Hello, again, Blogonauts! Well, after Mt. Popa, we were back in the air again, winging our way to the east. This time it was to my last destination in Myanmar: Inle Lake, a high-altitude basin that serves as home for a number of local tribes. (I'm not being condescending; "tribes" is what they are called. Rural Myanmar is highly ethnically sensitive, and each group maintains its own manner of dress and customs, and as one of Zoë's teachers said it, "They w...

Hello, again, Blogonauts! Here's a trick I hadn't considered before: Taxis make great luggage lockers while awaiting your next flight! Plus the driver will take you anywhere locally you might want to visit. Our plane would not depart until 4 PM, and Zoë had a destination in mind that would precisely fit the time gap between breakfast and "bye-bye Bagan." She wanted to show me Myanmar's version of Shangri-la. Plus monkeys. Mt. Popa, the vision of utopia, s...

Hello, again, Blogonauts. Forgive this polite fiction that I encourage you to live with ... that I am writing this blog on a daily basis and you are following closely in my footsteps. Myanmar's sticky web of web insufficiency left both you and me trapped and starving for bandwidth. There was so much to tell you about, but the internet was stoppered, and semaphore doesn't work around the arc of the globe. I intend to be caught up by the time I reach home, but ...

Hello, again, Blogonauts! This blog is a few days behind schedule, so I'll cut the verbiage a bit short and allow the pictures to add a thousand words each to the narrative. On Friday, January 31, Co-Co our Mandalay taxidermist ... no, Autocorrect, that would imply we're stuffed instead of merely drowsy ... our Mandalay taxi driver gathered us from the hotel before dawn to deliver us speedily to Mandalay's docks on the Irriwaddy River. The Irriwaddy is the seas...

Mandalay lies about an hour's flight north of Yangon. The city essentially surrounds a 1.5 km square (no, literally, square) military installation (formerly the palace grounds) that is divided from the rest of the city by a similarly square moat. It is a dusty but vibrant town on its own but one of Mandalay 's chief attractions for tourists and pilgrims is Mandalay Hill and its environs. Zoë and I took a pick-up-styled bus to a stop just below the top. There...