From Yangon to Nyaungshwe and Inle Lake

We arrived in Yangon in the afternoon and did not get up to much, so that part of this story is pretty bland, but the next morning we made our way to the airport and took a flight to Heho airport near the town of Nyaungshwe and Inle Lake. The flight itself was pretty good and the view from the plane was beautiful as we flew fairly low (ish) over the hills of Myanmar. After we touched down at Heho we had a bit of a problem as there were two drivers waiting there for us. Seems that Aya contacted our hotel about getting a driver and gave them our details, but they hotel never confirmed a driver and had in fact told her to just get a cab. So Aya booked another private driver instead. So there we were with two people standing there looking at us trying to figure out what was going on. In the end, we took the private driver and spent about 45 minutes getting from the airport to our hotel.

The road between the airport and the town of Nyaungshwe was fairly underdeveloped and at many places along the way it was clear they were trying to expand and improve the road with diggers and human laborers carrying cans of tar or baskets of gravel. It looked like extremely hard work, I thought to myself as I whisked by in my air conditioned car. Often we forget how lucky we are to have things we think are normal, like a flushing toilet or 24 hour access to electricity, but this was not one of those lapsing moments.
Our hotel, called Manle, was a pretty nice place. Very simple in it's layout, but nice. We spent a few nights here and the staff were very polite and always attentive. Of course, staff will be nice to customers, but there was something extra here and we were pretty impressed with the manners of people generally on our trip. I guess that is a saying about Myanmar, not much to see, but tourists come back for the people. I'm not totally sure I agree with the not much to see part, but I can fully agree about the people. Everyone we met was very nice and treated us fairly.
The two full days that we had at the lake we used to rent a boat and to see as much of the lake as we could and then the other day we just bummed about on the hotel bicycles, had some wine at a local winery in the hills, looking at some old temples, and eventually going to a puppet show at night. I have to say one of my favorite moments was the puppet show, but a close second was taking the bikes on a back road and just coming across some old stupas that no one else was looking at, or seeming caring to upkeep. Right after, we hit a kink in the road and weren't sure where to go, but a friendly monk stuck her head out the window of a building and waved us in the right direction. A moment later we passed a place called Hair Cats (a small place in the middle of nowhere, mind you) and a man called out, "Want a hair cat?"Aya will never forget it, I fear.

The lake is the main draw to the area, of course. We rented a boat for what would be about 25 dollars for the day. As with most things like this, it was partly understood that the driver would be taking us to shops and getting a commission if we bought anything. Before taking off we had lunch and then walked with the driver down to the canal to board the boat. It was a long wooden boat, which we were to find out later was made with local teak wood and lacquered with local tars. The engine was a long diesel engine that made quite a noisy put-put sound and it quickly got us through the canal and out into the open lake. It was a very nice day with some clouds, but mostly sunny and fairly warm. Cranes and other birds were doing their fishing along the shores and men were doing their fishing in the shallow lake.
We wouldn't really need long sleeves until later in the day as the sun was out and it was nearly noon. The smell of the fresh water, some decay of plants, and the expanse of the lake made me a little home sick as it reminded me of lake Michigan. Along the water's edge were many houses built on stilts as well as the occasional passing of another put putting boat. One of the things the lake is well known for is the fishermen who balance on the end of the wooden boats, keeping hold of the tilling oar with one leg and dipping their large wooden baskets into the water to fish. There were plenty enough of them, so much I wondered how the lake sustained itself.

We took about 45 minutes to make it all the way to the southern end of the lake where we then slowly made our way between smaller villages out on the water and from shop to shop seeing crafted silver, silks, wood, and other wares. Probably the most interesting place was a shop that had many looms for making fabric. The shop had various combinations of silk and lotus root textile, something I had never thought of before or seen, but it seemed to be quite rare and expensive. If nothing else it took the ladies working there an awfully long time to get all the root from the lotus in quantities large enough to weave them into textile. Of course, we had a walk about their shop too, but settled to have a tea and wait for our driver to get back rather than making a big purchase. I think overall our driver was disappointed as we only got one teak box with rolled cigarettes and didn't buy anything else our whole trip, not much commission for him. We also made our way through the "floating garden", what was essentially a floating boggy area, quite large, where tomatoes and other veggies were grown. I was quite impressed really. I bet the veggies were tasty.

At the end of the day we ended up at the "Jumping Cat" monastery where it was legend that the monks had trained cats to jump through hoops, but no longer did as it was seen as cruel. I don't know what is cruel about that, I really wanted to see some jumping cats, but all the cats there were not very jumpy. More the usual loungy type. We chilled for a bit and waited for the sunset, what was touted as a must see. Nearing dusk, we entered back to our boat and made our way the rest of the way across the lake as the sun set over the mountains. With the put putting in our ears, the lake smell in our nose and the golden rays slicing through mountains and clouds, it was a beautiful end to a very nice day. 

A New Year

Welcome to 2018! It is, almost,  my birthday and so a perfect time to reflect on the coming year  as well as the past year and to relax with my new Nicolas Cage pillow, a birthday gift. Things are looking pretty good in both directions, so let me share a bit about why.

Since last January I've done a lot of traveling, first to Japan in the spring to catch some cherry blossoms, and then again to Japan in June as part of a school trip to Hiroshima. I then again went to Japan this past December to see my family for the holidays. Three times in a year I went to Japan! That is a win. I also made it back to the US this summer to see family and spent a month in California for a summer program, so that was a good bit of traveling too. I added two new countries to my travelled to list of 40 countries now, Myanmar and Mongolia. As always, it was very exciting to go somewhere new and see a different way of life.
I don't always travel though, sometimes I have to work too and that has been going well. I've continued teaching at my brick and mortar school here in Beijing and online both semesters with GOA. In addition, I've been doing test administration and examining both for IB and SAT. Extra bucks for extra work! In addition, I spent 4 weeks this summer at an NEH seminar that, besides paying nicely, was super interesting and connected me to a lot of great educators in the US. I did have a stab at finding a new post in the fall as the hiring season heated up, but the market didn't look too good and the only great lead I had fizzled out, so we are here in Beijing for another year, shackled by golden handcuffs.
Health wise, we are doing pretty good. I ran two half marathons last year and Aya has been exercising more as well. We are both getting older and feeling some of that in stiffness and longer healing times, but nothing too major. We even got out to do some hiking in the Beijing mountains and I think there will be more of that in the next year as the air here has been getting better.

For the coming year there are a few things in the works. It looks like we will spend some time this coming summer in Wisconsin and I will also be going to Seattle again for GOA training in July. Last time I had a calf strain so I couldn't run around the beautiful trails on Bainbridge Island, but, fingers crossed, that will not be the case this year. I'm also eyeing some smaller races over the summer, like the Hairpin in Fish Creek. I also think there will be some additional trips as Aya and I are 100% sure that this is our last year in Beijing. The time has come so, good job or not, we are going to make the jump to somewhere else. Most of that will again gear up in November and December, quite far away at the moment. Who knows where we will end up, but some of the trips we are looking at would be to southern parts of India and Sri Lanka (new country!), maybe to Scotland/London/Iceland(new country!), or to some further parts of China like Tibet (new... country?). I will also stay on with GOA and teach with them next year, but I think my commitments with them will change and so I might be teaching a different subject, that will be exciting.

Certainly not least, I am looking forward to seeing some close friends and family. Happy 2018!

Hustai National Park

On our last full day of the journey we headed east, back to Ulan Bator and along the way made a stop at Hustai national park. The park is a huge reserve and there are numerous wild animals there like big cats, mountain goats, elk, and wild horses. The star of the assortment is the wild horse, known as Przewalkskis horses. These horses are genetically distinct from domesticate horses and are truly wild. In the world they are one of only two groups of truly wild horses still in existence, the other being somewhere in Africa.

So we entered the park keeping a keen eye for the horses, but mostly we saw prairie dogs until we spotted another van pulled over on the side of the road. The returning people told us that just over the ridge there was a group of the horses. So we hiked up the hill and as we crested we could see 4-5 horses staring back at us. As we stood there, them looking at us, us looking at them, we could also hear the elk in the hills around us calling to each other. We could barely see the elk, but the horses were close enough. Our guide told us he could see the difference between these and other horses. He was Mongolian, so I believe him, but to me it just looked like another horse.

After standing around for a bit we packed it back into the van and decided to go directly back to Ulan Bator.

Just a side note to all the great things on our trip. I was truly surprised at how polluted Ulan Bator would get. There are many power plants very close to the expanding city and they are burning coal all the time. On top of that, many people around and in the valley where the capital is are still living in gers and burning wood and coal in stoves of their own, quite inefficiently, adding to the smoke. It was bizarre in some ways that in this really beautiful and out of the way place there was so much smog, but that is the way of developing countries today.

Lake Ogii

On day three we woke early and jumped back in the van. Today we were going to the old Buddhist temple of Tuvkhun which had been destroyed by the communists in the early days of the Mongolian republic. There were still a good number of temples that had been restored and there were about 30 active monks on the site, but also lots of empty space where buildings had been knocked down. It was quite a beautiful and quiet place.

After we had walked around for a bit we went nearby to where the old city of Karakorum has existed. A joint Mongolian/Japanese team had built a museum there outlining the dig and artifacts that were found. It was all pretty interesting, but the best bit was that there was a tomb of a nomad found nearby. The tomb was quite large and the paintings on stucco walls were mostly still intact, as were golden ornaments and the containers for the cremated bodies. The most interesting thing for me was that the people in the tomb were Turkic. They did not look like Mongolians, but more like central Asians in the “stans” over time they had drifted from the Mongolian Steppe to central asia and into Turkey itself.

After the museum we headed for lunch and then on to lake Ugii A note about lunch, being vegetarian in Mongolia is not easy. Every place we went to our guide had to explain to the wait staff what to make and pretty much every time it was egg noodles with vegetable. It was not a bad tasting dish, but having it day after day became boring. Mongolia does not naturally had a lot of fruit and vegetables because of the climate. People mostly rely on dairy products and meat from the herds that they keep and every time we arrived at a new family’s home we would share in these products, milk tea and, for Suz, perhaps a bit of goat or cow meat.

Lake Ugii was quite large, but our guide told us it expanded to about twice that size in the spring when the rains came. Kind of a neat thing to think about, and expanding lake. He also told me there were fish in the lake, but I was skeptical as it wasn’t river fed and when looking at the water later it was very clear, but free of vegetation. From the top of a hill overlooking the lake we took a few moments to get the view in. It was here that I asked about a pile of stones I saw. I had seen many of these along the way and wasn’t sure what they were, but my guide told me they were Ovo and when someone died the family would add stones to the pile along with some personal possessions.

That night we stayed in gers again, but an interesting thing happened. There were 4-5 gers at this location along with what looked like a wood built cabin. The family only had one ger when we arrived, but rather than have all of us stay together again the family volunteered to leave their ger for the night and stay in the cabin. This left the family ger to Stu and Suz, so there were lots of personal possessions around the ger. That night the family got up to some drinking and brawling, which we could clearly hear. We gathered in Stu and Suz’s ger to have dinner and, from time to time someone would open the door (there was not lock really), peek in, realize the family wasn’t there, and then walk away. Everyone was getting progressively more drunk (but us) so we thought we ought to remind the family that we would need some wood for our stove to light a fire. They promised to send someone around to do it later. Luckily they did, but funnily it was only to Aya and my ger. On the way to the bathroom I opened the door to our ger and found a fella in there poking the fire. He then pointed to a big plastic bag of coal and dropped the whole thing into the stove, plastic and all. I thought for sure we were going to die in the night. The next day I asked Stu about it and he said no one ever came to their ger and they were cold all night. The fella in my ger must have been shit faced and either forgot there was another ger and just thought the hell with it and chucked it all in our stove. We did stay toasty for most of the night.

Dune

On day two we woke early for breakfast and were surprised by a layer of snow. A big question mark for us was whether or not our van would make it up the steep hill we came down to get into the camp the day before. Our driver didn't seem to care too much though and gunned it up pretty easily. For the greater part of the day we were on the highway, making our way to the edge of the sand dunes at the edge of the Gobi desert (I guess we were actually in it, but mostly grassland) We arrived around early evening and again went through the motions of greeting our family for the night. Interestingly, this family had some fermented mare's milk to share with us, called Airag. It tasted like alcoholic yogurt. Pretty bitter at first drink, but it definitely got better as you had more. This time around we shared a ger with Stu and Suz because there were other guests coming later on and not enough room for us each to get our own. 

After lying about for a bit, we got on camels and rode to the edge of the sand dunes. If you have ever ridden a camel before, you know that it is a ridiculous looking animal. Years ago I'd had the opportunity to ride a camel by the pyramids in Giza, but turned it down because they looked so ungainly. This time around there was no other option, so I got on. The camel's hair was kind of thick and coarse to the touch, but the surprising thing to me was how warm they were. Aya's camel seemed pretty grumpy and didn't really want to kneel down to let her get on. She (the camel, not Aya) also complained a lot along the way, trying to go in a different direction and moaning a bit. For the most part, the camels were pretty docile. 

We made our way to the dunes, kicked about for a bit, and then made our way back to the ger. As the night got colder we huddled in our ger and kept the fire going as long as we could, but like the night before we all slept and the fire went out. The next morning we woke to a freezing cold room.

Mongolian Hordes

This past October holiday Aya and I decided to venture north to Mongolia. We had been planning this for some time, but thought we should jump on this before the weather got too cold and I think we timed it just right. The temperatures did get below freezing at night, but were pleasant during the day, reaching about 20C on some days.

Our first day we stayed in central Ulan Bator and, with not much time before the sun was setting, decided to go to the National History Museum located just off of Chinggis square. The square itself was pretty impressive, with huge statues of Damdin Suhkbataar in the center of the square and statues of Chinggis Khen on the north end by the parliamentary building flanked by statues of... his sons? I think? After we danced around the square a bit (square dancing?) we headed on to the museum. Considering that we new Mongolia was not a highly development country economically, we were pleasantly surprised by the museum. It has multiple floors and rooms with a good amount of historical artifacts. Unfortunately, you had to pay to take pictures inside and, I guess unfortunately, I'm a bit of a scrooge so we decided to just view the displays instead of paying to take pictures. The most surprising thing for me, which I guess I kind of knew, was that many of the tribes that had inhabited Mongolia had moved east and settled in central Asia and western Europe. Some of these were part of  Ghenghis Khan's Golden Horde, but the rest were just nomads who for one reason or another moved. In any case, the museum was great and we really enjoyed it, but we had a tour to catch early the next morning so headed back to our hotel for an early night.

The next morning we were picked up by Danista Nomad tours. They were great the whole way through. Very polite, on time, good service overall and a decent price. We ended up opting to share the journey with another couple and that turned out to be a good decision as then focus wasn't always on us. It was also nice to have another couple of people to share our thoughts with and to ask questions to. We had a guide/translator who did a great job, and also a driver who I must say was pretty good at driving though did scare us a few times. The roads in Mongolia are not too bad, but there are parts that get wild. We crossed rivers in the van, took roads rutted enough to bang our head on the (padded) ceiling, and spent long hours on endless straight highway across the Mongolian plain. It was great.

On Day one we headed west out of town, first stopping at Zaisan, a soviet era memorial to the victory over the Japan and the partnership between the Soviets and Mongolians. The monument was pretty cool. One thing that we all noticed was the power plants on the east side of the city, pumping out smoke from the coal fired power. This was something we noticed on the way into town too. We were really surprised by how close to the city the power plant was. As I'm told, the city has expanded a lot in the past couple of decades so even though it was build outside of the city the city was now gotten closer to it. I could see that as a possibility, but even compared to the center of the city, the power plant was only a couple of kilometers away, too close. On top of that, we were later to learn, there were a few more plants that were just a bit further from town to the east. Any day the winds were coming from the east Ulan Bator was guaranteed to be covered in smog, which seemed to happen regularly each night we were in town.

After Ziasan memorial we jumped back in the van to head out to the huge Ghenghis Khan Equestrian Statue. It was a pretty cool site. In the lower levels there was a museum with some of the artifacts found in the area. The funny thing was, there was a mock up of a ger with a tea set in it. While we were looking around there was a Chinese tour group there who grabbed the other guy we were with, an Englishman, and started taking pictures with him. Then, the pulled him into the mock up and took pictures of serving him tea. It was a bit funny. After that walked up a set of stairs going to the top of the statue where you can come out and view the surrounding area. There seem to be plans of creating a type of park and hotel structure there in the future and expanding the museum to a few other nearby sites. One of the kitschy things there was that there were these giant birds which appeared to be hawks, but our guide told us were buzzards. We were to see them again both at tourist sites for people to pose with, but also gliding around the countryside.

Our next stop was Turtle Rock. Pretty obvious, right? We got out of the van for a bit and had a walk around, the climbed up the back side to get a good view. It was indeed pretty nice, but we didn't stay for long. The sun was getting low and we had to get back into the van to make it to our camp for the night.

After an hour or so more on a paved road we made it to a small town, then drove across (through actually) a river and then a rutted road and a few more small streams. As the gers along the way became fewer and fewer we kept thinking, is this it? Is this it? Eventually there was nothing else in sight. We charged the van up a steep hill and as we crested we saw a three ger ranch at the bottom of the valley. That is where we would stay for the night. When we arrived we entered the family ger to make greetings, which we would come to know meant having some milk tea(cow's) and some fried dough snacks. Once we had a bit of a snack and talked for a little bit we went to our own ger for a short rest. We then got mounted up on horseback and went for a ride around the surrounding valleys. It was beautiful in the cold and still of the evening. On the way back to the ranch we rounded up the cattle that were out in the valley and then shortly after returning we had a nice dinner with our fellow travelers. Each place we stayed the tour company had set up in advance so gers, beds, meals, etc. were all ready to go. I would also add that each place we stayed was in a ger, but the three nights we were traveling around were all different in the food that we ate, the families that were there, and the environment surrounding the gers. Each ger was relatively the same with a wood fire stove int he center, the chimney going through a somewhat open hole in the roof and the surrounding rounds walls of the ger having 4-5 beds to sleep on with possibly a middle table for meals. That night as we went to to bed, we stoked the fire one last time and hoped we wouldn't freeze in the night.

Wisconsin Summer