Wednesday, 14 August 2013 – Around Mandalay, Myanmar

On Wednesday we shared a taxi and guide with Steve from Melbourne and Lili from Barcelona and visited some places outside Mandalay.

Our guide took us to the busy Mandalay Jade Market first. We saw jade in all forms – raw and uncut dark grey or yellowish blocks, slices of jade, and finally jade being hand cut and polished into teardrop shapes and bracelets by young men using machines operated by foot pedals.

At the end of our visit to the market we saw traders sitting in front of desks with piles of teardrop shaped stones buying and selling various qualities at prices ranging from $5 - $8,000.

Our next stop was a monastery in time for us to watch the monks and nuns going in to have lunch (their last meal of the day) at 11:00 am. We watched a procession of chanting monks, nuns and novices filing into the monastery dining room where they sat down on the floor at low tables to eat in absolute silence.

We were invited to join as well – and we also sat down at our own table to eat. To our surprise the food was really good with mountains of rice and a big selection of vegetable dishes and couple of meat dishes to choose from.

Afterwards we went to Sagaing Hill where we visited a couple of temples and enjoyed magnificent views of the Ayeyarwady River and endless golden pagodas glinting of the surrounding hills down to the waterline.

In the afternoon we caught a boat across the Ayeyarwady River to Inwa (Ava) island.

200 year old teak monastery

Picturesque stucco ruins

Our final stop for the day was the U Bein teak bridge (the world’s longest teak footbridge) at Amarapura for sunset.

It was very cloudy so there was no sunset but it was still picturesque in the late afternoon light and we walked across the bridge along with large numbers of villagers, monks and trinket sellers.