Tag Archives: Mandalay

Mandalay – the U Bein pedestrian bridge

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Spanning a length of 1.2 kilometers (almost a mile) across the shallow Taungthaman Lake, the U Bein bridge has the distinction of being the world’s longest bridge built entirely of teak. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century, and most of its roughly one thousand teak posts are the original ones, all that is left of the wood from a former royal palace nearby. The bridge is surprisingly heavily used, and not just by tourists.

  

 

It’s a good thing they were thoughtful enough to provide those benches. They’re a good place for a person to rest while waiting for their lagging, picture-taking wife.

The surrounding lake is also interesting, providing places for worship, fishing, and, er, other lakeside activities.

  

 

 

 

Mandalay – Motorbike City

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Welcome to Mandalay, the motorbike city! They’re everywhere! Thousands of them! And the lanes drawn on the road (even the direction the traffic is supposed to go) mean *nothing* to them! And the speed limits… Oh. What speed limits?

I have never been anywhere where I have been more terrified to cross the street than in Mandalay.

It turns out that with sufficient ingenuity you can carry almost anything on a motorbike. (Later, in Phnom Penh, it wasn’t uncommon to see four, five, or even (rarely) six people astride a single motorbike.)

 

 

And here’s another good thing about motorbikes: They’re really easy to park in a small space.

 

 

Bicycles, it turns out, are easy to park, too.

 

 

Why the parking areas seem to be segregated by bike type, I can’t say. But they are.

Atop Mandalay Hill, where the tourists go for the view in all directions, and the natives go to practice English by speaking with the tourists, I met a young man who was studying engineering at the university. From the hilltop, he showed me the building that housed his university. It seemed pretty far away, and so I asked whether, after the demonstrations a few years ago the government had moved this university out of the downtown part of the city, as they had in Yangon. He said that yes, they had. And he now had to commute fifty minutes each way entirely across Mandalay on his motorbike every day to get between his home and the university, compared to fifteen minutes before. Just keeping the city safe from troublesome students while adding to the traffic problem, the need for gasoline (which is in short supply, and expensive), and global pollution.

 

 

Southeast Asia

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In the near future, I am going to begin posting a (long) series of blog entries about Dan’s and my recent trip to Singapore, Myanmar, and Cambodia. I’ve been through a first-pass edit of literally thousands of photographs, and I’m culling the best few that will give you a flavor of what the places, the people, and the activities were like, without putting you into visual overload.

So that you can get a sense of the big picture, here’s a table of contents, of sorts. I’ll start with Myanmar (Burma), move on to Cambodia, and then show Singapore. This is not the order in which we traveled. We traveled to Singapore first, then Myanmar, Cambodia, and (briefly, no pictures) Thailand. However, the order I’m using makes sense as we will move from the most removed from what we consider the “modern” world to the most modern.

Inside Myanmar, I’ll show some highlights of Yangon (Rangoon, until recently the capital) first, then Bagan (a UNESCO World Heritage site), bustling Mandalay, and the enchanting and surreal Inle Lake. Each of these may require more than one entry, so it’s going to be a longer Web journey than the actual trip. But I hope you’ll stay with me on this visual adventure!