Last evening at Bagan

For our last evening in Bagan we went off to see some more temples and structures at sunset time (oh, and an elephant.  We also stopped by in an exhibition of some tree trunk/root structures that were carved into magnificent sculptures - this was exceedingly clever; we saw several other instances of this on the trip. This day had been billed as a full day of leisure but it wasn't really very leisurely since we went to see a lot of places - and that was a good thing.

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Video of some of the structures seen from on top of one.

A trip to Pyin Oo Lwin (Maymyo)

We flew to Mandalay from Bagan and hopped on the coach to travel a couple of hours to Pyin Oo Lwin (formerly called Maymyo) which once was a British Hill station.  The roads were pretty steep and at one of the rest stop/gas stations (a big one with pumps, not just bottles) many people were using hoses to run cold water to cool their brakes. Part of the trip was on horse drawn "stage coaches" just as the way the British travelled early in the last century (British rule ended in 1948).  There were lots of gardens here. We visited the Candacraig Hotel, an English country home style building that was perhaps the first hotel in Burma - we had tea there. We toured the National Kandawgyi Gardens which included a boardwalk trip through the woods, lots of birds in the wild as well as some birds in a large caged sanctuary. On top of the netting was a monkey hoping it could find a way in. There was a petrified wood museum there also.

I like the spider shaped blobs on this salad we had at dinner.

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