This is how we spent the second half of our week in Myanmar. Ngapali Beach, otherwise known as paradise.

I found weavers in Myanmar!

We toured a little village near Bagan that had a loom set up for the tour guides to demonstrate weaving for their groups. Then when the group moved on a little old lady came in and fixed the amateur's mistakes.

 At the same village this 91 year old woman was spinning cotton bolls into thread. Behind her is another woman winding the thread into skeins.

In Bagan we went to climb a pagoda to watch the sunset. I prefered to stay on the ground and watch this weaver. She's using the backstrap method to hold the loom taut. She was making an unusual double sided fabric.

Our guide referred to her as a "long neck" but that "she's not from around here." Starting as a young woman, a metal ring was placed around her neck to stretch it. She had a dozen or so rings. She had placed a soft cloth between her chin and the last ring to make it more comfortable to bend her head down as she wove.

These looms are set up in a village outside of the beach town of Ngapali, where we spent the second half of our Myanmar trip. The house is built on stilts and underneath the building there were at least a dozen barn looms. The house next door was set up the same way.  

Most of the looms were being used to weave bamboo placemats. The warps were beautiful, multicolored cottons and the women (it's always women doing the weaving here) placed the thin bamboo sticks in as weft. They wove a few inches of thread between each placemat where they could then cut them apart and hem the edges.

There were a few looms set up to weave yards of fabric (in overshot designs). Unfortunately they didn't have this one for sale. It was beautiful - purple warp with green and white weft. Notice the temple (the x-shaped pieces of wood) being used to keep the fabric stretched taut along the reed. I loved watching the fly shuttle whipping back and forth.

This woman was winding bobbins from skeins of cotton thread. What a great use of old bicycle wheels.

While we were wandering around the "studio" one of my friends, who's a big Korean drama fan, noticed that one of the weavers had some pictures of her favorite Korean drama actors pinned to her loom. There was an instant connection and much giggling amongst the other young women there. My friend, by the way, is what we affectionately call an OWL - old white lady - but Korean drama bridges the gap between all societies, apparently.

Lee enjoyed hanging out at the weaving studio too. He was very pleased, I'm sure, to know that we were spreading our wealth among the various crafters in this lovely country. (Good thing there was some extra space in my suitcase.)

More photos from our time in Bagan.
We drove about 2 hours out of New Bagan (with a stop along the way) to Mount Popa, a temple perched on top of a volcanic plug.

Seven hundred or so stairs wind their way up the side of the mountain.

There are lots and lots of monkeys there. They look pretty much like the macaques we have in Taiwan. Some people buy little packages of corn to feed them while other people ask for donations to clean the poop off the stairs. It's an interesting economic cycle.

The temple itself is beautiful and actively used. There were lots of little chambers for praying and honoring the mountain spirits. Our guide told us the story of the star-crossed lovers and their eventual happy lives spent together on the hilltop. They are the spirits of the temple and people come from all over the region to honor them.

 The views were pretty spectacular.

Jenner wasn't interested in getting too close to the edge.

On our way we stopped at a palm tree farm. Farm isn't really the right word but I don't know a better one. It was a small operation where the family grows peanuts and sesame for oil, and harvests palm juice to make sugar and palm liquor.

The ox works to grind the peanuts and extract the oil.

The climber cuts notches into the palm fruits and hangs small clay pots to collect the juice. It's the tropical version of maple syrup.

The palm juice is either boiled down to make sugar...

 or fermented to make alcohol.

We had an incredibly delicious snack of fermented tea leaves in oil (that's in the middle section) with garlic and roasted peanuts, sesame and chickpeas.

 For dessert we had palm sugar with coconut, sesame, tamarind or plum mixed in.

There were even restrooms available. Here are the squat toilet outhouses.

And here is where you can wash up.

I thoroughly enjoyed visiting this spot along the road. It's clearly set up for the tourist trade and I was happy to spend my dollars there. These people are ingenious.

We left for Myanmar on Friday, February 5 but were delayed at the Kaohsiung airport because our plane was late in arriving. We did make our connecting flight but our luggage did not. We've gotten a bit complacent with our packing because we've rarely had any problems with lost luggage. This trip reminded me to be more careful with my carry-on packing choices. 

On Saturday morning we left (after about 4 hours sleep) for Bagan and checked into this fabulous hotel, the Floral Breeze.

After dropping off our few belongings (after all, our luggage had not yet arrived), we hopped onto our caravan of electric bikes. Note: there were 10 of us in this group, seven teachers from KAS, two teachers from another school in Kaohsiung, and my lovely sister, Jenner.

As we biked from New Bagan, the modern town with hotels, restaurants, shops and residential neighborhoods, to the plains with the ancient pagodas and temples, we passed a herd of cows and goats.

The region is dotted all over with pagodas, some dating from as far back as the 12th century.

We climbed up one and were rewarded with a spectacular view.

Here is an excerpt from the journal I kept on the trip:
I had one of those purely-in-the-moment moments of pure bliss when I looked around me, speeding along a dusty road on my electric bike in the countryside of Myanmar, surrounded by ancient pagodas with the wind in my face and I laughed out loud. Look at me, doing this, being here. Could I have imagined ten years ago, even five years ago, that I'd be here with dust in my eyes, the smell of smoke and jasmine in my nose? It's like being transported onto the pages of a National Geographic magazine with all five senses on overload. I can imagine being old and feeble, losing my here-and-now and I'll still be able to transport myself back to that one moment in time, riding an electric bike through the dusty countryside of Myanmar. That is bliss.

We returned to Taiwan this morning after an incredible week in Myanmar. I'll work on adding photos here after I recharge the camera. Here's the quick synopsis: We left on Friday, February 5 and flew to Yangon for a very short night (we got to the hotel around 1:00 am and left for the airport around 7:00 am). Saturday morning we flew to Bagan and Saturday and Sunday we had a tour guide with us. The first day was spent on electric bikes touring the pagodas and temples in the area and the second was a bus trip out to the countryside to Mount Popa, followed by a sunset boat trip on the Irrawaddy River. Monday we were on our own and, while Lee spent much of the day walking around Old and New Bagan with a friend, a few other folks and I took the electric bikes to visit a village that included a small weaving studio.

On Tuesday we flew to Ngapali Beach and spent the rest of the week lounging at the nicest resort I have ever had the pleasure to stay at, and I've stayed at some nice ones. On Friday we flew back to Yangon for an afternoon and evening whirlwind tour of the city before heading back to the airport for our overnight flight back to Taiwan.

So that's the Cliff notes for our trip. I'll spend the next few days posting the details and the pictures.

In about 12 hours we'll be stepping onto a plane headed for Myanmar (with a quick layover in Hong Kong because there is always a quick layover in Hong Kong). We decided way back in September to join some friends during Chinese New Year break on a tour of this lovely country. Admittedly, I knew nearly nothing about Myanmar before September. I couldn't even tell you why some people still call it Burma. I've done a bit of reading since then and, although I still can't really explain why some people still call it Burma, I've learned a lot.

Here's a country on the verge of yet another opportunity to reinvent itself. It's tough to occupy the space between two big countries, in this case China and India, and come out unscathed. And then when given the chance to be left alone to govern themselves there's been military rule, which never seems to be a good idea. But the new government has been elected, hope is in the air and it's time they had some of my well-earned money to booster their fledgling tourist economy. I'm very excited.

I've gone back and forth but finally decided that I'm going internet-free. I'll post about our adventure when we return in a week.

Now that we're settling back into a routine - which will be a short-lived routine as we have Chinese New Year break coming  up in three days - I will go back to a mundane topic, the weather. It's cold! Not the New England cold of days upon days of sub-freezing temperatures. I get it, that's what cold is. But when the weather was like that last week when we were in Massachusetts I turned up the heat and curled up in front of the fireplace.

Here the temperatures are in the fifties, which doesn't sound so bad except that it's staying in the fifties and there's no heat to turn up. Nobody has a furnace - not the apartments, not the school, not the restaurants, not even the mall. When you get chilled, which is how the fifties feel when the air is moist and the wind is blowing, then you just stay chilled. The apartment is all tile floors and cement walls so once it's gotten cool the whole building stays cold. It's the same with the school, with the added bonus of a constant 20 mile per hour wind outside my classroom door. 

While we were gone Taiwan had record setting cold with the temperatures dipping into the forties for a few days. It's supposed to get close to that this weekend. But the good news for us is that we're flying to Myanmar on Friday and it's going to be in the nineties there. Time is pull out the bathing suits and suntan lotion.