Show me the mocha

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September 9

I am really into this place, even if just because it has the Golden Triangle Café where not all the food is deep fried and they do an iced mocha for 1600 kyats that tastes good enough to make you immediately want another one. It takes the staff a while to produce this beverage, so maybe the trick is to order two at once.
Getting here is easy from Mandalay, if slow. Hoisting the pack I wander a block and a half to the ‘pick up’ stop where I am loaded onto a vehicle, told to disembark and eventually shunted onto another one. This takes off like the sulfurous beasts of hell are after it, only to stop about ten blocks away. This seems to be pattern for this mode of transport. We climb a mountain and have to stop half way up so the engine can be hosed down.
Up at Pyin U Lwin (Pnoolin, or something like that, it’s old name was Maymyo which was a lot easier to say), it’s grey, rainy and almost chilly. This was the summer headquarters of the British administration because of its climate. Makes a change from being baked to death in Mandalay.
I find my way to Grace I hotel, which has nice gardens and is slightly damp and crumbly, like almost everything featured in the novel The Inheritance of Loss. That book features displaced Indians and there’s one at this hotel who talks and talks, and I don’t mind him until he charges me a preposterous amount for the most uncomfortable bicycle ever. He is rather peeved I don’t want it for a second day, and I don’t book a shared taxi through him to return to Mandalay which would given him a hefty commission.
When I hire the bicycle, he wants the cash immediately so he can spend it that afternoon. He gives me this ancient, bumpy thing with a brake that disintegrates almost immediately. By comparison, a lovely brand new bike in Bagan costs half, and in Nyaungshwe a third.
Anyway, I grind around town on it looking at colonial buildings and ‘heritage’ hotels, all of which seem to echo with the ghosts of absent customers and the dripping water that has caused ubiquitous water stains.
Earlier I try to find a waterfall but I think I miss a turn off (the Indian had bombarded me with information, none of which actually proved useful). As I head back it pours with rain and I have to don my poncho which keeps off some of the downpour but makes me really sweaty on the inside. I retreat to the Golden Triangle for iced mocha and baked goods.
Eventually it stops raining so I head off searching for relics of the Raj and a place called the Club Terrace for lunch. I am the only customer and I order a green Thai curry, which according to LP will be ‘blisteringly authentic’. It has almost no flavor at all. Heigh ho.
Maybe I would have been better off at December Fresh Milk. This is some kind of iced dairy beverage café, apparently catering to students. Both premises (there are two), look a little dingy, but the name is intriguing. I do treat myself to a spirulina ‘anti-ageing’ beer which can’t have any spirulina in it as looks and tastes like ordinary lager and isn't the slightest bit green. It’s advertising material features slinky women though.
Watch a bit of TV on the ancient model in my room, the Myanmar station looks like the BBC during a power cut circa 1975. Mostly it screens photo montages of ‘amazing Myanmar’. There is one shot of some kind of structure perched on a conical peak which is intriguing. Then I watch an ancient B/W soap opera, which is quaintly seventies too, until I realize the characters all have mobile phones.
On my return the pick up circles town maddeningly, but the driver takes the steep curves at a sensible pace for which I am grateful, some of them rattle down at a backfiring speed that screams break failure at every hairpin bend.
Back at the Royal I am sad to think this will be my last stay here. After an early breakfast it’s off to the bus station for what was probably a reasonable bus for 1956, but is no match for the goat track to Bagan, although it heroically fords a couple of streams and inches past a truck stranded on a particularly suspension-hostile section of rutted path.
Meet Heidi on the bus though, she’s a feisty council worker from Hove with a little ponytail on the top of her skull and a tattoo on the side. We end up hiring Coco and Rambo the horse to drive us around the temples of Bagan the next day, though I sneak in a sunset temple when we arrive with a nice Israeli girl.
Next morning it's off to do 12 temples, lacquerware and find out more about Rambo’s private life (he has a wife and a daughter). I give him some apple and he seems kind of disgusted by it. By the time he’s dropped most of it he realizes it’s quite good.
The next morning we share a taxi to Mt Popa, which turns out to be the impressive structure on the mountain I saw in Pyin U Lwin. It’s most impressive from a distance, too much monkey poo on the stairs as you climb up, but it’s worth seeing.
On the way we stop at a bizarre roadside facility where palm toddy juice is being fermented and a bloke is driving a bullock in a circle to grind peanuts. We both have a go at this and then have to give him money. Well, you have to buy something and I didn’t want any of that hangover- in-a-reused-whisky-bottle toddy alcohol.
Next day Heidi leaves and I cycle around Bagan and New Bagan. I meet Brian, a trader in Hong Kong who has played professional volleyball and done a PhD on hedge fund risk. Nevertheless he managed to fly to Mandalay when he was actually going to Bagan, spent too much on his Mt Popa taxi and got cheated by money changers. His choice of guide book was determined by how many pictures it had.
After that I have to gird my loins for the 4am horror bus to Lake Inle. You’d have thought I’d be done with primitive public transport, but no, the most tortuous bus journey in the world is all in front of me.

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