Luang Prabang, Laos

In order to squeeze more days out of the schedule to spend in Chiang Mai, we completely cut Vientiane out, and even a day or so out of Luang Prabang, thereby leaving only three days in Laos, a decision I came to regret quite quickly. Luang Prabang (pronounced Loon or Lone Paban), is situated right on the famous Mekong river and still retains much of it's colonial French charm, and although many of the buildings are faded and beginning the long slide into disrepair, in many ways echoing the colonial era in which they were built, the look and feel of the town is very much alive. Laos is a "People's Democratic Republic ", meaning very poor, and definitely not as democratic as advertised, the flags emblazoned with the hammer and sickle are flying on every third building. The sense that tourists are quite unwelcome is given off by most of the local citizens, and even the waiters and waitresses show disdain for having to serve the interlopers. You can hear the tuk tuk drivers laughing and snickering as you pass. If I think about it, I suppose that Laos doesn't see many tourists, even though the local to tourist ratio in Luang Prabang is about 70 - 30, and the people are so poor that they just don't like what they see as westerners coming in and doing all the things they've been taught westerners do, try to buy everything, eating everything, and if the locals don't understand English they just speak English louder. I can make assumptions about why they appear to be so miserable, but I know so little about them as a people, it would just be uneducated guesses. So I won't try to figure them out right now and just report my experiences as unbiased as I can. For a country so supposedly bereft of tourists, they definitely have everything you need. Good internet and wifi, really nice and spacious guesthouses (ours was called the Apple guesthouse, run by Wayne, an expat Australian gentleman and his adopted son. These folks are very friendly, very helpful and more than willing to accommodate requests, I recommend them highly), fantastic food, both western and local, and even a couple of French bakeries. As for the sights, there are caves with thousands of Buddhist icons in them, there are waterfalls and river tours, there is a thoroughly unremarkable stupa at the top of a three hundred stair hike, and there's the natural beauty of the place, surrounded by misty deep green hills and the wide brown river. The traffic is almost nil, the shops sell things you'd never consider buying, like enormous intricately carved ivory opium pipes and bottles of snake whiskey complete with snake, and if you're lucky, they threw in a scorpion completely gratis. These are all tangible things, but what you'll take away is a feeling that you have stepped back in time some 70 odd years. The real sense that nothing much has changed, the style of the buildings, the relatively unspoiled scenery, and the scattering of wats and monasteries all lend themselves to an impression of timeless peace, calm and beauty. The people became marginally more likeable when they see our little boy, again everyone wants to see him smile and say hello in Lao (it escapes me at the moment), and to touch him, so I forgive the earlier misery machines. I begin to deeply regret having spent so much time in Chiang Mai, as I would have loved a few more days here to walk and tour and just watch the place happen. I could pretty easily spend a couple of weeks here too, maybe see something of the surrounding villages too, but we hacked our time budget to the absolute minimum, so it's off to Cambodia tomorrow. Angkor Wat! Excited!

Chiang Mai, Thailand

We have given ourselves four days in Chiang Mai, mostly just as a base for day trips and little jaunts to the surrounding area, then another 3 or 4 in Pai, then three days in Vientiane and four in Luang Prabang in Laos. We had been told that Chiang Mai was a pretty cool, laid back city, but as it's Thailand's second biggest city, we couldn't imagine it being overly laid back. Siobhan had been banging on for quite some time about massages and foot rubs and facials and pedicures. It appears we had entered the rubdown capital of the world. And legitimate rubdowns too! They are so serious about their massages in Chiang Mai, they have a program to rehabilitate and train female prisoners as masseuses, and there is a shop dedicated to the trainees and another opened by former inmates. I love looking and exploring every city we visit, and there is a wealth of things to do and see here, so Dominic and I spend our days exploring the temples and wats, talking to monks, and watching as Dominic is taught how to bow and pray in front of the statues of Buddha. He gets quite an audience every time confidently strides to the front of the temple, gets down on his knees, puts his hands together and bows forward, placing his hands on the floor in front of him, sits up and repeats until he's had enough. The tourists and locals alike adore watching him, and they all laugh incredulously as the little blonde boy bows and prays like an old hand. Siobhan, at the other end of the spectrum, finds several favourite masseurs and masseuses which she has studiously investigated by getting as many massages and manipulations as she can cram into one very long day, over several equally exhausting days. The massage parlours are not 9 to 5 affairs. She seems happier. We meet up at dinner time, and look for places to eat. Most times we decide to save some money and eat what the locals eat where the locals eat. The local food is fantastic, the freshest and most vibrant flavours, and we decide to find cheap local places all the time. Then we discover that Chiang Mai is crawling with expats and their expat food, many of these establishments are expat owned. Mexican restaurants dot the culinary and physical landscape, and they are all exceptional, with some of the best Mexican this side of Los Angeles, and likely the world. There are Israeli restaurants with hummus and felafel which Dominic loves, there are Indian restaurants with butter chicken which Dominic loves, and pizza joints and sandwich bars and fresh fruit stalls and stalls that make smoothies from the fresh fruit and deep fried street food and fresh street food and food and food and food. All this makes me feel that this places is designed to make you fat, and all the outdoor activities are to help you burn it off. Then we discover Butter Is Better. This is an American style diner with biscuits and gravy, pulled pork, chili dogs and muffaletta, cake and pie and everything that makes American cuisine both delicious and notorious. Temples, massages and good food pretty much wraps it up for the old city. Outside the old city walls, the new city is a dirty, busy, modern southeast Asian city with all the charm of a dry fart. Oh sure, the night clubs and rock and dance bars, strip clubs and drugs and underage prostitution and every seedy vice is there to be cheaply and easily obtained, but truly I have never been less interested. I took a trip to Chiang Rai, a little town an hour and some away, to the White Temple. If you want the effects of hallucinogens, just come look at this. It's the creator's vision of the voyage from hell, on one side of the bridge with demons, screaming, pleading faces, grasping hands and erect penises all projecting out from a plaster pool of the damned, over the bridge with it's stern guards protecting the way to heaven over the bridge to the temple itself. Inside the temple is the ubiquitous Buddha , but the walls are the real stars of the show. The wall murals are an equally hallucinogenic thrill ride, this time through the creator's brain. Amongst the heavenly imagery is scattered pictures of George W Bush and Osama Bin Laden, Alice Cooper and Michael Jackson, the moon landing and too many more images of iconoclastic figures of the 20th and 21st centuries, people who are clearly important to the creator, but perhaps a little less heavenly than you or I might imagine. That type of thing is more my speed, and our stop in Sihanoukville in Cambodia is the perfect example of the sort of thing I would have nothing to do with. My tastes, and my life, have no room for that anymore. I shall try not to judge those who still find the cheap ladyboy sex and drugs angle enough to fill their needs, but it's difficult not to when one's life now includes a little child for whom one is responsible. The whole place is been redesigned from a former royal city to a tourist haven, and we are told by one local that the Thais feel they are losing their culture due to the influx of anywheretourists, but the Thai youth are just as happy to absorb the latest and coolest trends from America and England. The films, TV and pop music could be easily replaced by anything westeem.rn. Sitting in a partially outdoor Mexican restaurant, eating Mexican food and drinking root beer, I see nothing but white, albeit tanned or burned, faces, listening to the live guitarist play Steely Dan, one feels that this could be anywhere in the western world. There is no hint of Thai-ness save the wait staff, and the singer sometimes betrays his locality with his accent as he sings a heartfelt acoustic rendition of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun". I am not at all complaining, there is loads to do that is very Thai in spirit, what with the food, the music and dance,and the temples every few blocks, but with the the Burger Kings and Dairy Queens, the booming discos and the mobile phone shops, even the long neck Karen tribeswomen (that's the tribe's name not the name of that girl you dated in highschool) are originally from Burma, one gets the sense that the city has not just welcomed foreigners, but has changed most everything about it's lf to cater to them. That being said, we actually stay for a fortnight. I wander around the city, Siobhan gets more massages and exfoliations, and Dominic just goes with the flow. I think he likes travelling and seeing the new things, just so long as he can get in a taxi, which are cheap and plentiful, and if you miss one there is one not far behind. He also talks about the trains, boats, tuk tuks, and after having been to the zoo and feeding the elephants and hippos and giraffes, he talks about the animals and the monorail which circumnavigates the zoo. He loves all methods of movement and wakes up talking about trains and falls asleep talking about boats and mumbles in his sleep about airplanes. He's still very much the star of the show too. When he rides on my shoulders he finds himself telling admiring strangers about the boats he's been on and the trains we go on and how mama was scared of the airplanes, and they just hang on his every word, smiling and cooing and telling him how cute he is and trying to get a picture with him. One woman actually pulls him off my shoulders and walks off with him to meet her, and I suspect his, new family. I follow closely behind smiling but making sure that they know he belongs to the world, not just them. No little boy has been admired by so many in so many different places, and they all want to touch him and kiss him and pinch his cheeks. Some get a little more aggressive trying to pose him, and I have to step in and tell them to be gentle, but for the most part, he just rolls with it and looks at me like it's just another day at the office. Our time here is coming to an end and we have rejigged our schedule as much as we can, and cancelled the cancellable in order to stay as long as we can. We have even discussed coming back here next year to stay for a few months. We'll see about that. Laos is coming up, but I am dead excited to see Angkor Wat in Cambodia, so I will have to work hard to give Laos a chance. We are officially half way through our trip and I am starting to get anxious about the upcoming university year already. India for a month after 3 weeks in Cambodia, so I will try not to get too worked up yet.

Thoughts on the nature of travelling pt 2

We are getting old. When we started seriously travelling, we took the tank sized baby buggy with us and I carried it up and down the stairs and streets of old Jerusalem and Bethany and Amman and Acco in Jordan and Israel. We stayed in hostels, ate street food and our 8 month old son was strapped to my chest as we investigated castles and churches and various ruins. We took rickety buses with missing floors in Morocco, we stayed in riyadhs and ate freshly caught fish on the beach. We learned the public transit system in the places we went,and travelled with the locals. We travelled cheaply and with a real sense of adventure. We could write a book on how travel with children cheaply and safely with all the fun and adventure that tourism could offer a young at heart couple and their little boy. Every place we went, Dominic inherited a new Grandma, we mixed and mingled with the locals (as mingled as two seriously introverted people can be), we talked with them about their culture, their families, our families, their lives, our lives. We walked in the sun and the rain and the snow. We slept in heat and cold. We don't drink or smoke, so there's no point in immersing ourselves in the night life or even going places which are nightlife-centric. We woke early, and got out early to see every second's worth of the day. We visited sights and sites and everything the cities, towns, and countryside could offer. We went to Albania and Romania and Lithuania and all kinds of places most people wouldn't think to go, with a real verve for adventure. 35 European, North African, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian countries later, I find myself writing this from inside a very nice and spacious wooden chalet, after a breakfast of omelette, toast and coffee, and orange juice which I asked be strained of pulp for my really very picky son. It was lightly sprinkling earlier, but is now chucking it down. We need to get to our next destination, but we won't consider the bus as it's an unsafe rattletrap. We won't stay in rooms without AC because it's too hot to sleep, and a fan won't cut it. We won't eat street food unless it's freshly deep fried, and prefer to eat in restaurants and choose local variations of western food. We are planning next summer's travels. To Cornwall. We are infuriated by the inability to get a nice hot cup of strong black tea, and let's not even discuss what comes when you ask for milk for the tea. We moan when the internet cacks out, despite the fact that wifi at a tiny mountain town is amazing, and we can barely carry our packs because our backs are in such bad shape. We look for hotels with a pool, even though we stay by large bodies of water, but for the most part we can't justify the cost. We are dreadful British tourists and we deserve to stay at home. We still try to do things as cheaply as possible, but the bar has been raised on what's acceptable. That doesn't mean we're staying in 4 or 5 star places, or being chauffeured around in limousines. We have just gotten more needy. I liken it to the punk band who has been on the road for 25 years and the day comes when they want a bus instead of a freezing cold van. They have put in the time, and they have earned the bus. I don't know when it happened. I used to quite happily put up with a lot less. Maybe it was the fresh sense of adventure that made me think that this how real travellers do it, and I like thinking of myself as a real traveller. Of course, "real" travellers would never say that I am a real traveller because I don't stay with a tribe of headhunters in the jungle, or get off my face on the local hallucinogen to find my spirit animal with a shaman, but I feel real enough with the money, time, responsibilities and slightly muffled sense of adventure I have. Perhaps now, after much travelling, I feel we have earned the king sized soft bed and the hot shower. Maybe I am lazy and intolerant and am just playing traveller, but I don't see why my travels and experiences should be minimised just because I should want a hamburger instead of a deep fried tarantula on a stick. It makes me crazy that there is such snobbery when it comes to broadening my horizons, like I'm not going to the right places for the right amount of time for the right reasons. Travel is for the love of travel, love of adventure, and love of the world. Travel is for making you a better person, more aware of people, places and cultures and everything the world has to offer. Maybe travel has made me feel a bit better about myself and a bit superior to those who would rather sit at home with no interest in the rest of the world. So I can understand how a "real" traveller would feel superior to me, one who has really only dipped his toes in the ocean of travel, but at least I get out and go with my little family, we still travel when we can while trying to carry on a life at home in England. My 3 year old son is better travelled that most people on the world, the sad thing is that he probably won't remember most of it, but I have taken as many pictures as I can to help him jar a memory or two loose as he gets older. So I feel OK about the air conditioned bus and the pool and the grilled cheese sandwich with ketchup. I still eat the lak lok in Cambodia, but I have the ribs too. I deserve to. I see the world as much as I can with the time and money and safety concerns I have. I love the world. I love that my family sees it with me. I love that I can tell you about my travels. Maybe you will want to go too. I am a real traveller and I am a world citizen. Some people are happy to go to exotic places and never leave the resort. That's not travelling. You might as well stay home. That's not what we do. There are travel snobs but there are snobs about everything. Feel good about every trip you make, and every strange food you taste and every organised bus tour you get on because you are getting out there and actually experiencing the world with your own senses. You get off the couch and claim your place in the world. You understand the world a little better every time you go. You make yourself a little bit better every time you go. Be a world citizen, and thereby a better citizen to your own little world.

Thoughts on the nature of travelling pt. 1

On the whole, while rich with culture and heritage and stunning natural beauty, Myanmar is incredibly frustrating. On the surface, every modern convenience is available, but they are mostly a shambles, barely performing the tasks they are designed for, assuming the electricity stays on long enough to half-assedly perform them. The roads are in dreadful shape, although the junta is aware that tourism is increasing and so is the need for tourists to get to their destinations, so improvements are being made all over the country. Hot water lasts until maybe 8 pm. Maybe. In larger cities, these breakdowns, shutdowns and letdowns are more of an obvious problem. Hotels rely on computers, so do banks and grocery stores and government offices and business buildings and hospitals, not all of which have generators to carry them through until the power returns. In little towns like Kalaw, a cashbox is just that; a box with cash in it. Mostly they don't accept credit or debit cards, so cash is all. They cook with gas cannisters attached to burners or even charcoal in little bbq's, so electricity is unnecessary. The balls they kick around don't take batteries. There are mobile phone shops and computer service shops and travel agencies all over, especially in little towns like this in which every third shop is mobile device related, and they all become quite pointless wastes of space when the power goes out. Internet connects the whole world, even in little towns like this, albeit frustratingly slowly, but the Internet is even less reliable than the power and when the Internet goes down, business and life carries on like it was never here. As an aside, I do wonder if the Internet and computers are such a great thing for these cultures and communities. I saw a Buddhist monk sitting at his laptop playing an online first person shooter game the other day. Surely that is not allowed by the higher ups at the monastery? Isn't that against Buddhist principles? Maybe everything I know about Buddhism I don't actually know. Wouldn't be the first time I got it wrong. It seems everyone, in cities big and small, spend their days staring at their phones and tablets. Whole groups of friends congregate to ignore each other, favouring texting and Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and whatever. When the power goes out in big cities people look lost, like life no longer has meaning or purpose. Even shopkeepers ignore customers in favour of these little time thieves, like money and business no longer matter. When the power goes out in little traditional towns like this, people acknowledge each other. They talk to each other. Shopkeepers shout and hawk their wares like their livelihood depends on being heard, and it really does, because if their neighbour has a better, louder sales pitch, they will lose the sale. You know, like business used to be 100 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 30 years ago or before the Internet could go with you. Computers have brought the world together and driven individuals apart. Little towns and their sporadic power prove that we don't need it, and never really have. It's wonderful to watch as the past, before internet, unfolds in front of your eyes. The sights, sounds and smells of the markets and shops and businesses and life come alive when the power is dead. When WWIII happens, these people don't have to care at all. This place isn't set up for tourism, it's never needed it before. It doesn't need our money or products or future vision. When I leave here with my money and ideas about customer service, it won't matter at all. Some may say that because tourists bring money to impoverished communities, our tourist money helps these people out of poverty or at least to survive. That's a discussion for another time. It's a shame it won't stay like this much longer. I would say come see it before the future arrives, but you would just bring the future with you, and the past dies a little with each tourist. The roads will be better, the power more reliable, the internet faster. The past becomes a relic, it becomes the past. Right now, I'm writing this pen to paper because the power has gone out, and I will transpose it to the tablet when power and internet return, and I can do this because I remember how pens and paper work in harmony. That's going away too. You really can't hold on to the past forever I suppose. The more people want to see places that don't need the future, the faster the future arrives, driven by the need to service more people. Stay home. Turn on the TV. Go to London or New York. Forget the rest of the world with it's old-fashioned notions of daily life. Let it live a little longer.

Yangon pt. 2

Returning to Yangon after the amazing Bagan we hope we have left the best sight for last, the Shwedagon Pagoda. This is the one you'll see first if you search for "myanmar sights to see". If you can't be bothered, it's an enormous gold conical temple with little temples and Buddhas of all manner surrounding it, not to mention small structures dedicated to the days of the week. The purpose is to find the Icon representing the day you were born, and to wash water over it while saying Buddhist things. Don't ask me what, I don't know. Don't ask me why, I don't know. The various temples surrounding the pagoda each contain one or more Buddhas, in various States of repose and made of different materials, one jade, one crystal, many gold. There is a gigantic black bell in one temple for special ceremonies, called King Thayarwady's bell. At eight and a half feet tall and forty two tons, it doesn't need to be struck very hard to make a very big sound. There is a temple containing Buddha's footprint and one with a replica tooth and a site at which the Buddha's hairs, which were enshrined in the giant pagoda, were washed before they were encased in several thousand tonnes of pagoda. I feel I am not doing this remarkable holy site justice. I'm really not sure how I could. The scale of it is quite unbelievable, and the fact the government, in it's infinite wisdom, moved the capital from Yangon to Naypyidaw and replicated the pagoda in it's entirety, is testimony to the wonder of the Shwedagon pagoda and chiefly to the government's barmyness. The last remaining sight for us is an immense reclining Buddha with characters all over it's foot, each representing a different important word. As it happens, there is another immense Buddha statue at the opposite end of the city, right by the airport. The names of the temples in which these statues are housed differs by one letter, and if one's mouth is full of betel nut, the names sound very similar if one is telling the cab driver which one to take us to. I don't think I need to finish this story. This left us with just enough time to get to the airport. Sigh. Thailand ho!

Inle Lake, Myanmar

We decide to get a taxi from Kalaw to Inle as the train is going to be minimum 2 1/2 hours late, and quite likely later. We are also warned by the stationmaster that as it is a narrow gauge train, the ride has become dangerous because the rain has made the track very slick. We are closely listening to our sense of caution. We are aware that the number of road fatalities is fantastically high. We are aware that the road is very curvy. We are aware that drivers in Myanmar have a very macho attitude toward overtaking and being overtaken. We are aware that the stationmaster and the taxi driver likely know each other and the driver will kickback to the stationmaster if he sends business his way because all the money for the train goes to the government and the money for the taxi goes to the pocket. The taxi is an extortionate amount of money, but we can control the speed of the car and make the rules about when and where to overtake. This will not be the last time this decision must be made. I should mention that I am posting these out of order because I had to write down by hand all of these posts due to power outages and crap Internet, so I wrote as I remembered to write, not as it happened. The ride in the taxi had us feeling quite certain we had made the right decision, it is through the mountains where if there is a straight line in the road, you've just driven off the road, likely down a cliff. Just gorgeous views of the mountains and valleys if you can bite back the fear of impending doom. We arrive in Inle perilously close to safe and sound. The hotel is a construction site. They are laying new sewage lines which means first they must dig the old ones from underneath the driveway. Sigh. We walk a very short way before we discover a French restaurant serving pancakes and all manner of western food and a smattering of Burmese food at preposterous prices. We pay it. The town is loaded with tourist luring shops from restaurants to souvenirs to tours and cooking classes. The real lure of the place is a boat down river and onto Inle Lake. In high season there is a market which is built on stilts on the lake itself, but as it's low season the water is too low so the market is set up inland. The market itself is simply table after table of the same things, none of which appeal. Dominic and I go by ourselves because Siobhan's fears now extend to boats. Life jackets on and off we go for one of the most lovely, leisurely and picturesque trips of our whole adventure. We ask the boatsman to avoid as many shops as he can which cuts the trip in about half and the remaining sights are at the back of shops or at least one has to run a gauntlet of salespeople before you get to the points of interest. Sales avoided, we make it to the back of a very long shop, where we visit the longneck tribeswomen, and they actually have long necks due to the increasing number of brass rings they wear. One story is that they initially started wearing the rings to prevent tigers from biting their necks, bur I think it was an aesthetic thing which has become a cultural thing. Whatever the reason, it is quite a startling sight at first, but they make such a fuss over Dominic, a running theme here in southeast Asia, that they lose the mystique quite quickly and join the Dominic fan club, talking to him and holding him and kissing him, and I think he is beginning to enjoy it to the point where he is asking to go over to the ladies so he can be fawned over. Next stop is the temple in the lake. A big and beautiful gold thing, inside there are what appears to be five gold blobs at the centre of the temple. As it happens, the blobs are Buddha icons that have so much gold leaf on them that they now look like five sets of two gold rocks balanced on each other or 5 big gold gourds. The surprise is the big gold boats moored nearby the temple. Gold ceremonial barques just at the ready for special occasions Back away from the temple are the fishing villages, built on stilts on the lake itself, called floating villages. The trip through the villages is extremely calm and serene. The opportunity to watch life go by in the village cannot be missed. One gets a sense that things have remained the same here for a very long time and were it not for the motors on the back of the family boats and the occasional motorcycle parked in the middle of the house (how exactly did they manage to get it there?), one could be forgiven for thinking one had found a window back through time. Those who are doing the fishing are out on the lake in either traditional long skinny boats piled high with nets or recently collected seaweed or vegetables grown on the lake, the one-man jobs being paddled not with the hands but the feet. The leg is wrapped around the oar while standing, leaving the hands free to handle the nets. Quite ingenious actually. It's a very strange sight, but it makes a lot of sense. Now it's time to head back, so across the lake and down the river we go and sadly one of the most peaceful few hours I have ever spent are over. A quick walk back into town takes me into the market which is half for locals and half for tourists. The dividing line seems to be the dogfights which break out sporadically. I am constantly surprised by the number of dogs just roaming the streets. They don't bark or bite, but you just feel that the numbers say one will soon snack on your leg. Another thing I notice, and it's very hard not to, is the truly revolting habit of chewing betel nut. Most men in Burma chew betel nut rather than smoke as it is a mild stimulant. The problem is that it stains the mouth and teeth red so it makes it look like everyone has been punched in the mouth, and then, like chewing tobacco, they have to spit the juice. A lot. It is such a prevalent habit that there are bins on streetcorners and in offices and shops and government buildings dedicated to betel nut spit. Most people don't use these bins however, and just spit in street and if you 're really lucky, on your leg and shoes. Quite the most revolting thing I have seen in a long time, and it just never stops. All day long they chew it, they talk with a mouth so full of it you have no idea what they just said, and when they realise you have no idea because their mouths are so very full, they smile a great bloody smile at you, apologise, and spit a giant red gob on the floor or street, and carry on like there's nothing horribly revolting about it at all. It is. It really is. I just can 't say it enough. Ew. Anyway, Inle is a very charming little town, and it is a little more set up for tourists because it is Myanmar's most popular tourist site. Next up is Bagan, and we again decide on a taxi because over half the ride is through mountains again, so safety first. They should really consider investing in a road safety programme in this part of the world. Little signs that say things like, "Don't strap your baby to your chest and get on a motorbike if you're going to speed, overtake, text, and eat breakfast all without wearing a helmet". Or something like that.

Myanmar/Burma Yangon to Kalaw

Upon arriving in Myanmar you immediately notice some informational inaccuracies, you CAN get visas on arrival contrary to the information commonly disseminated on the Internet, but they are only available for holders of the passports of certain countries, or business and diplomatic purposes. The other is that even though he country is under the rule of a military junta, or as they like to be referred to, the authority, there is not a feeling of overbearing presence of the military. They are everywhere and the bases are as prevalent as restaurants, but it is such a common sight that they melt into the scenery rather than loom over it. The military presence is felt in other ways, as I will explain later. On the ride from the airport, Siobhan mentions that she gets a much better feeling about Yangon than she did about anywhere else we have been on this trip. This will change. Retrospect will change the feeling again. We get to the hotel which is near the Sule pagoda, and settle in. The room is a little dated and the kettle resembles a nuclear device, but once the workings are understood, it operates as it should and everything you'd want in a room is there. Internet is painfully slow, and this is a fact all over the country. Some places it's so very slow it might as well not exist. The frustration this creates brings me to another thought. 20 years ago, the Internet was the domain of computer geeks and mobile devices did not exist. You still had to use the phone to talk to people, and you had to bring your files with you if you wanted to work when you travelled. Now, on one device, you can talk face to face, take pictures, work, and listen to music all at the same time. These devices have shortened our attention spans and tolerances to the point where if you can't send a message across the world in a matter of seconds, an uncontrollable rage builds in you, and it's directed at the internet and the country you are in. Quite unbelievable is this technology, Star Trek stuff really, and it's taken for granted that the world is connected to you and you to it. There are some parts of the world where the internet speeds are still comparably slow, but the locals are still quite pleased with it because they don't have the speeds that we do, but they do have internet, and that is mostly good enough for them. For some of these countries, the technology didn't exist until very recently and is heavily monitored and controlled by the government. In more than one country, Google and YouTube is banned, and in its place are authorised, severely censored versions. What I am getting to is this; try to understand that what you hold in your hand,likely right now, would be considered witchcraft not so long ago, and is still a novelty to some, and the fact that you have worldwide access to it is a truly remarkable thing. Be patient. Your world will still exist even if you can't get to Facebook right away. I have digressed. Once outside the hotel, which is right next to the former city hall, you notice the whole area is a bit run down. The pavements, or sidewalks as we north Americans call them, are in dreadful disrepair to the point where enormous holes open up in front of you at quite random intervals, making walking down them feel like a live action version of the 80's video game Pitfall. Made myself feel pretty old for a second there. We try to find a restaurant, turning right off the street where our hotel is, and into the unknown wilds of Yangon. The city is not really set up for western tourists, apparently there were only 600 000 tourists last year to Myanmar, less than rode the London Eye last year. The restaurants are many, but the signs in English are very few, and as I can't read the Burmese Unicode language, we are forced to keep walking until we find one that has some acknowledgement of our failings, a sign at least partially in English. We happily scamper in, they could have been serving scabby dog on a stick, but because it said scabby dog on the menu that I could read, I would have ordered it. Fortunately there was a truly lovely noodle dish and the tom yam soup was second to none. The bathroom which was located at the back of the kitchen looked like some rectal apocalypse had happened, so I felt it very, very important, immediately after concluding my business, to burn my hands off my arms. I found the alcohol wipes shortly before it came to that. One glaring cultural difference is obviously the importance of hygiene. They think that so long as they have cleaned themselves, it doesn't really matter about the condition of the surrounding area ie. cleaning the toilets or floors or walls or whatever else has gotten impressively soiled over the years of continual bodily functions. We, in the west, feel that the spread of disease doesn't end with a quick wash of one's backside. The important thing to take away from this is that the food was delicious, and we eventually made our way back to the hotel. As we walked down the perilous sidewalk we noticed the large number of restaurants with signs in English, English menus and western food, and realised that had we turned the other direction out of the hotel, we would have been immediately greeted by all manner of familiar food and even made to look like familiar restaurants. Sigh. We needed some things for the little boy, so I ask for directions to a store that sells milk. I am sent to a little shop that sells mouthwash from 1975. Not exactly what I need, so I ask the shopkeep where I should go. I am directed to Ruby Mart, a large department store, which I had no idea was there from looking from the outside. Most of the buildings are in dire need of repair and basic upkeep, unless it is a religious building, so to hide a 4 floor departments store here is quite a feat. Inside, the shop feels like the retail equivalent of Kathmandu. Loud, wholly inappropriate music is playing from the entertainment section, the aisles are really just too small for anyone western to get through (read fat), and the aisles, so helpfully marked with the contents, don't really contain those things, but if you look for it, it is there. Breakfast cereals are next to makeup are next to dog toys, but if you look, it is there. Feeling like I have achieved the impossible, I have foraged in this unforgiving land and found what I need to help my family survive. The truth is that the locals are really very friendly, very helpful, and very eager to practice their English by speaking with you. Irrelevant. I have conquered. Returning with the booty, we prepare for the plane to Heho airport the next day. The flight is on a little twin engine prop plane, which has Siobhan chanting her Hare Krishna mantra almost immediately. The takeoff was smooth, the flight was very smooth, and the landing was as smooth as a little plane like that can manage. It seemed a little odd to us that on a plane that clearly held dozens of passengers, only six were on it, including us. We know that we are not encouraged to take airplanes as the money goes to the regime, but the bus was out of the question due to serious safety issues. On the road from Heho airport to Kalaw, our taxi driver speeds and overtakes "slow moving" trucks, cars and motorcycles, making Siobhan very nervous, and making me want to assuage her fears by telling her that it's safe enough, we're not going to fast, the driver knows what he is doing. A bus overtakes us, beginning a diatribe about bus legalities, and what they can and cannot do in England. She gets cross, feeling that I am minimising her fears, not supporting them, and I suppose I am just trying to make her feel better. I'm failing. When she gets upset about safety, she sees danger everywhere. An uneasy silence descends on the taxi, as we try to calm down and stop arguing. Then we see it. A bus has crashed through the concrete bullards at a hairpin turn and ended up over the cliff and down the mountainside. There are people crying, the military are there, but no emergency vehicles yet. The military presence is likely accidental, as there are military personnel everywhere, so he was probably just passing by. There are bystanders and rubberneckers with cameras. We drive slowly past, the taxi driver trying to get an eyeful as well. This has done nothing to make Siobhan feel safer, and naturally reinforces safety fears about drivers and buses and speeding and fiery death. When we get to the hotel in Kalaw, which is really lovely, nestled in the mountains and amongst a blanket of green, with cool, clean air, and very friendly staff, the Nature land 2 if anyone cares, Siobhan trys to find information about the crash, but only finds info about a peculiar sight we noticed. On large trucks and buses, a person hangs off the left hand side, sometimes at the front and sometimes the side exit on buses. Why would they do that, you ask? I shall tell you. When cars were introduced to Burma, they were right hand drive and folks drove on the left side of the road, due to the British influence and at the time, rule. When the junta took over, they decided to do away with almost all things British, and literally overnight announced the they were now to drive on the right hand side of the road, making it fantastically dangerous to drive and even more dangerous to overtake, which they do at every opportunity. So dangerous that they can't see if cars are in the oncoming lane and and can't overtake safely, so drivers require someone hanging out of the vehicle to let the driver know if they feel it is safe enough to pass. No real knowledge of the reaction time of the driver, and the driver is completely reliant on this lookout man, who may make bad decisions about the amount of time required to pass a vehicle given the speed they are travelling at, the distance between the vehicles, and the estimated speed of the oncoming vehicle, all of which is hard enough hen you are driving and overtaking by yourself in your sensible country. We had initially planned to take an overnight bus from our next stop in Inle Lake to Bagan. 10 hours in the dark, with nothing but the constant fear of crashing and burning to lull us to sleep. Siobhan tries to find out if it is a relatively safe ride, not too many twists and turns, maybe not too many accidents on that stretch of road. It is the ride from hell, apparently. A plane is just too expensive. We decide to get a taxi for the 5 1\2 to 6 hour ride. I'll tell you how we fared next report.

Bagan, Myanmar

So much has already been written about Bagan, the sheer number of stupas and pagodas, the age and importance of the site and of course the view from "sunset temple", one of the two pagodas which most people seem to climb at sunset to get the all-important photo off the site, the skies turning shades of pink and orange and red and purple, creating a truly majestic backdrop for the overwhelming number of stupas which seem to sprout from the ground all over the site. It really is a remarkable sight, there is no way that vision will ever leave my memory. Some of the stupas and pagodas are quite small, humble structures, some huge, majestic things that you can circumnavigate, each side containing its own paintings and differently coloured and dressed Buddha icon. Some of the oldest are crumbling and falling down, but there are efforts to preserve and rebuild them. The important thing about seeing Bagan is to make it the last stop on your tour of Burma because by the time you get there, you will be encountering the phenomenon known as temple burnout. There are just so many of them, and they really are everywhere in such seemingly random places like in the middle of a field añd in the middle of a street. An alien would be forgiven for thinking that they are naturally occuring, just shooting out of the ground on hilltops and in fields and cities. You will have seen all the temples you can manage and there is another one just waiting on the next corner. These are beautiful things, and the first 100 or so will occupy as much space on your camera as the women carrying small houses on their heads and monks and the landscape if mot more. If you see atBagan at the beginning of your trip, you will likely mot care if you see another temple or pagoda ever again, and that would be a real shame because part of the joy of travelling in Burma is the discovery of all the wonderful structures of worship and devotion. Each one has similar contents but the hand positions of the Buddhas mean something different, thus giving different meaning to each temple. Many of the older ones have painting onthe walls that can be faintly made out, and itfeels like you have made a step onto the past, watching monks chanting and praying in front of the figures of Buddha and seeing devotees rubbing gold leaf on the idols. I do wonder what the actual Buddha, the former Hindu prince Siddhartha, the man who gave up the love of worldly things or Maya, and sat beneath the Bodhi tree for six years meditating would have made of all the religious trappings, gold, gems and huge temples, the poor spending ill-afforded money on offerings and gold leaf. It seems the exact opposite of what he was all about really, but I don't understand the religion, so I am really not qualified to speak on it. We took a horse and carriage around old Bagan in the morning, before it got too hot. It's a wonderful opportunity to go slowly around the town, seeing the shops and homes as well as the temples. There 's even a Buddhist retirement commmunity. I once again recommend going on the computer and finding pictures of Bagan and hopefully the pictures will speak louder and more eloquently than I can.