Day 7 - Road Trip to Chin State - Getting There is..... Or one rich noviate and one poor corpse

Still suffering from Temple fatigue and wanting to do something cool for our remaining four days in Bagan, we made sort of a snap decision to go to the somewhat remote, mountainous Chin state, in northwest Myanmar, which just opened for tourism in 2013.

We spent most of the day in a 4-wheel drive, with a good driver Thi Ha.








The ride was a pleasure for me because of the changing terrain, occasional villages with a dearth of concrete, metal, plastic or litter (except for little dumps on the edge of town) characterized instead by rather tidy thatch-roofed, woven mat-sided, and occasionally wooden houses, animal watering troughs of hollowed out logs, almond-eyed brahma oxen pulling wooden carts and plows, and people of all ages giving us friendly smiles and waves. It really is that way.

And there were some highlights, the first and best of which was a procession we happened upon that was for the induction into a monastic order of a son of a wealthy man. There's no need to comment, it's a visual feast. My favorite part is the beautifully decorated oxen pulling carts bearing costumed children.



There were many good sections of the road, but a lot of it was under construction, with most of the work being done by hand.



Even the tar - prepared in barrels over charcoal fires next to the road - was applied by hand.







We stopped for lunch at a rudimentary place, with surprisingly good food...









and distinctive facilities.






Guess which is the Gents and you have learned to read your first Burmese words - well, after "Google"...

After lunch we passed by a funeral procession of an obviously poor family...



started climbing into the cloud forest..






and finally arrived at the $70 per night Pine Wood Villa in Kanpetlet...







which would have been OK if it had had any heat.







The cloud forest was very cold and wet (who knew?) - more on that to come.

When we arrived, the staff was mostly asleep, and a couple of them didn't bother to get up when we walked in - some kind of hibernating torpor, I believe.

But the rhodies were nice...







we had our huge pile of bedding, and we were to move on to Mindat in the morning. Can't remember why I thought moving on to Mindat was a good thing.

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