We Understand Only .005%

November 24, 2019 to November 28, 2019

Mawlamyine to Hpa An

Wobbling and Complaining

Dear little friends,

One can be marooned by weather, it happens all the time to cycle tourists, and most other travelers, too. We complain and complain and complain about being super hot and sticky, wash shirts after an hour’s wearing, and guess what? IT DOES NOT CHANGE THE WEATHER. So we got on our bikes and rode to Hpa An.

And it was hot.

It’s a really pretty road from Mawlamyine to Hpa An. It’s flat, lined with trees for a lot of it, not that far, etc. etc. I mean, it’s probably one of the most spectacularly beautiful routes we’ve ever been on. But I’m afraid I have more complaining to do, sorry ‘bout that.

We left our guesthouse and rode through the outer edges of Mawlamyine, stopping to buy water at a small shop. I was sweating. The forecast for the next week was in the mid-90s and humidity levels are slowly dropping so by the first bridge of two it wasn’t terrible, just the standard heat and humidity lessened by a slight breeze. Since it is officially the dry season people have started tidying up the falling dry leaves and the wet ones too and setting them alight but full burning hellsmoke hasn’t really reached full capacity, just give it a few more weeks. While we sweat like a stick of natural deodorant in a black pannier the locals huddle in the morning over small smoky burning leaf piles, practicing warming their hands for when it actually gets cooler.

Bridge number one is very exciting. It has a metal bed of wide-ish slats with not inconsequential spacing between. Near the edges they filled the spaces with narrow metal strips so the motorbikes (and us) can ride safely. It takes a certain amount of nerve to negotiate this 30-inch “sort-of-safer-zone”though and the slower I go the more I wobble so when Bruce stopped mid-bridge to take photos I had some audible concerns. Meanwhile the motorbikes sharing that lane with us had to change mid-bridge too and while far too polite to honk, they didn’t seem happy. I mean, they honk all the time but those are mostly informative or exclamatory honks, not angry honks.

Once Ansel Lellman was done with his hazardous shooting we got going again but he was going too slowly and losing his nerve. Oh wait, there was part of a thin metal strip missing! He stopped completely then we got going again. I made a mental note to give him a head start next time. A bike with thinner tires than our stocky Schwalbes would be toast on this bridge in my belief.

The rice fields were glowing green, the karst landscape in the clear air hovered like a dream, a long stretch bordered with shady elderly statesmen trees beckoned. Why was I still complaining? Not out loud, but internally, since Bruce usually can’t hear me anyway so what would be the use? The road is rough, my friends, and it got rougher the further we went.

Bridge number two was also exciting, so exciting that the large bus that had passed us earlier was parked on the other side and its passengers were walking across, also on the motorbike strip, so we dismounted and walked across with the chattering crowd.

See that area on the right? We and the motorbikes are supposed to ride there or woe be unto us.

A dream road should let you ride AND gaze at the dream scenery, right? Is that too much to ask? And while your eyes are glued to the road surface, you should be able to skirt the most egregious potholes without putting yourself under the wheels of a truck going 80 miles an hour, right? Well, there you are. This dream road had all sorts of plot twists to mess with our heads and our butts. There was a lot of traffic, the road surface sucked. And so the 38 miles to Hpa An felt more like 70.

Hpa An is an area with karst mountains and caves and outdoorsy things to do, and it’s also a first stop for tourists coming overland by bus from the Myawaddy/Mae Sot (Thailand) border. Some of them seem a little shell-shocked, to be honest, which made sense later when we discovered more about the road their bus came in on.

Our guest house served these little glutinous rice sweets with breakfast, and no, that pink one is not ham.

Various pulses for sale in the morning market.

This riverside temple is guarded by frogs.

This room in the temple had a couple of dozen admonitory panels like this one. I was fond of this one because remaining free of insecurity is one of my challenges. The illustration seems to imply that one should remain untroubled by one’s mortality but as long as I travel by bicycle my mortality will remain a factor in every decision I make.

General Aung San keeps watch over the tea house.

We spent our first day or so in Hpa An exploring the town and then rented a motorcycle to visit a cave temple or two. Bruce used to own a motorcycle in high school so I am more confident in his abilities and maybe I found it more fun than he did, but it was very fun zipping around effortlessly, and the roads to the caves were far smoother than the one to Hpa An.

The .005% understanding rule is, even with the admittedly casual research we do, we never really know what’s going on. We freely admit that right up front. So at the cave entrance, we shucked our sandals (because it’s a temple) and walked up the steps, paid our admission fee, and entered Strange Land. Caves are not my favorite, actually, but this one was pretty interesting. At the beginning is a lot of temple-ish stuff, statues, lights spelling out Buddhist texts reminiscent of some sort of jazzy Walmart advertising, and then you walk through the cave on a path that became increasingly disconcerting, like a carnival haunted house.

Okay, establishing shot: a beautiful cave temple entrance with beautiful flowers and some really great music on the loudspeaker.

You pay your entrance fee here under the watchful gaze of a reclining Buddha and a reclining elderly monk.

This is an impressively large chamber right inside with an array of religious decor.

“Bruce, look! Vultures!” I said, then realized they were just some chickens who had wandered inside.

Natural rock formations were labeled with fancifully imagined descriptions, my favorite was the one that was supposed to represent a giant thanaka grinding stone of some deity or another, a purely Burmese pretension that I thoroughly enjoyed for its charm and obscurity. There is a suspended walkway over an abyss. I mean, when I looked down into the abyss it wasn’t as abysmal as my first impression but no doubt I’m not the first person to immediately think of Indiana Jones and my eyes darted upward nervously looking for a giant rolling ball or some snakes.

So, ahem. The flat part of this stone is supposed to resemble a flat thanaka grinding stone that you see everywhere. The elephant, well, she was in hiding.

Next comes the Lair of a Million Bats. I was grateful for my hat and suspicious of those folks shining lights up to see who was making the godawful bat noises up there. I was surprised by the lack of visible guano but still not willing to malinger, tempting fate.

After a bit you see the literal light at the end of the tunnel and the cave opens up to a gorgeous bucolic scene of a small lake with colorful wooden boats. Should we take a boat? We had no idea what happened on the boat but there were boats and people waiting to take boats, and a cute kitty that fell in love with Bruce so we were torn about taking a boat or petting a winsome cat that wanted to crawl into his backpack and live the life of Riley in a house paved with Friskies. Some other people got on a boat and disappeared out of view. Empty boats came back and docked. I mean, they had boat drivers but no passengers. Nobody seemed to know what had happened to the passengers but there was no discernible sense of alarm so we decided to leave the kitty and share a boat with two other foreigners. Living life to the fullest, that’s us.

The sweet wooden boat took a lap around the lake/pond, with the boatman rowing silently and all of us silent too, just taking in the lovely day, the cool breeze off the water, the birds dipping and flying, the… fish that jumped into the boat! An adorable silver fish hopped around on the floor of the boat between me and the Austrian girl and without squealing we just grabbed and grabbed and I finally caught the slippery devil and threw him back with a sweet little plop. Kadoink. Nobody said a word, it was like a magic spell. We’re not sure if Svetlana, our other passenger, spoke much English but in any case, we all seemed to have a silent agreement to be silent. Everybody was smiling though.

See that black area? That’s another cave and the small light oval is an opening to another lake. Very cool.

The boat neared a cave wall, which, OH LOOK, had water running under it. Under the cave wall we went, headed where, we had no clue, nobody spoke or conjectured. Out we popped into another pond, then down a canal level with rice fields where egrets and butterflies and dragonflies flew around and then suddenly we were coming ashore and walking back barefoot on the gravel to where we had left our shoes at the cave entrance. I thought of my sister Peggy and I when we were little, toughening up our feet in early summer by running around on rocks and saying “Oochy ouchy!”. But we were too busy discussing this dreamy little episode to say that even though it did hurt and I certainly thought it.

The boat lands near that big tree, and the path leads to the right and back to the parking lot.

Back on the motorcycle we explored a bit more, riding through a notch in the mountains and crossing the river where we had considered climbing to a hilltop pagoda but ultimately that spot was kind of dusty and desolate and the road under classic Burmese rocky road construction, something that can turn away under-motivated tourists such as ourselves.

People can never quite believe us that nearly every road is built in this fashion but here you are.

Our first night in Hpa An we hesitated as we left the guesthouse in search of dinner, and one of the managers sent us to a nearby restaurant that we ended up eating at every single night. He assured us that they were popular with tourists, washed their raw salad ingredients with purified water, and worth trying. And we have to say, we were thrilled to have real Burmese food, to eat the raw cabbage slices and herb garnishes, drink the lime juices with ice, and not get sick at all. What a treat! Here’s the thing, Myanmar. Teach your cooks to feed everybody this way and people will flock to Burmese cuisine. It’s unlike any other. Full disclosure: another guest at our place said that he ate the tomato salad there and got sick. Lucky for us they were out of tomato salad the night we tried to order it.

So here we have three awesome curries, which come with a pot of rice, soup, all these little pickle-y and/or fishy things, a plate of watermelon, a few dessert sweets, and a lime juice each. The bill: $5.

We had left four panniers in Mawlamyine and we had no choice but to return there, so this time we took a boat on the Thanlyin River. It has a roof to keep most of the sun off, a pleasant breeze, was not noisy or smelly, and was pretty relaxing. Unfortunately for Bruce he was fighting a bad cold the entire time we were in Hpa An so he was a bit listless. The boat had a batch of young backpackers who seemed far more engrossed in their phones than the life along the river but what are you going to do? I think they had just arrived in the country and did not realize that Myanmar people wave and smile at strangers and it is loutish to not return the greeting. I tried to do my part and set a good example but the reality of things with us and young backpackers is that we look like the people they are traveling to get away from so they tend to ignore us and our good examples.

It’s super fun to hop off the boat, load up the panniers, and roll away as the unfortunate others haggle with the taxi trucks. Since our guesthouse is next to the bus station and close to the train station, apparently Bruce saw these same backpackers crammed into a truck passing us on the road, on their way elsewhere. He says he smiled and waved at them, but they are still learning, these darling ones, about Myanmar etiquette. They stared at him with vacant gazes. Where was I? Dodging potholes and trucks going 80 miles an hour, not noticing them any more than they notice me. I am serene that I am visible to the right people, that’s all that matters.

Today's ride: 38 miles (61 km)
Total: 273 miles (439 km)

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Comment on this entry	Comment	6

Jen RahnThat cave tour experience, especially the silent boat ride part, was truly like something I would only expect to see in a dream.

I would say that anyone who can enjoy understanding only 0.005% has been freed from insecurities!
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4 years ago

Andrea BrownTo Jen RahnOh, insecurities are very present in my head, thank you very much. But we have found that in Myanmar that baffling situations are generally just fine, unless they involve sketchy bridges or food.
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4 years ago

Jen RahnWell .. whenever an insecurity crawls into your mind space, just think of me, thinking of you as courageous and badass.

And and then smile as it crawls on to someone else's mind space (probably mine!). ;0)
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4 years ago

rich rosenbergCan't believe that Bruce would not carry you and your bike across the "bridge of danger" with the open slats. You two amaze me. Love reading your blog and looking at the photos.

Richie
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4 years ago

Andrea BrownTo rich rosenbergHa, that’s the LAST thing I would have wanted! Thanks for coming along with us, Richie.
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4 years ago

Bruce LellmanTo rich rosenbergI was actually hoping Andrea would offer to carry me. There were two of these bridges and a week later we rode them again! They totally freaked me out!
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4 years ago