Toungoo, Myanmar
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Our first day of our roadtrip was great. There are so many sights to see on the road that I could not stop looking out the window. You will see packed pickups driving past, horses and cart, lots of people on bicycle and people carry all sorts of crazy loads. Everything is done by hand here, it really is like stepping back in time. Our first stop was a WWII war memorial , then in Bago we visited a pagoda with a 4-face budda. It was about 6hrs drive to Toungoo where we spent the night in the Myanmar Beauty guesthouse. This is a family run place overlooking paddy fields. They grow many vegetables and fruits in the garden - mangos, pine-apple, bananas, lemons, limes, mangosteens, passion fruit, coffee bushes etc. It is interesting to see how these fruits grows and the owners explained to us how rice is grown and gave us a tour of the garden. The family are 4 doctors with a number of guesthouses. They are very knowledgable and told us many interesting facts about Myanmar. For example, this is the only country I know of where the value of a car increases the older it gets
. People don't use banks as inflation is currently 50% and the banks are government run only giving 10% interest and the people don't trust them anyway. Instead people will buy gold and jewellery, cars and houses. The guesthouse is built from teak and is very sturdy. Teak is very valuable here in Myanmar and during our time on the road we had seen many trucks loaded (overloaded) with teak tree trunks destined for port via the river where it is exported.
The guesthouse was a bit pricey but they treated us so well and made us a huge dinner (only 5000 kyat together) containing many of the fresh vegetables grown in the garden. The breakfast the following morning was another treat. We spent just one night here and made our way up to Kalaw the next day.
