Heading North

After a couple of days we decided to bite the bullet and head north. We had had enough of cities so rather than bus/train it straight to Mandalay, up in the north of the country, we decided to break the journey half way in a small town called Meiktila. The snag was that the journey was 9-12 hours and the buses all left mid to late afternoon.....do the maths and you will see that the proposed arrival time was not ideal.

So, after a night dozing on the bus, we arrived at around half past three in the morning and unloaded our bikes. There was NOTHING going on in Meiktila and, unsurprisingly, everything was closed. So, we decided to get the bikes together, which took a couple of hours, and then head off.

We were on the road by dawn and it was wonderfully exciting to finally be on our way, heading through the countryside with fields of rice, dried river beds, groves of trees, small thatched houses and the occasional temple with gilded roofs glinting in the sun. Initially the road was fairly busy, but it turns out that all traffic in Myanmar is between dusk and dawn, so within half an hour, it had pretty much died down and we had the road to ourselves apart from the odd bike.

By midday we had been cycling close on six hours and had managed to cover somewhere in the region of about 35km (there had been a few stops along the way). Meg had had enough, as had the rest of us. Truth be told, this was actually the first time we had ridden the bikes with loaded panniers and with the kids, and we all felt we had done pretty well, though the distance covered may not indicate this!

We stopped under a tree and decided to hitch the rest of the way. The third vehicle to pass by was a forestry lorry loaded, for some reason, with clay braziers, and they stopped for us. We passed the bikes up onto the back of the lorry and climbed in behind them and carried on our way.  A little while later we passed through a cross roads with a 'truck stop' Myanmar style and were offloaded as the truck was going off in a different direction. As mentioned, everyone travels at dawn, dusk or during the night and the drivers spend the hottest part of the day relaxing in a cafe. So we joined them and found a palm thatch 'bed' to clamber on and all promptly fell asleep.

The owner was a friendly guy and we were proving great novelty value (the kids, not Mike and I) so they asked us to spend the night, and vacated the family house so that we could do so. This was a little naughty as you are only meant to sleep in registered places, but we were exhausted and the family were nice, so we stayed. All great, apart from the fact that Sam was attacked by bed  bugs or mosquitos and came away sporting 34 bites on his back and legs whilst the rest of us were fine.