November 20, 2014
The Rest is Downhill
Except when it's not
Kalaw to Nyaungshwe
Dear little friends,
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After goofing around in Pyin Oo Lwin for a few days we took a night bus to Kalaw, which meant getting on a crowded bus at 9 pm, and going back down the long twisty hill and south on the Mandalay plain and then going back up into the mountains on another long twisty hill to Kalaw. There isn't a lot of extra room on those buses, the place where it seems like feet should go was only about 3 inches tall so that was weird but it was actually a pretty good bus ride, meaning the driver was not a maniac and it had awesome suspension. There was a fair amount of motion sickness going on around us though, and the little bags provided were being merrily filled and tossed out the window at a brisk pace.
The highway to Kalaw, highway 4, theoretically goes all the way to China through Kengtung, another place on our imaginary itinerary, but it isn't heaving with traffic the way the other 3 or 4 main highways in Myanmar are. I say theoretically because foreigners can't travel west on Hwy.4 past Taunggyi, for various and sundry reasons such as banditry, tribal warfare, or government secret stuff, let's just call it GSS for short. If you troll around on Google Maps like I do you'll see all sorts of evidence of GSS in Myanmar, out in jungles are improbably swank housing complexes paired with prison-like barracks which may or may not be actual prisons. If you ask somebody about this or that road and their face becomes completely blank yet urgent as they say, "No, not possible.", you can blame GSS. You are best to go with that because if you don't, you get yourself in trouble, i.e. escorted to the nearest outbound plane or border, but worse, get somebody else in trouble, maybe some sleepy checkpoint guy or even somebody who may or may not have even noticed you on that road. So don't be pulling any Rambo crap here, you will almost certainly end up unharmed, if scolded, but somebody else will surely pay for your arrogant adventurism. Consequently we will not be riding to Kengtung on Highway 4, tempting as that is, but we may end up flying there or to Tachileik, which is on the border with Thailand. You can come back into Myanmar there but you can only go as far as Kengtung for ten days or so, and you leave your passport at the border to ensure you do not travel onward into GSS-land.
We found ourselves in Kalaw at 3 am, it was pretty darn cold up there but the air was clear, the stars were out, and the guesthouse let us nap in their front lobby until our room was available. I have photos of that guesthouse from 2008 labeled "Our dismal guesthouse" but it is dismal no more, the building was demolished and a new one built with very attentive staff and nice new rooms. Golden Kalaw, we recommend it. One problem with not being in our 20s or 30s or even 40s anymore is that a night bus means a wipeout day the next day, we were sleeping most of the day and then woke up enough to go to bed at 6 pm. Unfortunately most long bus rides in Myanmar are only scheduled at night.
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There is a lot of trekking out of Kalaw and we have done it and it's worth it but this time we wanted to take our bikes to Inle Lake and not on Highway 4. So Sam, the famous guide from Sam's Trekking mapped out a route for us and early the next morning off we set. Well, it would have been early but we didn't want to miss breakfast! It's a great route and we recommend it FROM KALAW. Doing it the other way would essentially mean climbing out of the Inle Lake basin by your teeth.
Breakfast finished and bikes loaded, we were off by 8 am or so, and pedaled away and up toward Aungban. We were pretty excited to be back on our bikes after an indecent amount of "rest days", but I soon realized our tires hadn't gotten the air I had promised them so we had a pit stop for air. We were climbing along and I was feeling smug that I could do this climb without a lot of drama when we saw this thing that looked like some kind of box-like luge built into the hillside. Sometimes hillside temples have long covered stairways up to them, maybe that was one but it sure was ugly. Bruce said, "That's the road." I felt despair.
It turns out he was wrong and instead of climbing by our teeth up the luge we went through a notch and sailed down to Aungban. "It's all downhill now!" said the One Who is Often Wrong About Downhills.
Okay, here's the top secret turn-by-turn route to Inle Lake. Go through Aungban on Highway 4 and when you see a pond turn right onto another road and stay on it for about 25 miles. It pops you out near the south end of Inle Lake near Indein where you turn left but you still have to go 17 miles north to get to Nyaungshwe at the north end of the lake. We don't know if it's an easier or shorter road than from Kalaw on Highway 4 but we do know it was a glorious ride with little to no traffic, bisecting routes we trekked on in 2008 so we were up in the mountains with cowbells and rice harvesting and mountains and Pa'O villages.
The only problem is that it was mostly uphill. Many times during the day I heard "It's downhill from here." and not just from ol' OWIOWAD. I was at crash-bonk point so we stopped by a pond where locals washed their laundry and the water buffalo had cropped the grass to lawn-like inviting-ness and I ate a Clif bar and an orange and a banana and drank some water (but not from the pond). There was a guy there working on his oxcart wheel, they would soak them in the pond and then put the metal wheel on over the wood spokes or something like that. He smiled when I put on an exaggerated gasp and exhausted show and made an uphill gesture. He uphill gestured back and said no more of that, all downhill to Inle, wowie, somebody who knows was telling me the same thing, awesome!
Except he was a lying fool.
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The road starts out pretty good for a road in Myanmar but it eventually turned into a "work in progress" road with piles of big rocks, piles of medium rocks, and then a lot of gravel scattered around to give you trouble. When we finally did get to the real and actual top of the road, and there was one, and it was glorious, and there were far-off views of the lake and the sun in the heavens smiled down on us, there was then the sketchy business of negotiating some very steep straight downhills with my front brake squealing like an old pig and my hands aching from keeping the brakes on for many miles. I've never been a mountain biker but I did grow up in Montana and gravel roads were par for the course so some of the old skills came back. I did not skid off the rough gravel into the deep ditch next to the road. I did not hit that cow.
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I am skipping all the real description of the day, though, for a couple of reasons. First, we have amazing photos that are going to tell you how beautiful it was. And second, Bruce is going to write about this ride and will probably fill in the rest for you. It was a fantastic ride, simply splendid. If I were a stronger cyclist I would have felt better at the end of this day, but the truth is, our mojo was pretty spent by the time we reached the lake, and there were still 17 more miles to go. It really takes the fun out of an otherwise excellent riding day to feel like absolute shit when we finally crossed the little green bridge into Nyaungshwe.
To make it even more surreal, sleepy little Nyaungshwe was crawling, loaded, teeming, rancid with tourists. Our favorite mirror-walled temple had been plastered over. A five story hotel was being built along the canal and another lurked behind. Ay yi yi!
Suddenly out of the haze of tourists a woman beckoned from the side of the road. Insistently. As in, "You must stop, we may be related!" and since I do have a lot of relatives, none of whom would ever ever in a million years be in Nyaungshwe, we stopped. It turns out it was Sandy of Frank and Sandy, whose journal we have been following who have been zigzagging around Myanmar in similar fashion as we have except that they have hundreds more miles of actual riding under their belts. Sandy was famous in our minds for a spectacular incident of food poisoning in Bagan which I forever and always will respect her for fully describing in humiliating and humane detail.
We were much too exhausted to visit with Frank and Sandy last night but after our day of napping and laundry I'm sure we will catch up with them later. They are also staying at our beloved Remember Inn, where this morning after a lovely sleep, our rooftop breakfast was the best ever, with lots of choices for a main breakfast (we had the Shan noodle soup, highly recommended), avocado juice, bananas and watermelon, and after coffee and tea we sat like roly-poly puppies and the edge of our difficult day yesterday started to fade just a little.
When we see them, we'd like to recommend that road to them because they are stronger riders than us but if they do their teeth will have to be stronger than their legs.
Update: We had breakfast with them and they are busing on to Bago this afternoon and will head south. Our supposedly napping day yesterday turned into a full on adventure in the afternoon on yet another unexpected Burmese event, or should I say, Shan event. It is worthy of its own post so when we have halfway decent wifi again you'll hear from us. Every day's a good day here when you go with the flow and say yes to things. Stay tuned.
Today's ride: 47 miles (76 km)
Total: 116 miles (187 km)
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