Monywa

By car, 21th March, in the morning, we left for Monywa and along the way we visited many places. We went up to the hill to visit a pagoda with many statues of sitting Buddha. Far away we was able to see our next destination, a pagoda with boobs, because the king who builded pagoda was inspired by his wife's boobs Pagoda is called Kaungmudaw and it's located about 10 km from Sagaing, nearby Mandalay.

Our next stop was really interesting, two recents Buddha's statues: a Buddha lying down and long 90 metres and one huge, standing, 1.70 metres. The last one is a sort of skyscraper with Buddha's form, builded with reinforced concrete and the atructure in steel with 33 floors, with windows and lift out of use. Inside the buildng there was work in progress and it seems to me that work will be long before the end. We went up to the 28th floor (there is 33 floors and the last five was not accessible) barefoot. Outside the temperature was high and you can only immagine how was the situation inside. Inside the floors there are many statues and many walls painting which in the good way reppresen hell's scenes: the orcs that frys the humans, they fishing them...

Not far from the giant Buddha, there is an ancient park with thousands Buddha's statues under the Bo's trees.

Some kilomters far, we've visited a pagoda with almost 600.000 Buddha's statues. There are a lot of big statues, but the majority are little statues that cover all the pagoda's walls.

In the late afternoon we've arrived in Monywa. We've left our luggage in the hotel and after a short coffe break on the terrace of our bungalow, we went for a walk before the dinner. The most interesting thing is a little pedestrian bridge builded in teak wood, a litlle bit drunk. Not even you go up and down as you can see on the photo, also on the left and right. Before the dinner we went in a local pub where we tasted a great dark beer called ABC.

The day after, 22th March, we went ti visit the famous caves in the rock, older then thousand years, but before arriving there we stopped to observe how to extract copper from the ground, as they used to do in the ancient times, without the help from the technology.

Returning by car toward Mandalay, we stopped along the way to visit a little village an to taste two local dishes. The first one was the beer made from the palm and the second one was a really particular thing, not usual taste: mouse on the barbecue. You have to bee brave to eat it but the taste was ok, it was like a good barbecued pork.

Around Mandalay, we stopped to visit teak bridge, U Bein, 1,2 kilometres long which connected the city of Amarapura and Innwa. Some parts of the bridge, damnegged by time, was changed with an ugly structure. In one direction we went walking and we returned toward the car by a taxi boat (the price was 3 dollars). And as usual our last visit was in the sunset time.