we had a beautiful charming 23 year old guide for the walk to the Lake!

Lake Inle. You are supposed to spend your time in boats - Liz did this - but I didn't really get the idea. I cycled around and had a great time. I know that we always say how luuuuuverley the people are when we wander off to somewhere foreign but in Myanmar they really are delightful. You stop at a cafe or restaurant out in the sticks and you are immedately invited to sit with the locals there. English is surprisingly good - not everyone is by any means fluent but many have quite a good grasp of the language. You never have to ask for help, as soon as you stop someone will come up to you and ask where you are going. A small word of warning; I did get ripped off at the lake. In other places you just walk in and ask for the goods or services that you want and they will charge you whatever the price is - usually ridiculously cheap - but I saw this sign and I had to go for a haircut and a shave, didn't ask the price beforehand and he wanted $50 - a local would certainly not have paid a dollar. I paid $20and let it irritate me for the rest of the day. Yes, it was a rip-off but, at least, partially my own foolish fault and he probably needed the money more than me. Having said that there is a sight none of you have ever seen - short hair and clean shaven – but Liz hasn't sent me a photograph so it will remain a mysteryto all except Liz..

Bagan. I thought the area round Mandalay was stupafying - I had seen nothing. The structures here are numbered and there are 8,000 in an area of 20 or 30 square kilometres. It all really kicked off 900 years ago when the local king got converted big time and started building. Others followed and these things must have been going up at the rate of dozens a year for the next couple of hundred years when the place fell into decline. Some of them are pretty chunky, one has a forty metre tall budha and a couple of 30 metre jobbies to boot as well as a reclining budha round the back. Expensive though. A restaurant (in LP of course) was almost London prices, a half bottle of local rum was $2 - twice as much as at Lake Inle. Needless to say when I was without Liz I had a good lunch (with only one beer) for three quid. They hadn't got a licence to sell beer so it was brought by the glass because the police check regularly apparently.

The place has been split into three chunks - the area you want to see and, on either side, a new town and a backpackers town. Liz won't ride a bike or get on the back of a motorbike - the obvious ways to get around - so we parted company for the day and I got a bike. Frankly after six of these bloody stupas and temples I had had enough.

Pyin Oo Lwin. An odd sort of joint. You get the impression fairly quickly that there is a bit more money around than most towns but, although the market is very good - well stocked and great variety - it is not apparent why. The reason for going to the town is the botanical gardens. These were set up a hundred years ago so now are quite mature and worth a visit. They are four kilometres from the main part of town but the stroll there and back is a bit of an eye-opener. The houses aren't made of bamboo! Some are quite big with decent gardens and not the knackered old cars that are normal. Yes this is where Mandalay's Middle Class come to play at the weekend - one or two places were open until after 10!

Speaking of knackered old cars. Myanmar is an old British colony so naturally they drove on the left side of the road. Now they drive on the right. I assumed that this change must have been pretty recent because all the taxis we went in the driver sat on the right hand side of the car. However, the change took place in 1970 so not even the cars in Myanmar are that old. They have right-hand drive cars because they are cheap! Japan's tax system more or less forces people to change cars once they are six years old. So where do the old cars go to? Japan drives on the left so the cars are right hand drive. I saw very few vehicles where the driver was on the "correct" side of the vehicle.

Hsipaw. Part of the reason for going there is the train ride - but not if you are in a hurry. I had a good look at the track and it rises and falls (each rail seperately), and sways about quite readily on a one metre guage track. You can get seasick riding it. There is a rather large viaduct built by some Yank company 100 years ago; it was refurbished in the nineties and, to be fair, wasn't rusty. It is measured in feet, obviously, because the Yanks don't understand the rest of the world. It is over 300 feet high and about 2.200 feet long (600+ metres). I timed the train across it and it took 5 1/2 minutes (plus the bits in front of and behind me). I make that just above fast walking speed and that is faster than it felt like.

Hsipaw itself is nothing special but we did another trek from there. Our guide this time was only eighteen and was obviously a reserve but, in practical terms, the best of the three. He is a carpenter's son so knew all the trees, a tremendous spotter for birds and highly flexible. We got to our destination village for the first day but it was only 2.30; he was happy to go on for a couple more hours and stay in another village. Liz got a touch of food poisoning and, after a couple of hours the following day, wanted to get a tuc-tuc back into town. Tuc-tucs are reluctant to go to the point on the "highway" that we were at because the road was quite likely to shred their tyres. Liz was whingeing that she wished our hotel was organising her escape but our man came up with a big truck that would take her into town for a dollar in twenty minutes time - as opposed to $35 for a tuc-tuc in an hour. When we walked the road later I could see why there was reluctance. He (Little One he is called) also took me to his home, to the shops on his motorbike and Liz to meet his 93 year old teacher. That is what I call service. Another budhist who only lasted a week as a monk - two meals a day were not enough for him. As you can see Liz neede a little assistance boarding the big truck.

One interesting thing about our night stop on the trek. We were sitting outside the homestay at about 6.30 when a couple of army guys turned up in full camoflage with AK47s (or whatever they use these days, I did not ask to look at their guns - yes, I am a coward). However these were not Myanmar soldiers but Shan State soldiers making sure that there were no federal soldiers in the village. This is a good illustration of what Myanmar is, a rather uneasy collection of different tribal groups with quite a lot of fighting in their recent history (and present day in two areas). The Burma people are the biggest group at about 60% of the population and they live on the plains. Up in the hills the people are different with their own cultures and languages, although educated people speak Burmese as well. University education is conducted in - you've guessed it - English. Aung San Suu Qui is wrong, the country should not be called Burma but Myanmar. Imagine if the UK was just called England - wouldn't are Celtic cousins love that!

One other thing about "The Lady" - she is popular all over the country as far as I could work out - her photograph can be seen in many houses. The only other photo you see quite regularly is a "General". However, this was a revolutionary hero who was assassinated at 27; the fact that he was Aung San Suu Qui's father (she was two when he died) is rather more relevant today.

Would I recommend Myanmar? A guarded yes. The people are great, communications are easy (spoken, not the internet - many places have wifi but there just isn't the bandwidth) and it is cheap but there are limits on what is interesting - unless you like stupas and temples by the truck load. The six places I have named are all in the Lonely Planets top nine - I would suggest being more adventurous if you visit - bikes, wandering round villages, longer walks, remoter areas - that sort of thing. Some areas are off limits, allegedly because of opium growing although I suspect it has more to do with political issues. The military are still very much in control although this does not impact you as a tourist. Towns of any size have ATMs that work but it is still a good idea to take a few hundred US dollars in clean, high denomination bills. Wildlife - lots of beautiful butterflies, a few interesting birds but saw no large wild mammals and only interesting dragonflys of the invertebrates - but then I do have the powers of observation of a deaf mole.

Finally, I think this is Liz's best picture on a wooden bridge across the end of a lake– pity I can't remember the exact location!