Our flight on Mann Yadanapon Airlines departed Bagan for Mandalay at 8:35 am.  I wonder what a vacation would be like without 6 am alarm calls.  Our guide in Mandalay was a delightful woman by the name of Thanda, who first took us to the large Mahanumi temple.  The photos of shaved women in pink robes are nuns or nun officiates.  We’ve been seeing lots of monks of all ages throughout Myanmar, but few women until now.  The country is 90-95% Buddhist, and most males becomes monks at some point in their life for a few weeks or months.  This can occur even after they’ve married and had children.  They are fed a meal in the monastery in the morning and then they have to go ask for food, but only until noon.  For some kids, the monastery is the only education they might get if there are no schools available.

Most of the Buddhas we saw in Mandalay were covered with robes because a full moon celebration for the monks.  There was a competition for selected weavers to weave robes for the statues in 24 hours.  So we missed out on a lot of the normal gold statues that we might have seen.  One of the photos below shows Tom standing next to some cotton bushes they had brought in for the celebration.

After the temple, we went to a gold leaf making place where three workers were pounding the gold nuggets into gold leaf.  The hammers were very heavy and they pounded interwoven stacks of gold and bamboo paper for hours until the gold was thin enough.  This is the gold that they use for enamelware and covering Buddhas and religious structures.

After lunch, we headed to our hotel to check in and found that we had the best room in the Hilton – top floor with our balcony directly looking at Mandalay Hill.  Gorgeous!  From there, we visited the Old Palace grounds, then the Golden Palace Monastery with its wood carvings.  Then it was up to Mandalay Hill with its Sutaungpyei complex of temples and stupas and tourists.  It was planned for us to go at sunset, but not enjoying crowds made up opt for an earlier excursion.  On to Kyauktawgyi Pagoda where the huge Buddha is carved out of a single block of marble, and then finally to one of the largest complexes of all – the Kuthodaw Pagoda, which has 729 slabs inscribed with books of the Buddha’s doctrine.

I forgot to mention that one of the strange things we noticed only in Myanmar.  Many of the Buddha images are surrounded by flashing neon lights.  Seems to be a bit of a contradiction.  What isn’t a contradiction is how devoted the majority of people are.

The next morning, we started by visiting Thanda’s home and meeting her parents, two sisters, and her son.  He is really a cutie!  Then it was an hour-long boat ride to Mingun, a village on the other side of the river with a huge unfinished Phatodawgyi Pagoda and the Mingun bell.  At 90 tons, it’s the largest ringing bell in the world.  I had to skip the rest of the day because of the heat, but Tom kept on sightseeing.  (He’s pretty amazing, even with a cold/cough.)  The next stop was Sagaing Hill with 600 white-washed pagodas and monasteries.  The two main pagodas were the U-Min-Thonw-Sae and Soon-Oo-Pon-Nya-Shin Pagodas where they were adding robes to the Buddha images.  The final stop was a 200 year-old bridge in Amarapura called the U Bein bridge.

Cheryl

 

Cheryl (and Thanda) with pancake makeup on one cheek and a gold leaf on the other

THIS was the view from our Hilton hotel balcony.  That’s Mandalay Hill.  How lucky are we?

Old Palace grounds

Mandalay Hill complex of temples and stupas

 

Kuthodaw Pagoda

Visiting Thanda’s family

    

Heading over to Mingun

 

Sagaing Hill – U-Min-Thonw-Sae Pagoda

Sagaing Hill – Soon-Oo-Pon-Nyaa-Shin Pagoda