We arrived this morning in Mandalay much later than we were supposed to arrive but at a more reasonable 6am. The four of us shared a pickup truck to our guesthouse and got rooms. We decided to meetup later for dinner and headed out for the day separately. Janelle and I started walking South towards some pagodas but even at 8am the sun was brutally hot. After walking for 20 minutes and being covered in sweat we realized that we had hardly gone anywhere on the map and would need a new strategy to get to the pagodas.
We found a cheap place to rent bicycles and rode them to a monestary that we only looked at from the outside as we had to take our shoes off and walk through several hundred meters of mud to reach the monestary.
We also went to a pagoda with a large golden buddha where only men are allowed to approach the buddha where they add more gold flakes.
After being in the Southwest of Mandalay we rode our bikes to the Northeast to Mandalay Hill. We parked our bikes at the bottom and declined invitations from taxi drivers to drive us near the top. We took off our shoes and started climbing the steps. We had no idea how far it was but didn't think it could be that far, it's only a hill after all. Every 200 steps or so there was another buddha shrine.
There were several times we thought(hoped) that we had reached the top only to go behind another buddha shrine to find more stairs.
and then...
It turns out there are 1,729 steps.
We watched the sunset from the top of Mandalay Hill and then walked back down all 1,729 steps and rode our bikes back to our hotel in the dark.
We met up with our new travel buddies and went out for some dinner and drinks. We bought a bottle of local rum and had a lot of fun.
Check out all of today's pictures in the slideshow below:
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