While the heat in Mandalay was stifling, here in Pyin Oo Lwin it's quite bearable, at about 1000 metres elevation. I accepted Adam's offer to accompany him and his friends, and on Friday morning, after I climbed the Mandalay hill and visited some of the caves at its foot, we were off to drive the two hours into the Shan hills. The car ride was exhausting, so when we finally arrived, I blew off my initial plans to go to walk the botanical garden (which Adam calls the most beautiful in the world) and instead stayed in started to read my new book, "From the land of green ghosts" by Pascal Khoo Thwe, a Burmese fugitive's memoirs about his travels from this most remarkable country to Cambridge, where he went to university. We went to eat Chinese that evening and I tried to chat up some locals afterwards, but without much success, so after everything had closed at around 9:30, I headed back to the hotel. The lodge is a beautiful British colonial house with great teak-floor rooms and most helpful staff, set in a very nice setting overlooking the lake up here. At $30 per night, it's actually above my budget, but given that so far I didn't pay anything for transport or food -- Adam and his friends have taken me around -- I am still within the bounds of the expected. And for sure, those $30 are worth it, I slept great, but woke for an hour to witness a giant storm followed by a downpour of really cold rain. Saturday morning, we visited the local market and I made a reservation for my return flight from Yangon to Bangkok on 4 May. Then, following a recommendation by Adam's friend Eddy, I took a motorbike taxi to a nearby Bhuddist cave and some waterfalls. The cave was great and very unlike the ones we had seen in Laos. It extends several hundreds of metres into the mountain with a river running through it, but stairs and planks have been built everywhere, and there was plenty of light from bulbs hanging everywhere to illuminate the Bhudda statues. Actually, being very close to the Shan state, which hosts the only people with a catholic religion, I was able to witness some statues of Jesus, and also some icons of Bhuddist images with clearly Christian tendencies, such as the halo, giving it all a very weird touch, or at least I cannot place it yet. I returned for a longer chat with Adam and then set off to meet James, a former employee of the British government, who runs a computer school and was able to help me out with his satellite dish to at least allow me to send an email to a friend, who will hopefully publish my blog entries for me. Burma is really cut off, many websites are blocked, SSH seems impossible, as does HTTPS, so the sshd I had bound to port 443 is of no use to me. Also, my cellphone has no reception -- only local cellphones that cannot make international calls are allowed -- and telephone calls from the public booths are very unreliable (I tried a couple of times at least to reach my mother to say I am still alive), and a call to Germany comes in at $6 per minute and seldomly work. My time online is short as I don't want to be a burden to James, and I also want some of his time to talk about Linux and computers in Burma in general. I left eight Ubuntu CDs with him and hopefully he can put them to good use. He seemed interested at least. My further itinerary is beginning to solidify: I shall leave for Mandalay on Monday and head to Bagan on Tuesday, by boat, which a friend from college recommended to me when he read about my expedition. From there, I am considering to fly to Inle Lake and then take local transportation down to Yangon, where I want to spend four or five days. That's it for now, thanks for reading along. I will write more about my impressions of Burma when I have more time, at the latest when I get back home.

Our last night in Chiang Mai saw us eat at the market and take our rented motorcycle for a spin around the town, before falling into bed in order to get up early the next day. In the morning, we ran our last errands, including the buying of a lovely 14 litre Deuter backpack as my hang luggage -- Aline took the backpack I originally brought along with her as a shopping bag -- at a 30% discount, as well as breakfast, before we were off to the airport to part ways. Even though at first I really did not want to take Aline along (because I had planned this vacation as my first ever vacation alone in an unknown area), we had a great time, and I am glad I did. This way, she got a first glimpse of Southeast Asia, which may well be my future home, and if it turns out that way, hers too. In the checkin queue for Mandalay Air, I brushed up a conversation with the gentleman in front of me who turned out to be a regular visitor of Burma. He -- Adam -- supplied me with plenty of advice, and as we ended up sitting next to each other on the plane, he told me a lot about his business and the friends he was going to meet, eventually inviting me to come along to a lodge in Pyin Oo Lwin, east of Mandalay, for the weekend. Adam apparently knows the drills and by his side, I passed immigration and customs in a jiffy, without having my bags searched and no questions asked (not that I had anything to hide, but it saved us some time). His friends were waiting at the airport and gave me a ride into town (about one hour), dropping me off at a nice hotel right by the railway station. I am not yet decided whether and how long I will come along, but it's certainly a great offer, especially to get in touch with some of the people who could pull the right strings to help me in case of problems, or in the future facilitate further "clothing expeditions" into the country. I am to meet them again for dinner in about an hour but decided to check out the town a bit on feet, as well as investigate the Internet situation. As it turns out, it's pretty much all locked, so if you end up reading this entry, it means I either found a backdoor, or managed to sign up a freemail account somewhere, and mailed it off to a friend with write access to my blog. In Pyin U Lwin, I am supposed to meet James, a British expat who runs the only computer in the town, so maybe I'll be more lucky there. He'll surely be an interesting person to talk to with respect to the Linux CDs I brought along, and the Internet in Burma in general. It's a shame I did not set up a DNS tunnel before the trip, but the connection seems too slow anyway. Oh well, good thing I bought that USB stick! Mandalay so far strikes me very similar to the outskirts of Bangkok or Hanoi, I have not encountered too much poverty yet, but it's generally dirty and loud. I will probably not spend too many days here, but am always flexible to go along with what comes around. I do find myself stared at a lot more than I am used to from other countries on this side of the globe. Usually it takes them a while longer to respond to my smile, but if they do it is generally followed by an invitation to come sit with them. "Generally"... ha! I've only just come here, we'll see what time brings. Stay tuned.