Day 40 - To Mandalay

After breakfast, a taxi to Inya Lake...




for a stroll along the shore on the path the locals use for exercise.



Kudos to the first person to guess what this video shows (other than the lake).



Then a walk back to our hotel, with a stop for me at the Kabar Aye Pagoda for a sketch (first one of the trip) for me...




and some more walking for Dana.

Then a car to the airport and a flight north to Mandalay (see map from previous post), where we are met by Yan (pronounced like "jen"), who will be our guide for our 5 days in this area.

We didn't have much time for sightseeing, so we chose the teak bridge and gold-leaf making. Actually, Mandalay is not much of a sightseeing town, so it's no great loss. Ironically, the town is overrun with American and European tourists. My guess is that it's the mystique created by 1) Rudyard Kipling (who wrote the poem "The Road to Mandalay" but never set foot in the town, and/or 2) the movie starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby (who also likely were never here).

According to the LP, the bridge is the longest teak bridge in the world.




I believe it's also the teak bridge that bears the most tourists in the world, a good percentage of whom are old guys fussing with huge, clumsy cameras - even tripods - seems to be what one dreams of doing in retirement. Haven't the heart to tell them an iPhone can work just as well, and also do Hidef vids - plus being a note-taking, wifi, and texting tool - not to mention a phone.

I wanted to see the gold leaf making because of Janet Harbert's question re where the gold leaf that is placed on the Myanmar statues comes from. Turns out most of it it comes from rivers near here, and is processed in Mandalay, where it is refined into small nuggets, and then beaten into tabs.





The pounding also heats the gold to give it more plasticity.

The tabs are further processed...







and placed on tabs...



for application to Buddha images and other statues (or eating)...or applying to tourists foreheads.




Off on a 4 day excursion tomorrow - may be some wifi problems.

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