Mandalay Photos


I originally was planning on skipping Mandalay because I'd only heard bad things, but the only transportation directly from Inle Lake to Bagan was an 18-hour minibus on bad roads. For those that aren't familiar with travel on a minibus, it is quite cramped. So I decided to got through Mandalay and stop for a couple of days after all. I'm afraid it was as bad as I'd heard. The people just weren't as friendly as in the rest of the country. We took a taxi around to the ancient cities nearby, but they weren't very well preserved. We also went to a famous extremely long teak bridge, but it was more of a tourist sardine can than a bridge.

We also went to a place where hundreds of monks line up to receive rice, which was a tourist zoo too. But, we ended up talking to a wonderful young monk afterward. He had lots of questions for us and we did our best to answer them. He asked what democracy was, which surprised me. In an unfortunate bit of timing, one of my friends decided to start video recording the conversation right about that time and the monk got concerned that he was being recorded talking about something that could get him put in prison. He claimed that there were "lots of British and American spies in Myanmar" and said that one of his friends was in prison due to talking to a British man about democracy and then the man turned him in to the government. We had a hard time believing the story and assured him that we weren't spies.