The Tingyan Water Festival in Mandalay

We arrived in Mandalay on the second day of the five day Burmese water festival called Tingyan. It was so fun!! Basically, there are people standing everywhere with buckets of water to drench you, especially if you are a tourist (or a women, but I don't want to get into that right now). On the main roads surrounding the Mandalay palace there are stages set up with dancers and Burmese pop govers of Western music playing. From the stages, people with hoses splash all the men dancing beneath and the motos and pick-ups cruising tghe strip. By this point, Myanmar was brutally hot, with average temperatures of 40 celcius in the afternoon. As a result, being drench all day was quite a relief for me.

Unfortunately, me and my other tourist friends all got stoack problems from something on the boat. For Michael and Eva, this meant they didn't leave their rooms for a few days, and I got off the easiest. The afternoon we arrived, me and Daniel went to check out the partying, and some local guys our age insisted we join them on their motos. We then spent the next couple hours driving 5 minutes, getting of at a stage, dancing for five minutes, and then driving to the next stage. In the evening, we met them again to watch a soccer game, but I was feeling too sick so had to leave early.




The next day, we had made plans to visit the Ancient capital cities surrounding Mandaly by taxi. Unfortunately, I was the only one in any condition to go, though I shouldn't have gone anyway and felt pretty sick the whole time. The highlight for me was the first stop, the Paliek Snake temple. It became famous when the three original snakes that lived there died, and shortly after three huge, and friendly new ones slithered out of the woods to replace them. The interesting part was not so much the snakes themselves, but the hordes of local tourists and their excitement at getting to bathe and feed the snakes. One of the other highlights was the longest teak wood bridge in the world, at Amarapura, which was swarming with local tourists celebrating Tingyan. Many were doing so in cafes located in the water.



The third day, I met a local women my age named Chan Mye Thu, who I had originally met in Yangon and wanted to show me around. I told her I was too sick to go, but she looked so dissapointed I went anyway, which worked out well because I was fine once we left. We rode around with her cousins and visited some of the sites of Mandalay as well as the Tingyan celebrations. Tingyan was damppened, unfortunately, because after dancing a bit some jerk tried to grab Chan and kiss her, so we left.




I left Mandalay ny overnight bus, which was the only non-plane transportation I took between cities that did not break down or arrive late. Instead, it arrived really early, which was worse because I got to Bago at 4 in the morning. After sleeping awhile, a did a day tour of the Myriad of Buddha images and religious sites in the town, including the highest stupa and largest reclining Buddha in the country, and maybe the world?