10-5 (Thursday) Mandalay flood

I slept until 3 a.m. YEAH! It poured torrential rains last night. It was still raining this morning but not so hard. The “guys” picked us up at 8:15 after we had breakfast in the hotel. The first place we went was Mandalay Hill. The streets were flooded. The water was very deep – up over the sidewalks. We had to creep along. Needless to say we had to take off our shoes to go up to the pagoda on top of Mandalay Hill. The view looking down on the city was quit spectacular. (Driving up in the car was one hair pin curve after another.) I asked Ko oo to please drive slowly going down and he did.

We went to some other temple/pagoda (The Big Book Pagoda.) The ticket booth person said we needed to pay $10 US so that we could go in all the other pagodas on our list in Mandalay. We were sick of going in pagodas and said we didn’t have any dollars. We asked how much it was in Kyats. It turned out to be more than $10. We said we weren’t going to pay it. That was that. I know U Tin Wint was a little worried about what he was going to do with us the rest of the day. We told him we wanted to go shopping at the market. He took us to a local place but they didn’t have anything we were interested in. We walked to a couple other places and finally found the shop of “Mr. Slim.” He was selling things from the Naga tribe. He spoke excellent English and had interesting stories to tell. His family was very wealthy at one time. They originally came from Pakistan. His grandfather worked for Upjohn out of the states. Then the new regime moved in and they lost everything. I bought several things from Mr. Slim. He wanted $40 for everything . I got it all for $30 which was too much but I wanted it. We told U Tin Wint we wanted to buy some carvings. He took us to a “carving” factory which wasn’t what we had in mind. We didn’t buy anything. We told him we wanted to go to a Supermarket. As we were driving there the roads were so flooded that the water started coming into the car. We had to hold our feet up! Toyota should make a commercial with our car – it just keeps going and going. Some cars and motorcycles were stalling out but we just kept plowing through. The bad thing was that you couldn’t see where the pot holes were.

We finally arrived at a very nice shopping mall. U Tin Wint walked in with us to find the “food court.” We told him to go on and do his own thing that we wanted to stay and shop. He looked relieved. We had potatoes with chilies for lunch, boy were they hot! Dinki you would have died. We walked around the mall and lastly went in the supermarket to buy food for the night and the next day. We walked along the streets but didn’t see anything interesting. We hired a “blue” taxi for 2,000 to take us back to the hotel. This kind of taxi is a mini, mini truck. The driver sits in the cab and we cram into the open back. The streets were still flooded but he made it through to the hotel.

We got back about 4:00 but were happy for the time to wash our hair, do laundry and pack to go to Inle Lake the next day.

The “guys” came by and brought our backpacks which we had left in the car. They weren’t staying at our hotel. They said they were going to pick us up at 5 a.m. so we could try to get to Inle Lake by 1:00.

Before we went to bed the thunder was so loud it shook our room. I didn’t know how we’d be able to get through the streets in the morning if they were more flooded than today. The infer structure in this country is nil.