Discovering Northwest Myanmar 10: Ye-U to Indaw

Having just gone through a grueling ride the day before on my detour down to Ye-U, I wasn’t looking forward to another 250km slog through what I thought was going to be rather boring, dry landscape. My goal on day 11 of the trip was to get to the town of Indaw, which, according to google maps, had accommodations. 

Bike needed washing again

I was back down in agricultural heartland of Myanmar, and so I had expected to see mostly just farmland. Instead, this road through Sagaing Division was as varied and interesting as any other. There were rolling hills, tree-lined smooth highways, scrublands and forests. 

One of the most pleasant aspects of riding through Myanmar is that everywhere you go, most of the highways are
lined with lush trees. It's like driving through a green cave.

 

Seeing a Buddhist monk on a motorbike always fascinates me. This one is being joined by a few
hundred of his brothers over on the left side of the road.

This is what a truck normally does when you want to pass. They move
over a bit.

When it comes to the driving part, my biggest challenge of the day was getting round a military convoy. Half a dozen large military trucks full of soldiers with assault weapons were making their way up the road (I won’t say where exactly) at a speed that was just a bit slower than I wanted to go. Normally, when there’s a truck in the way on a narrow highway, one simply gives a friendly tap on the horn, and the truck will move over a bit and let one by. Well, first of all, these trucks were so big, they didn’t really have space to do that without going off on the shoulder. Second, there’s a natural reluctance to honk at a truckload of armed men to tell them to get out of one’s way. Hey Myanmar military! Get out of my way! I’m coming through. Umm… No. 

Umm.. excuse me.. sorry to ask..umm... if it's not too
much trouble... could I get by please?

With other big trucks on narrow roads, another option in passing them is to wait for another truck to come along the opposite direction. In those instances, both trucks have to slow down and go off onto the shoulders to pass each other. Then, simply use the motorbike’s superior acceleration to get by. By chance, there were no trucks coming the other way, and so for mile after mile I was stuck behind these dust-churning trucks being stared at sternly by the curious soldiers.  

Unfortunately, you won’t see much of this on the video. Somehow, I thought recording troop movements on my GoPro might get me in trouble. I do live in a country which is still experiencing armed conflict (more on that in later blogs). 

Indaw is a medium-sized town not too from the border with Kachin State. Nothing all that remarkable about it except for the truck graveyard I happened to come across. 

Enjoy the video!  Bluegrass version of a Guns N’ Roses hit! 

Discovering Northwest Myanmar 7: Rihkawdar to Kalaymyo

I could’ve spent more time up there in Chin State. I mean, I really liked it there. The people, the towns, and most of all, the weather were wonderful. Remember, April is the hottest month of the year in Myanmar, and down in the valleys, the 100-degree, 60% humildity days were sweltering. The clean, crisp air of Chin was quite a relief. 

Sunrise in Chin State

 

As a place to ride a motorcycle, providing you have an enduro-bike with a good suspension, Chin State had been like a dream. The mountain vistas mesmerized me and the roads were in decent condition. The dream soured a bit on the road from Rihkandar to Tedim. On a lesser bike, it would have been a nightmare. 

Fortunately, the CRF250 I’d rented from mandalaymotorbike.com handled to rocky, bumpy roads without much trouble. After Tedim, the road to Kalaymyo was quite smooth. 

 

In Tedim, everyone was going to church. Well, not everyone.

Down from the hills into a valley, the heat was back. However, instant relief was available in the form of Thingyan, the water festival.  Just outside my hotel door, a stage had been set up.

They let me run the hose for a bit.

Hoses busily sprayed truckload after truckload of people out celebrating. A few dozen local youth danced up a storm in front of loudspeakers. I joined in, recording it with my waterproof camera.  When the organizers noticed me, they asked if I would like to record a traditional Thingyan dance. Of course! I’m  sure the dance was planned for later, but they moved it up just for me.

This first video shows the trip out of Chin to Kalymyo.

The second video is just the Thingyan dance and the goings on around it.  

Discovering Northwest Myanmar 5: Hakha to Falam

In Part 5, we continue our adventures through Chin State. Just a few years back, It would have quite remarkable that I was even up there. Like much of Myanmar, Chin had been closed to foreign tourists for decades. The few that did make it up there were invariably accompanied by gov’t approved tour guides on gov’t run travel packages. This little state, landlocked between India and Myanmar hasn’t had many tourists until recently. 

They like to paint their houses in vivid colors

Some facts about Chin State: At about 15,000 square miles, it’s roughly the size of Switzerland. About 2/3^rd the size of West Virginia and one and half times bigger than Vermont. Whereas 8 million people live in Switzerland and 2 million reside in West Virginia, the population of Chin is a bit shy of 500,000. And like these other places, it’s all mountainous. I can’t say that I saw a single bit of horizontal land in the whole state that people hadn’t made that way. 

Being so sparsely populated, there are only a few real towns in the state. In this episode, I travel between two of them which aren’t very far apart: Hakka (the new capital) and Falam (the old capital).

Again, I was taken in by the amazing mountain views I got to see and noticed a few things. Chin burial customs involve roads. At almost every major turn in the road, at almost every spot where you could look out and see spectacular vistas of expansive mountains and valleys, there were graves.

Not graveyards, just graves. Two or three, up to eight perhaps if it was remarkably beautiful spot. And of course, memorials to the dead. Structures to preserve them from the elements. It was kind of odd that at every point when I wanted to stop and take a picture of the remarkable landscape, that I was doing so alongside someone’s dead uncle, but I’m not superstitious in that regard. If there’s life-after-death, ghosts, that sort of thing, I’d think any human soul would appreciate what I was doing, and wouldn’t be offended if I needed to go pee on the periphery of their gravesite. 

 

Breakfast in Hakha

I got to Falam, a very religious town which I’ve heard recently tried to ban alcohol sales within the town limits.

Having a nose for these sorts of things, I found that this ban would involve shutting down one shop, because it seemed there was only one place in town to get a beer. 

Enjoy the video 

Discovering Northwest Myanamar - Part 1: Yangon to Sagaing

Badger meets bunny at the cat-sitters place

Once again, I’m doing the thing I enjoy most in the world: I’m back on a motorcycle tour!  As I write this, I’m sitting in an odd restaurant “night club” in the small Myanmar town of Palࣰe, Sagaing Division. I’m starting to write now, long before I expect a video will be uploaded, because I want to recall details and feelings while they’re still rather fresh in my mind. 

This trip is going to be different in several ways. First of all, I’m not visiting any of the major tourist destinations in the country. Apart from Mandalay where I rented the motorbike, I’m not travelling to any cities of any significant size. This town I’m in right now has only one guesthouse, and prior to the trip, I wasn’t even sure they’d accept foreigners (not all accommodations in Myanmar are licensed to do so; they must meet certain requirements like western style toilets). I couldn’t contact them because other than appearing on Google maps, they have no presence on the internet. Not even a phone number!

Secondly, the regions I’ll be visiting are more remote and hard to get to. If you’ve followed previous journeys, you might remember from the “Epic” of February 2017 that I changed my plans and gave up on heading further into Myanmar’s westernmost state, Chin, after a bone-jarring ride in the initial leg. My little Chinese scooter couldn’t handle it. Well, this time, I’ve rented a Honda CRF250, a hardy bike that can handle pretty much anything, and this time, I’ll conquer Chin.

After Chin State, I’ll be following the Chindwin River upstream to get as close as I can to the mysterious-sounding Nagaland.  The Naga people are well known for being little known.  I don’t want to go to Nagaland proper because there’s nowhere to go from there except into India (can’t do that on a Myanamar motorbike) or back the way you came. I’m not a fan of that.

When you reach a fork in an unmapped road, you need to look
for clues. For example, in this pic, the road on the loft is
more traveled.

Lastly, this journey will be different in that I’m going to be driving on roads that only appear on some maps. Google maps won’t help me because these roads aren’t  on it. On Google Earth, however, zooming in, you can see them on the satellite image.  I just need to be careful I don’t mistake a river for a road again.

In the initial video, I start off in Yangon, on the morning of last day of work, drop Badger off at the cat-sitter I’ve employed and make a mad dash to the Yangon bus station situated way out on the outskirts of town.  As traffic can turn into gridlock at any time here, I was quite nervous that maybe I had not allotted myself enough time. I made it with 30 minutes to spare, but in my rush I had forgotten several key items: my map of Myanmar, the fancy motorcycle-riding jacket I’d been given (It had pads and armor built in) and worst of all, the carefully prepared itinerary that one of my Myanmar colleagues had made for me, well outside her regular duties. It had hotel names, phone numbers and prices. Shit!

Map of DayOne

To top it all off, I had spent extra on my ticket for a “VIP” bus, a first-class bus that instead of the normal, confined, four seats per aisle, this one only was supposed to only have three. I was actually looking forward to the nine-hour luxurious ride from Yangon to Mandalay. What I got was a standard bus. Somehow, the booking agency had messed up my ticket. I booked it online and so there was little I could do at that point.

Once in Mandalay, I got to meet someone I’ve known online for years, Zach, the owner of Mandalay Motorbike and tours. Visit: mandalaymotorbike.com!  Zach has given me tons of advice over the years on my Myanmar motorcycle journeys, and in turn, I’ve sent him referrals whenever I can. Plus, he watches and likes my videos. Zach has my dream job. He actually makes his living spending  weeks on the road, exploring new places, interacting with the wonderful people here in this exotic country. We spent a few hours swapping stories, he sharing his insights and knowledge on my proposed route.

CRF250

Then, it was off to Sagaing.  Sagaing is the capital of the province of the same name, and it’s relatively close to Mandalay, just a 45 minute drive or so. From there, I happened onto Sagaing Hill and its famous concentration of temples (some call them “pagodas”, but I’ve never been fond of that word as it reminds me more of China and Japan – the word ‘pagoda’ is nothing more than the Portuguese word for temple). Wow! What a sight!

Lastly, up to the famous antiquities of Mingun (Min Kun). There, I saw a lot of foreign tourists; the last I expect to see in any number for the rest of the way. Mingun is home to the largest temple I’ve seen here outside of Bagan. Construction began in the late 18^th century, but due to historical inconveniences like massive earthquakes and the invasion of the British, it was never completed. 

From Sagaing Hill overlooking the mighty Ayeyarwaddy River

All in all, I’m ecstatic to begin this trip. As it has its unique aspects, there will undoubtedly be unique challenges. With this awesome machine under me, I have little doubt I’ll overcome them as I have before.

Enjoy the first video! 

Technical note: I use two cameras on these journeys now. My GoPro mounts onto the helm and is also useful for recording people candidly without them realizing they’re on camera. My other camera I use for buildings and scenery and such. Anyways, the GoPro and my video software are having a hard time communicating in regards to format. The GoPro footage shows up in a 4:3 ratio, creating a vertical “letterbox” effect.