Back to Yangon

 Above the clouds.

 Pilgrim transport for the young..

 and the old or infirm.

 Pu Pu buys bamboo glasses for her nephews.

 The red fruit is rambutan.

 The village in the rubber tree plantation.

 Latex flowing slowly out of the rubber tree.

 Sheets of latex being dried and smoked.

 Back to crazy public transport.

 Preparing snakeheads for drying.

 Dried fish shop.

 Fishing the river.

 The 114 metre tall Shwemawdaw Pagoda.

 Pieces of tree the locals use to make thanat-kha. 

 We watched all of these people climb out of this truck.

Myathalaung reclining Buddha.

Thursday, May 24^th.

I woke up in the middle of the night to a horrendous crash of thunder! The storm lasted about a half hour with lots of lightning and thunder, that eventually moved further away, but the rain came down in torrents. I was happy I was not to be one of the pilgrims sleeping on the platform!

Initially, when I woke up at dawn, we were fogged in. Then it dissipated, and the sun came out, but we were up above the clouds that enveloped the plains. Really beautiful.

We had an a la carte breakfast which came with a plate of fruit, including pomelo, which is like grapefruit and really delicious. Then walked from the hotel, past all the morning pilgrims and shops, back down to the truck transportation to get off the mountain. This time the three of us were in the front cab with the driver. We proceeded a little more slowly down the switchbacks to the base. Once we got there we were picked up again by Win Han, our driver.

On the way back to Yagon we made several stops. The first was at a fruit stand along the road where Pu Pu bought us some rambutan because I mentioned yesterday that I like lychee and thought rambutan was similar.

The second stop was at a rubber tree plantation. This was a large plantation of tall rubber trees with a basic worker’s village under the canopy. We met the local man who was the boss and he showed us around. He explained, through Pu Pu, that he supervised the collection of sap, the pressing of it into sheets and the smoking and drying process. There were several basic, primitive houses here where families who worked tending the trees lived. The owner of the plantation also allows them to raise animals here to supplement their meagre income. They raise cows, chickens and have a horse that they rent out locally for novice monk processionals. The houses are all raised up on legs in order not to flood during the monsoons and so that the animals can take shelter underneath.

The next stop was at a couple of stalls where women were drying fish, particularly snakeheads. We watched as they beheaded the fish, gutted them and then splayed them open to be dried in the sun. There were a large number of fish is various stages of drying with salt. You can imagine the smell. Across the street there were a few shops selling the dried fish, dried, shrimp of different sizes and anchovies.

Further down the road, while we were driving along the river, we saw three men hauling in a fishing net. I think they caught more mud and debris but there were a few fish in the net too. One man would pull them out of the net and throw them to another on the bank and he would either stone it or throw it hard against the ground to kill it.

Then we drove for a while before stopping at Bago to see Shwemawdaw Pagoda, which looks similar to the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yagon but is actually taller at 114 metres (16 metres taller). We just took photos from the entrance road and did not enter because there was a fee and didn’t really offer anything different. We watched as a local truck with a covered back offloaded about thirty people from its cramped interior. Pu Pu talked to them and they said they were all from the same village and were making a pilgrimage to this pagoda. Also here I saw people selling pieces of wood from their roadside stalls. This wood is what the make the pale yellow make up from.

After that we stopped for lunch in another large, mostly empty restaurant. And finally a little further on we stopped at the Myathalaung reclining Buddha that was 270’ long and 63’ tall, or 90 metres by 21 metres.

The rest of the afternoon was spent driving back to Yangon. We arrived at our hotel, which is located close to the airport, by 3:30 and checked in. I spent the rest of the day relaxing in my room and finally catching up on all the Tibet blog entries, including the rather long summary. I was asleep by ten.