Day 21: On to Minbu, after Floral Gardens in Naypitaw

After a large, and quite good, buffet breakfast, we were driven to the Naypitaw Floral Gardens, where we took a stroll with Mr. Soe.






The gardens are well-maintained,and tho they may be particularly manicured right now for the ASEAN tourism conference going on during our visit, it seems likely that they are more generally well-maintained - they just had that look.

There was a children's play area, with a water slide...



and a suspension bridge....




and for a little bonus, Mr. Soe identified some white-throated babblers, one of the six Myanmar endemic species.



At 9:30 Mr. Soe put us aboard our minibus for the trip to Min Bu, which is just north of Magway on this map.



We went through some really rough country for about two hours...





(hard to see the canyons, but they were quite deep and there were a lot of them), and then we hit a flatter stretch where the farming was rather intense, and we saw oxcarts about every quarter mile...




sometimes greater density...



and in one town a tractor dealership, tho we saw none in the fields.

And we had one of those delightful serendipitous travel moments, discovering that the woman sitting next to us (Ms. Thandar), an engineer working in the Naypitaw government office dealing with telecommunications, was headed to a family reunion in Minbu. She spoke the best English we have heard so far in Myanmar, was a very nice person, and was eager to help us. This was great, because we had not been able to make any lodging or other arrangements for Min Bu (the LP pretty much ignores it).

Thandar not only got us lodging at a spiffy, brand new hotel (open one week), Man Thidar, for $25 (may not look like much, but it was a real surprise to us)...




but she also got her uncle, San Win, who lives across from the hotel, to meet us there and facilitate not only the hotel, but also a private car for the next day to see the two big attractions near here (he's going with us).

The hotel got us reservations for a bus to our next destination, Pyay, on the 31st, and got its new wifi system up and running for us, albeit a bit too slow for posting.

Our dinner in the hotel was quite good, benefitting from the fact that the hotel owner has owned a good restaurant for a long time, and in fact brought in roast duck from the restaurant for me.



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