Ace and Penny at Large

To re-route from Inle Lake to Mandalay we had 5 choices: another overnight “VIP luxury” bus, a 9-hour minivan ride, $80 taxi, $80 each taxi+plane, or a $4 all day train ride with an overnight stop. Penny was pulling for the minivan ride, but I really wanted to do the train and I was able to convince her by saying she could blame anything that went wrong on me. Oops.

The first leg of the trip was an all day “upper class” ride from Inle Lake to Thazi where we’d stay overnight and then catch a 3-hour express train the rest of the way to Mandalay in the early morning of the next day. 

“Upper class” on a Myanmar train basically means your booth seat has a thin grimy cushion on it (as opposed to just being wood). And there’s a small metal table in the middle of the booth. We were lucky that no one sat across from us in our booth so we each took our own bench which it was possible to lie down on if you contorted yourself a bit. The floor of the car was wooden planks. It was fairly dirty (I saw a mouse running around but didn’t tell Penny). The cool thing was that, unlike Amtrak trains, we could open the windows all the way and stick our heads out. The train moved super slow so you had plenty of warning if a tree branch was coming. 

On the way to Thazi, we passed our old haunts of the Kalaw train station (where we tried to sleep in freezing cold temps at 4am after our overnight bus from Yangon) and another train station where we’d stopped during our trek to have cookies and rice pudding. At each stop, we’d get off and stretch our legs and find some kind of tasty treat to bring back on board with us. 

The train had a pretty good rocking motion back and forth and a lot of bumps too. It put me right to sleep, but Penny stayed up the whole time and read. Apparently the views were pretty good of villages, mountains and different crops. 

It was dark when we got to Thazi and we were brought to our hotel in an amish-like horse-drawn carriage. At the hotel, we were surprised to see an elephant in the back of a pick-up truck. 

After a few hours of zzzs, the same horse drawn carriage picked us up at 4am and took us back to the train station to wait for the 5am train. Lonely Planet lead us to believe that this leg of the trip would be much nicer than the last, with a dining car and reclining padded seats in upper class. However, the ticketing agent told us there was no upperclass car on this train and we’d have to ride in “ordinary class”. Oh, well, we thought, its only 3 hours.

We waited by the tracks on a bench and a monk came by smoking a cigarette and playing music on his iPhone (Penny said he reeked of booze too) and he sat down and looked through videos on Penny’s cell phone and shared his videos too. 

The train was about a half hour late, and when it came, there was total chaos. Most people from our last train had slept on mats on the floor of the train station and they suddenly got up and crowded the platform. We found the car that our assigned seats were for but when we tried to get onboard, we found the entrance way blocked with a motorbike. We tried another entryway, but it had a motorbike in the way too. Then we noticed people were climbing into the train through the windows! The whistle blew and there was a big rush to get on. Pretty soon we were the only ones left on the platform. It was now or never! We were standing underneath an open train window and Penny started acting like she was going to hoist her backpack through the window and climb in, but I said no, lets climb over the motorbike in the doorway. The train started pulling away and we just barely climbed on. When we were in the entrance way, basically sitting on top of the motorbike, we surveyed the situation: the isles were choked with bundles of wood and giant pots and pans and metal trunks; there was a motorbike blocking every entranceway. People were huddled in corners, sleeping in the isles, climbing over each other like a clown car. 

In front of a lavatory door we found a place to stand. There were some Burmese women huddled on the floor in front of us. The woman directly in front of me looked like she had lost her nose somehow a while back. It was going to be a grim ride, even for 3 hours. 

I started climbing around the train and I managed to climb on top of a pile of metal trunks by a doorway. My head was up against the roof, but I could see the better part of two train cars. There were no empty seats and the passageways were virtually blocked. Still, there were guys climbing slowly and deliberately through the cars selling snacks, coffee, and one guy was even carrying a lid-less pot of soup. It was amazing to watch him climb over stuff while the train was bouncing around and not spill a drop . . .

(Half and hour later . . .)  The conductor and two bouncers appeared to check tickets.  They told us to follow them (we were the only non-Burmese I saw on the whole train) and they guided us over the bikes, etc to an empty bench seat about 3 cars down. 

Here is Penny’s quote of the train ride: “It’s not that I don’t love you, it’s not that I wish you were dead, it’s not that I think we should break up, I just think we should travel by ourselves for a while.”  (she later apologized of course, but I think she still means it).

 

(note: I added a "Yangon Day 3” entry on the blog today too)

 

Thanks for the Happy Anniversary wishes! Will write about Inle in next couple days . . . trying to play catch-up!

 

PS - Penny adds: I hope I can tell my part of this story in person. My version includes a 4’diameter pot balanced on a stack of wood with a small child sleeping on the lid. It also includes a bit on the first day where Ace went off to get snacks and the train came and left *just* as she returned. (That’s really when the “Its not that I wish you were dead" quote happened). What I didn’t realize was that the same train was coming back in 20 minutes (strange but we later did an odd back and forth tour between 2 stations later in the day also).