A breath of fresh air today! We travelled two hours up into the mountains to an old British hill station, previously called Maymyo and now called Pyin Oo Lwin. In colonial times, the British resided here for 3-4 months in the hot summer months. It is the cool season now, but 32-34 C is not cool for us and we were glad to escape both the heat and pollution of Mandalay for this delightful place which is 3400 ft higher and several degrees cooler. There are many old colonial houses and other buildings from the early 1900s still standing. Some are very run down and dripping with mildew, but as this area is now becoming popular with both government officials and the Chinese, many have been refurbished and elaborate new homes built. The above photo is of one of the old homes that has been upgraded. We visited an amazing old colonial hotel that was built in 1904 and is still open for business.

We spent a couple of hours wandering through the impressive 176 hectare Kandawgyi Garden which was founded in 1915 by an English botanist. It was clean as a whistle (even the lawns were swept!) and manicured to within an inch of its life - most unusual here! As well as gorgeous flower beds and botanical specimens, the gardens contained large petrified wood specimens, takins (the rare national animal of Bhutan), a bird enclosure with indigenous birds and an orchid park. We hated to leave!

On the way up the mountain we stopped at a large roadside flower market where "wholesalers" bring in motorbikes heaped well over the drivers' heads with mounds of colourful chrysanthemums. The flowers are sold there and then taken to Mandalay.

Along the route we also saw small bottles and jerry cans filled with two different colours of liquid for sale. We discovered that as drivers here are limited to two gallons of gasoline each day, these bottles are black market gas and the colours designate the quality of the fuel. The fact that most people can only afford the lowest quality explains why the vehicles belch so much black smoke.

So...Mandalay... a dusty, polluted, noisy rundown city with chaotic traffic made up of thousands of bicycles and scooters often carrying unbelieveably large loads, overloaded buses with passengers peering down from the roofs, primitive and fume-spewing trucks, as well as vintage private vehicles. There appears to be no traffic rules but people are forgiving and it all works in a gentle, inefficient, give and take sort of way. The street scenes such as monks and nuns wandering into shops carrying their food bowls, communal bathing spots on street corners, roadside telephone desks, and open air restaurants and street vendors are fascinating. But it is the sites outside of the city that are the draw and why tourists come to Mandalay.