Spring 2015 - Day 49 and 50: Myanmar
The potential bad thing about having to meet at 6:30 for a trip is that you miss breakfast. The awesome thing is that they serve us early breakfast on these occasions. The crew is awesome, seriously they are the best. Every time I have seen him since I had my Disney interview Joel has asked me if there is good news. It blows my mind he would even remember that. The crew is awesome.
Anyway, when I got into the classroom where we were meeting Cindy, our trip liaison, was handing out toothbrushes. We would be donating a whole bunch of toothbrushes to the school we are visiting. The toothbrushes were all in cardboard boxes but since the country doesn't have a very good recycling system we packed the toothbrushes into our own bags and left the boxes on the ship.
Besides Mom Shelley one of my sisters, Brianne, is also on the trip with me!
We got off the ship right at 7 and loaded onto a bus. We spent the entire morning driving. I read Harry Potter on my kindle and tried to sleep as much as possible.
Our bus struggled. Half way through the drive a weird clunking noise started coming from the wheel well right beneath my feet. We pulled over for a moment and the two locals that were accompanying us got out and looked. I think it was luggage clunking around in the bottom compartment but it definitely felt like something with the wheel. But they didn't do much and when we got going again the clunking stopped.
Then, a while later, a high pitched alarm started to go off. It was loud and constant. We pulled over again and they got out again. We were over heating.
They got some water bottles from the back to help cool the engine down but the noise persisted unless the driver had the emergency break on. So he drove for a while with the brake on and then he figured out that it would go off if he shifted down, so we drove in a very low gear for the rest of the morning.
Around noon we stopped for lunch at these really pretty place. I don't know exactly what it was except we guessed they held a lot of weddings there. It was like a recreation park. They had some water sport stuff and a playground and beautiful gardens. We ate at tables set up under a pretty tent. It was lovely. I didn't eat very much. I really didn't want to get sick so I was extra cautious with the things I put in my mouth. I ate rice and some green beans and a bunch of fruit.
As we walked back to the bus we stopped to watch a bunch of fish eat some greens floating within an artificial square on the lake. Random, but cool.
Right after lunch we stopped at local market for about 20 minutes. Mom and I walked down to the market together, which was again covered and filled with little stalls. The first part of the market that we walked into was all fruit. There were bananas as far as the eye could see. It was beautiful.
Mom convinced me to buy a longyi, which is the kind of skirt that they wear. It is basically just a large piece of fabric that they wrap around themselves. Even men wear them. It is the thing to buy but I hadn't really wanted to buy one because I didn't really have a use for it. But they were only 3 or so dollars do I bought a purple one.
When we got back to the bus they were moving us to another bus. Apparently ours was seriously having issues and so needed to be fixed. The new bus was smaller and more rickety. We definitely were earning our title of struggle bus.
We drove for another two hours and then stopped at a place where they make parasols. They hand make these beautiful umbrellas by hand out of bamboo and cloth. They hand paint them and hand wave the strings on them. They had teeny tiny ones and huge ones that you could use on your back porch. We were able to watch them work, the painting was amazing. He made it look so easy and simple but it turned out so intricate.
They were selling the umbrellas of course, but I didn't buy one. I knew I would have no use for it. I wish I could have bought a huge one, that would have made a great souvenir for my parents. They could use it on their porch, it would totally match their decor. Ok, maybe not.
We spent the rest of the afternoon driving again. The bus driver of our new bus was not comfortable driving in the area we were, which was windy road through the mountains, so he honked the horn every 5 seconds. When we were coming up on someone on a bike, honk. When we were going around a corner, honk. I thought was going to go crazy. It was piercing my brain and I seriously thought I was going nuts. I put music on so that my brain would have something else to concentrate on, and that helped, but I was seriously ready to get off that bus long before we arrived at the resort.
When we did get there around 6pm it was sweet relief. Walking into the resort was like walking into a dream. We were handed pineapple juice and I walked straight through the lobby and out on to the beach to watch the bright orange sun sink below the horizon. It was incredible.
The lobby of the resort is all open, leading right out to a pool that is two squares connected by their corners. On the opposite side of the pool from the lobby were stairs that lead right down to the beach. The beach was huge and had perfectly white sand and perfectly blue water. There were a lot of people on the beach, some were riding horse or mopeds, others were just walking and playing in the water.
To the right and left of the pool are the rooms. The rooms were grouped together in three. One building to every three rooms. The rooms were pretty average. There were two full sized, four-poster beds, with mosquito nets hanging from them.
There was a T.V and a safe and a small vanity with a mirror. The bathroom was also fairly average, although the shower did not have a curtain. My roommate was Kassidy, who I hadn't met before this point. She was really nice and we talked a few times before we went to bed.
We were given some time to check into our rooms and then we gathered around tables set up around the pool for dinner. Mom and I both got red wine. It was the worst wine I have ever tasted. It even smelled awful. We couldn't even drink it. We sent it back and tried the white wine instead. It was not much better. I don't think Myanmar is known for their wine. The food was similar to the food we had eaten for lunch. I was still being overly cautious so I ate mostly rice and fruit again.
They had live music for us during dinner, which was wonderful and really set the mood. Someone down the beach also set off a few fireworks! Once dinner ended we received our instructions for tomorrow. They divided our group into three smaller groups for the elephant ride. One group would go tomorrow morning at 7, another would go in the afternoon and the third group would go on the morning of our last day. I was put in the afternoon group. That meant that I had all of tomorrow morning free.
When I went back to my room I found that they had let down the mosquito netting for us and had tucked it in. I was glad, I would not have been able to figure it out on my own. It was weird sleeping in a bed surrounded by mosquito nets. I felt like royalty and also felt a little enclosed, especially because you couldn't see through them very well.
Sitting out by the pool I had started to be eaten by mosquitos even though I was wearing a lot of bug spray. It must have made me paranoid because I felt itchy in my sleep and ended up dreaming I was being attacked by ants. Yeah, that wasn't fun.
Brianne and I agreed to meet around 9:30 so that we could sleep in. Brianne has severe dietary restrictions and so doesn't eat a lot of the provided food so I went to breakfast by myself and had toast and fruit. The toast was really interesting because it was a little sweet. It was really delicious and reminded me of my favorite Hawaiian bread from a restaurant at Disney.
Once Brianne joined me we went down to the beach. There were lounge chairs paired under low umbrellas all along the beach. We settled into two and then two of the resort employees came over with towels and tucked the towels into the chairs so that wouldn't have to lay on the plastic of the thin mattress. It was so nice.
Brianne and I spent the whole morning talking about anything we could think of: the voyage, our different trips, life at home, basically anything you could think of.
The beach was so peaceful. It was warm and quiet, I would not have wanted to spend my morning any other way.
Lunch was provided for us and we needed to meet the group at noon to take the bus. It was optional to go to lunch so Brianne decided to stay behind because she wouldn't have eaten anyway. She would just join us for elephants when we got back from lunch.
When everyone was gathering in the lobby Cindy took attendance to make sure everyone for elephants was there. That confused me so I asked her about it and she said we would probably be going to the elephants right from lunch. No, I told her, we can't do that because Brianne isn't here. She responded that it was a possibility that we wouldn't be coming back to the resort so Brianne should probably accompany us.
I ran and found Brianne and told her to hurry and get ready. Poor Brianne, she already didn't feel well and now was being forced to rush and be stressed instead of have a nice leisurely lunch.
But she didn't mind and she was glad that I had come and got here, she really didn't want to miss elephants.
Lunch was nothing new, except that Gloria actually specifically told us to not eat a few of the dishes because she could tell they were not cooked well. I again just ate rice and fruit.
We did, in fact, go straight to the elephants from lunch. And we nearly left two people behind because of it. I was annoyed that they hadn't warned us of that logistic originally.
But, no matter, we were on our way to ride elephants!!
We had to drive 30 minutes back up the winding mountain road to the elephant camp. We were dropped off right outside of it and walked the remaining half mile into the camp, which included passing a very rickety rope bridge.
The camp itself was just a small building, a wooden bar the elephants stood behind when you fed them, and a tall stand you used to get on top of them. The camp had 5 elephants and they were kept there just so that people can ride them. The camp is owned by the government and there are a bunch of them all over the country that do different things. Some are for labor and some are for tourists, like this one. When they are not being ridden they are allowed to rome free in the forest around the camp. They all wear bells around their necks so they can be found but the elephants are smart enough to stick things in the bells so they will stop ringing.
Each of the elephants had a "driver" that sat on the top of it. Right on top of its head. They guided the elephants over to the wooden bar. These were asian elephants so they were smaller. Theirs eyes were level with mine. They stood in a line and we are able to touch them and feed them. We could buy a bucket of sugar cane for 1 USD. The elephants loved it. They reached their trunks out searching for the sugar cane. They couldn't get enough.
When we were done feeding them their drivers put their baskets on them. They were wooden and were padded by a blanket. The baskets hung off the side of the elephants. Two people could ride at once, one person per basket. So you weren't sitting right on top of the animal and instead were hanging off the side of them. Brianne and I didn't really want to sit in the baskets, we wanted to straddle the top of the elephants. That seemed more comfortable and more like we were riding them.
Since their were only 5 elephants and there were 21 of us we had to break into smaller groups. Brianne and I were in the second group to go which means we had about 25 minutes to wait. It went by quickly though and soon we found ourselves getting on the back of an elephant.
It was awesome. And painful. See, the think we didn't think of when we decided to straddle the top is that we were basically straddling its spine. And it's spine was large, and bumpy. The guy had me sit so that my legs were outside of the wooden harness thing, resting right behind the elephants ears. I found a notch in his spine and just kind of accepted that I would end up with a huge bruise on my butt by the end of it.
Brianne straddled right behind me and off we went. We wanted to not be the first elephant so that there would be one in front of us that we could take pictures of, so we boarded third, but then we ended up first any way.
But whatever, we were riding an elephant!!! I don't know what to compare it to, it wasn't much like riding a horse. We swayed back and forth gently, it wasn't bumpy or jolty at all. It was really wonderful.
Someone asked me which was better, riding an elephant or riding a camel. I don't think a could choose, they were both such unique experiences and are just not comparable.
Our elephant ride was pretty long, and it took us through this beautiful jungle. At one point we went down a small hill so that we were walking in the river. The trek down the hill was pretty exciting because I slid right up against the elephants head. But I didn't feel like I was going to fall off.
I asked our driver what our elephants name was. It was Podawe and he was 33 years old.
Half way through the ride we stopped and our driver took pictures of us on the elephant.
Our trek back up the river bank was even more interesting than the hill down because sliding backwards felt much less secure than sliding forward.
Getting off the elephant was much more challenging than getting off, mostly because I was sad that it was over. But we got to feed them more while we waiting for Cindy to ride.
They are just such beautiful creatures. It was wonderful to be able to interact with them and be with them even for the short time that we were.
Our bus encountered more struggles on the way home from the elephants. We had gotten our other bus back that morning so our bus driver no longer honked every few seconds. We were going around one of the tight corners when another large truck came from the other direction. We passed each other slowly, trying to fit around the corner without hitting. We failed and took off the other trucks mirror. We stopped completely and the driver and and our other guides all got out. There was much discussion and, at some point, I think there was a cop involved. I don't know how it was resolved but after a while everyone got back on and we continued down the road.
We asked Gloria if accidents were common on this road and she said no! This was the first time she had encountered so many problems on this trip. So we really were the struggle bus.
We had free time for dinner and none of us really felt like venturing out and experimenting with the local food. The night before we had found out that you could order pizza from the resort so that is what we did. Mom, another SASer, Nicole, and I split two cheese pizzas and a plate of french fries. It was not the best pizza I have ever eaten but it definitely was better than just eating fruit and rice for another meal. We also ordered pineapple juice and it came in big fancy glasses with slices of pineapple on the top.
We sat and chatted at our table by the pool for a long while and then turned into bed fairly early. I was laying in bed about to fall asleep when there suddenly came a bunch of loud noises from outside. My first thought was that someone was knocking on our door, but no, it was farther away than that. My second thought was that someone was clapping out shoes right outside, but it seemed louder than that.
It was fireworks, someone was shooting off a whole bunch of fireworks and once. They scared the crap out of me. But I didn't go out and look at them, I just got back in bed.
