October 8, 2019
A One-Way Ticket to Mandalay
A One-Way Ticket to Mandalay
Dear little friends,
Well, that’s the way it started out. We were looking at airfares to Southeast Asia and mulling our options and then this super-cheap fare from Portland, Oregon to Mandalay, Myanmar for $340 popped up. Whoa, dude. That’s a really long way to go for $340. I mean, it costs more than that to fly to Kalispell, Montana, so what’s the catch, you say? Well, there is one, but before we talk about the catch, let’s get caught up.
Bruce and I have taken two bicycle trips to SE Asia in the past five years, our trip journals reside here and here and those trips were a lot of fun and we’re ready for another adventure. When we returned from our last trip in 2017 we knew we could no longer take any more trips until our very beloved but elderly cat had departed this world. She had excellent care from Kristen and Jeff Arnim, and that winter CycleBlaze was born in our office as those two tried to stay warm in our dank house and kept Pinkie fed and loved and well-documented. Every morning on our trip, this was the first thing we looked at. In fact, we loved this so much that Bruce continued the documentation after we got back home.
Pinkie had a beautiful last summer in 2018. She was aging rapidly and hanging out more in the yard instead of her usual wandering. She was very interested in supervising Bruce’s backyard construction project and happily ignored sawdust, noise, and hammers falling around her. But on a full moon night a year ago last September she slipped outside to do her rat-hunting rounds and two coyotes killed her. We live in a city that has coyotes, as many cities do, and we knew the dangers. But we adopted Pinkie as a street cat who had outside responsibilities and there was no keeping her inside, ever, unless she wanted to be there.
So, Bruce was mid-construction with no acting supervisor and winter was coming and there was no time to plan another trip. Which is unfortunate because a trip probably would have helped ease the horrible loss we were struggling with. Winter in Portland isn’t the most fun thing, really. It’s chilly and damp and dark and you can only make so many cozy fires and eat so many warming stews and drink so many steaming cups of coffee and tea.
Mid-summer, here we were, fingers hovering over the “buy” button because I was insisting that we remove ourselves from another Portland winter, but wait (here’s the catch), what is this ghastly itinerary associated with this unbelievably cheap airfare? 60 hours??!! But before moving on to the next-cheapest and shorter airfare, Bruce looked the itinerary over and said, “Hey, let’s do this!” And so we clicked “buy” and the rest is history. It turns out that it’s actually a pretty cool itinerary. We leave Portland in the evening so no early-morning runarounds with a fretful sleepless night beforehand, fly to San Francisco, stay in a hotel overnight, meet a friend for coffee at the airport, get on a flight to Kunming with presumably a good night’s sleep under our belts, stay another night in another hotel in Kunming, and then arrive in Mandalay at 9:45 am. Do you know what this means? It means we can finally assemble our bikes at the airport and ride them into Mandalay, which is about 25 miles from the airport. I have always wanted to do this! Sold.
| Heart | 12 | Comment | 2 | Link |
So sorry to hear about Pinkie.
About this trip. Well, it's about time !
Safe and joyous travels to the both of you.
We will be lurking, online.
Cheers,
Chris n Coleen
5 years ago
Agreed, it’s about time. We are pretty jazzed to get going. Hugs to you and Coleen.
5 years ago
Oh There’s Something Else
Here’s the something else we have always present in our planning and anticipation of this trip. It’s that there is more than just a one-way ticket to Mandalay because we do eventually have to come home and we may have to come home earlier than our February 29, 2020 return ticket from Bangkok, because, drum roll please, I am to become a grandmother next March or April or so. Not only will I become a grandma but the wee one is actually two wee ones, and my daughter is quite petite and there is a reasonable chance she will have to be on bed rest toward the end of her pregnancy so of course I will want to be helping out with that. And after those little squirrels are born I’ll be helping then too. I can hardly wait!!!! But for now, I’m not gonna lie, while I yearn to be bouncing down a hot back road with the rice drying and the birds singing I know for certain once I’m on that road I will also be wistfully wondering how things are going back in the twin-making factory. All things have a cost, and the cost can be bittersweet, complicating enjoyment. I’m trying to think of this trip as the granny version of a “baby-moon”, the trip that expectant parents take during that second trimester sweet spot between morning sickness and waddling, before the sleep-deprivation and parenting turn them into graying, harried people such as myself.
Back to Biking and Packing Topics
Well. We’ve done this twice before and decided we would spread all the preparation out for the weeks between the decisive “buy” button click and pulling up to the departures drop-off at the airport. We have been remarkably focused and have tried hard to get at least one trip-related chore ticked off of the to-do list every day. I received an upgraded “cockpit” configuration as a 60th birthday gift from my kids and their spouses, since that was what I asked for. Both bikes needed new drivetrains after grinding out in the sand and rain of Vietnam. We are really trying hard to carry less weight so the kitchen scale lives permanently near our packing area and the hope is that we can take our total down by, oh, at least a couple of ounces. We are realistic about this goal, we carry a lot that other people don’t, but we also know where we are going and what possible challenges we may have regarding health care, safe food and water, and heat.
We have some new camera gear that we don’t know how to use or manage yet, a new journal website that we don’t know how to use or manage yet, and other exciting things to figure out. And one of my health challenges in the past year was being diagnosed with sleep apnea, but after a year of using a CPAP machine I think I have discovered another device that will work for me. More on that later.
| Heart | 8 | Comment | 4 | Link |
5 years ago
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“Unmettled Roads”, what’s that all about?
I took my first trip to Myanmar in December of 2005. Not many people were going there at that time and a lot has changed there since then but one thing that hasn’t changed is the map of the Bagan region that was painted on the wall of our guesthouse dining area, it was still there in 2014 when we returned to the May Kha Lar Guesthouse, slightly faded but still charming and informative. In 2005 we toured the vast temple area on gritty one-speed rental bikes and going on an “unmettled road” as opposed to a “tar road” meant flat tires and sinking into sand. Ask us how we know this. We pushed our bikes a long way back to the May Kha Lar the day we disregarded that map. Ma Cho had her cooks fire up the stoves again and make us breakfast even though it was long after noon.
We have discussed at length the quality of roads in Myanmar and we will surely bring up that topic again while we’re there since they’re not kidding around when they say “tar road”, most paved roads are built by hand of rocks and sand and boiling tar poured over them. Maybe some of the new highways are asphalt or concrete, we don’t know, we haven’t been on those. But while a tar road is most likely going to be pretty bad, the unmettled ones will be much much worse and despite our intriguing journal title we hope to avoid them as much as we can. That being said, we are drawn to “out there” roads with little traffic so we assume that many of those on this trip shall indeed be unmettled, and even if not unmettled they will probably test our mettle anyway.
We will spend the first few weeks in Myanmar traveling south along the Irrawaddy River into the delta region. Old copies of Lonely Planet Myanmar have maps and destinations in the delta but after Cyclone Nargis laid waste there in early May 2008, it appears to have become a non-touristed region except for a few beach areas in the west.
That alone intrigues us, and besides that, it’s flat, a good place to ride ourselves into better condition than we are right now. We could do that in Portland too, of course, but that’s cheating, really. From the delta we’ll visit Yangon and a few places like Hpa An and Mawlamyine that we hear are splendid. There is a lot of Myanmar tourists are not allowed to go to, yet. Maybe not for a long time. But there is also a lot of Myanmar that we haven’t seen yet so we’re pretty excited to do some more exploring there.
At some point our Myanmar visas will run out and we’ll head to the Thai border and from that time until February 29, 2020 is a blank wall of possibilities. We love that kind of trip. Yes, we’ll plan out something at some point but the beauty of Thailand, besides being much easier than Myanmar, is that you can literally hop on a bus or train and be somewhere else in the country or at another country’s border, in just a few hours. We may visit our friend Laynou in Vientiane, Laos. We may decide to revisit our fantastic Mekong route, or visit national parks, or go to a beach or or or or. Whatever it is, it’ll be fun and delicious.
| Heart | 10 | Comment | 0 | Link |
Can one ethically go to Myanmar these days?
That is an excellent question and it is discussed a lot on travel forums and the like but for us I think we hope that we can learn a lot while we are in the country and write about what we learn a little later in the trip. It’s a complex situation there, we are fully aware. But we are paying close attention and as always, will try to be the best guests there that we can be. Myanmar is beautiful and has wonderful friendly people. We fully admit we look forward to having “Myanmar Face” from smiling at people all day long in this exotic backdrop of stunning scenery and glittering sights. But the other side is that Myanmar has always been complicated and it’s worth examining our motives as honestly as we can and hope to gain insight and meaningful interactions whenever we can.
It’s not a tarred road. It’s an unmettled road with frustrations, misunderstandings, heat, pushing through all sorts of heartbreaking problems. But our experience in Myanmar has always been that whatever happens we get breakfast even when we’re late, kind people will help out, surprising events will settle like golden dust all around us, gumming up our plans and putting a sparkle on everything we see. We aren’t worried about anything at all.
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Really looking forward to the photo of the airport bike assembly and of all that will follow!!
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