Inle Lake is a magical place! There are many villages around the lake where people live in houses on stilts and come and go by boat - small, dugout canoes as well as larger boats of over 30 feet, with ancient, hand-cranked to start engines that carry huge loads of both people and cargo. It's amazing what can be done on the water both from homes that are quite grand and those that are very humble. People raise chickens and have pigs on floating platforms around th...

Finally - some exercise - and what great exercise it was! We hiked into the hills around Kalaw to visit three Palaung tribal villages. It was gorgeous hiking through hills which used to grow opium but now grow mostly tea along with oranges and sesame seeds. The rutted and often muddy paths are only passable by motorbikes or ox carts, so the houses are very humble and the Palaung still live much in the way they have for centuries. We had tea in a traditional long ...

Today we travelled about three hundred kilometers south from Mandalay to another hill station called Kalaw. The first part of the journey was through a low-lying agricultural region where we continued our fascination with the ox carts which are used everywhere here for pulling loads and plowing fields. Mechanized tractors or other farm vehicles are virtually nonexistent. Almost as equally charming are the local "taxis" - the horsecarts - which are used in all the...

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 ...

This morning we headed to the riverside where we were transported up the Ayeyarwady river for about 45 minutes to a small village called Mingun. It is the site of the world's largest unfinished pagoda - or as it has been called, the world's largest pile of bricks! It was only 1/3 finished when the king died in 1819 and then was then severely damaged in the 1838 earthquake, leaving a grand, if somewhat dangerous, flat topped viewpoint 150 feet high with large crac...