Mandalay Photo Gallery by spoonbender at pbase.com

Mandalay

Mandalay was a surprise. One of those places where you are in a taxi/tuk tuk/whatever from the airport and you're going through shitty little industrial area after shitty little industrial area and you're thinking, "okay, so when do we get to the nice old town?" or wherever you are staying.

In Mandalay, you never get there. The city itself is a dusty, dry, and ugly. It's built on a grid around the old Palace, which is surrouned by a mote. In four days, I never got my shit together enough to go inside. LP describes it as not terribly interesting and I ended up really enjoying Mandalay, despite it being, basically, a shithole of Da Nang, Viet Nam and al-Hudaida, Yemen quality.

But there are tons and tons of monasteries from Mandalay's golden age and these are interesting and worth the trip itself. There are also some ancient capitals in the area. Of the four on the tourist route, I only made it to two, mostly due to lethargy and growing temple fatigue. I saw Amarapura and Mingun. Amarapura has the fabled U Bein Bridge. BUSLOADS of tourists are deposited there all day long, tasked with getting a photo of, ideally, a monk riding a bicycle carrying a parasol in sillhouette.

I never got this shot. There are plenty online, however, if you want to see what this might look like.

The best day in Mandalay was a day I just set off toward the Irrawady on a rented bicycle and ended up in a small farming village. It was very quiet, very beautiful, and a fun ride.

Mandalay was also the place where the locals first turned surly. It was here I had a gang of kids at a moneastery following me around yelling "Hello, Fuck You!"

By Bagan, the locals had become so surly, so obnoxious, I really began to dislike Myanmar.

Interesting story. On the ferry back from Mingun I sat on the bow of the ship with a beautiful Italian woman and I told her the story of the kids yelling "Hello, Fuck You!" at me. She laughed, smiled, shrugged, and then said a curious thing: "I guess we only have ourselves to blame."

Ah, the white man's burden. How heavy it's become!

Trishaw driver, Mandalay	Dusty old shitty Mandalay	He was wearing a santa mask. What choice did I have but to photograph him?	Dusty old shitty Mandalay	Mandalay shop	Typical Mandalay house
This guy has about 3 seconds to DUCK	Part of the old Palace. Never made it inside	Palace wall	The moat was nice. I jogged once around the palace. Took 50 minutes, so I figure about 9 kilometers.	Very beautiful. I guess I should have gone inside	They had little exercise thingies along the path around the palace
Nice golden stupa by the Irrawady (this is a creek by the Irrawady)	The grandest, most beautiful of Mandalay's many grand monastreries	Carving	Detail	Rather ecstatic looking	Nice body
Angels?	Wood carving	Another	This was an amazing building	I went through a phase of obsessively photographing guardian lions	Here's one at a Amarapura temple ruin
Against a field of gold	I probably have 80 of these	I couldn't stop	I liked especially guardian lions with plants growing on them	This one was SO lifelike	This guy seemed to be dressed like a Nat statue I saw a lot
It was so quiet and nice the day I rode out to the Irrawady. All this, only a kilometer or so from Mandalay madness	Farming village	A little stone bridge	Same little stone bridge	Crossing a tributary, on the way to the farming village	Tributary life
Pastoral, peaceful. The best day in Mandalay	Ah, symmetry	Ox carts	Stopped for tea	Very young monk	Irrawady village kid
Another Irrawady village kid	This girl was cute	Huh?	Rowing on the Irrawady, on the way Mingun	I cut the sky out of this because my sensor was so dusty, it was full of spots	These lonely shots get me. I suspect they are too schmaltzy.
Ugly American stands in front of Mingun Paya, folds arms	Mingun Paya	Only one of the four doorways is painted.	It's white	So, you go inside the doorways of the fabled old Mingun Paya, and what do you see? Hippie graffitti	Mingun
Same temple, different white balance	Rode a bicycle to Amarapura, stopped to take this photo	More river silhouettes	Lord Buddha, with LONG fingers.	River life, big stupa	U Bein Bridge: No Parasol-holding Monk, god-damn it!
U Bein Bridge	Amarapura, outside a monastery	Amarapura	A small village just beyond Amarapura seems to make its living off a garbage dump in its midst	This little girl's job is to sift through what looked like charcoal. God knows what she was looking for.	One of the kids living in the village by the garbage
Her too	Stone cutters souq, about halfway to Amarapura	Random temple, downtown	Stone cutters souq	Footballing novices, temple by the stone-cutters souq	Stone cutters souq
More	Buddha-palooza	Lord Buddha gets an appendectomy	View from Mandalay Hill	Again	Novices
Temple detail	Disciple conclave	Some kids led me through a temple.	Living quarters of a nunnery	She seems to have a hole in her head	Golden temple things
Another random temple.	Same one. I forget where. Name, everything.

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