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.

Our time in Chiang Mai is nearing an end, and with the end my lonely adventure to Burma is coming closer. Having had three days left in the city when I last wrote and deciding that a two day trek would just be too stressful, and the chance of it not meeting our expectations too high, we chose to stay put and get the most out of the city. We hired a motorcycle Monday night and rode around the town for a while, finally ending at an Italian restaurant for dinner. Aline is half Italian, and not quite as promiscuous as myself when it comes to Thai food, and had I known how much joy even my willingness to eat Italian in Asia would have caused in her, I may well have gone easier before on my motto not to eat anything but the local food. Dinner was quite good, although the wine (they only had one open white, red wine was not an option for me in the heat) again met confirmed my dislike of Chardonnay: it's oily and sour, or at least I have not yet had a taste of a different one. With the motorcycle waiting for us downstairs, I was unable to stay in bed for long, and we got up early the next morning to head to the Mae Sa waterfalls in a national park just 30 kilometres north of Chiang Mai. After a bit of zig-zag navigation, trying to get out of the city which has just a little too many one-way streets for foreigners, we didn't have any more problems reaching the site, disembarked and hiked around a bit until after about 30 minutes we got to one of the falls with a lot of Thai (no tourists whatsoever) bathing and trolling about in the water. We joined, of course. With the plan to drive further north to visit the "Hmong Lodge" and another waterfall, we walked back and I could not believe it when my pocket did not contain the motorcycle keys anymore. Damn. Once again I felt foolish that I just cannot seem to keep my stuff together, and I punished myself running back to the falls while Aline was already making arrangements for our rescue. Fortunately, I eventually did find the keys just in time to call off the arrangements, and -- soaked in sweat -- we were on the road again. I really should exercise more. About 30 minutes of a beautiful ride down into the park, we reached the "Hmong Lodge", only to find it to be nothing more than an overpriced lodge, offering its guests "local culture" in the form of shows and displays of Hmong handicraft work. We enjoyed the most expensive beer of our trip up there, then turned around and stopped at another waterfall, where a bunch of Thai youth had assembled. With a subtle intention to crash their party, we joined, but the heavy rain that started after a few minutes drove those intentions away. After spending 15 minutes-or-so sheltered in a hut with some of the Thai and making almost no contact, we took off and rode the bike back to Chiang Mai, stopping by one of the cinemas and deciding to spend the evening watching "Ice Age 2". We got back to the hotel just in time to meet our tailor to fit the shirts, trousers, skirt, and jacket we had ordered, sending her back with quite a few changes to be made. Then, with an hour left to kill, we opted for a massage before the movie and headed into the shop we thought the hotel owner had recommended. Turns out that we took the wrong door, and while Aline was getting a good knead, I found myself under the incapable hands (and feet) of an overweight Thai woman, who apparently seemed to think that litres worth of massaging oil would somehow obscure her inability to massage muscles and instead apply moderate pressure to my bones only. I told her a bunch of times but really only made it worse -- in the end I must have upset her to a point where she started bouncing up and down on me with the clear intention to torture and eventually murder me... but fortunately the 60 minutes were over just in time. The movie theatre itself wasn't spectacular (and I didn't think the movie was either), and if it hadn't been for the national anthem and some low-budget film flashing pictures of the King, while everyone stood and paid due respect to him, I'd have said it was just another cinema night I'll quickly forget. At 70 Baht entrance fee (about 1,40 EUR) it didn't hurt either. The evening ended as we met some folks from a bar back in Ayutthaya and chatted for a while, learning that the Thai elections are on today (Wednesday), and as a result, no alcohol is served in the city throughout that day, as well as after 18:00 o'clock the night before. Tough luck for them, especially after we succeeded in getting another can each while they did not. The trick is simply to take the beer out of the fridge and hand over the money without asking questions. So today, our last day in the city, was supposed to be museum day, with the tribal museum, the national museum, and possibly even the insect museum on our list. Negotiating with a tuk tuk driver for the right price, it then occured to us that it's cheaper anyway to hire a motorcycle at 200 Baht/day (4 EUR) -- and way more fun -- so we again hired a bike and drove off to find the museums closed due to the elections. Not that this upset us in any way; we rode back to the hotel, spent the hottest hours of the day reading by the pool, and went for another cruise in the afternoon, returning again just in time to meet the tailor a second time; while my shirts and trousers are fine (and beautiful), Aline's skirt needed yet another modification, so we are expecting her again tomorrow. By the way: yesterday we rode a Yamaha Mio 125cc automatic bike, and today I settled for the Honda Dream 125cc manual, which I had ridden before in Laos and which seemed like a good bike. If I ever have the choice again, I would certainly go with the Yamaha, which was a joy to ride, especially since this has been only my third time on a bike. Now, the last night in Chiang Mai will probably see us dining somewhere, packing, running the last errands, and sleeping in, so we can actually make it to the airport tomorrow in time and rested. I hope I'll be able to continue writing from Burma. Apparently, network access is restricted, so I fear I may have some difficulty logging into my servers. However, I bought a USB stick today, and with that, and maybe A Little Help From My Friends back in Zurich, I can publish entries nevertheless. Stay tuned.

This third day of the Songkhran festival in Chiang Mai, we again failed to stay dry, but escaped the fury a bit with a two hour river cruise, including a visit to an herb garden, and an expedition to the zoo. The zoo was unlike anything I would have expected, but showed how lazy the Asian people really are: most animal cages were accessible by car, and it was somewhat foolish of us to try to reach the aquarium by foot, but we were lucky to have a friendly Tai give us a lift with his pickup. We also witnessed the feeding of a panda bear, which is apparently a rather rare animal, or at least that's the way it was hyped to be. My favourite was the black panther in a cage with a leopard, in between the tiger and one of the very rare white Bengalese tigers. This tiger's skin is white and thus makes it rather difficult for it to attack in the wild. I described it as a evolutionary permutation with low fitness. Aline claims that these tigers are artificially bread these days, which makes it all the more peculiar. We returned to the city for another round of splashing bveefore stopping over at Julie's Guesthouse, the place where I was to meet a lady running clothing and other support items to refugee camps. It turns out that this is a programme by D.A.R.E., in which her guesthouse participates, running the goods to the Burmese refugees living in Thailand. The clothing I had brought along are destined for people in Burma though (there is surely an equal need), so I guess my options are down to a single one: take them with me, skip the monestary, and travel the country myself. So today I went ahead to buy my next two air tickets: I am flying out of Chiang Mai to Mandalay on the 20th, and I return to Bangkok from Yangon on the 4th of May. That will give me more or less 13 days in Burma (I am calling it Burma now, not Myanmar, since that is what the Burmese and the Thai people use) to get from Mandalay to Yangon, and having heard a bunch of times now that travel within Burma isn't all that easy, I figured out a way to do it: I shall spend a few days in Mandalay and meet some people, then hopefully find a student with good English skills to embark with me on the journey, meaning I will pay travel and hotel expenses for him/her, in addition to a flat, daily "wage". Until then, Aline and I have 4 full days left in Chiang Mai, so the 1-2 day trek has once again risen high in my list of priorities. Tomorrow, we are going to cooking school, and there is also rock climbing, a go-cart track, and various other things to keep us occupied. Thanks for reading along.

We spent eight hours today, starting at around 10:00 o'clock, completely soaked with water. I had read about the Thai New Year celebration "Song Khran," but I would not have believed it to be as extreme as it turned out to be. But let me start where I left off: Phitsanulok. Following the recommendation of the director of the lower northern Thailand Tourist Authority (TAT), we spent the evening by the river running through Phitsanulok, where the Thai were celebrating the "food festival" -- it seems to me that the Thai, or Southeast Asian folk have a festival for almost anything to make it around the year... The road along the river was banked with little booths selling just about everything, from edible to handicrafts, with fair booths offering games such as darts, jumping castles, and live bands in between. Strolling around, we had a bite of the most appealing things -- I did stay away from roasted cockroaches, maggots, and other bugs this time, for I had already sampled them in Vietnam and felt no particular need to repeat the experience, although it was not revolting back then at all: it's just a little meat with a lot of crust that you don't want to eat, and the taste isn't particular. An excellent meal of noodles with some sort of sweet-spicy sauce, together with a beer and the company of some young Thai boys ended the evening for us and we returned to our hotel rather soon, with the intention to get up early to finish our errands and make a run for Sukhothai. So with our plane tickets and some fresh cash, we set out for "Sgt. Tawnee's Folklore Museum", a private collection of traditional Thai "things" -- tools, traps, toys, instruments, clothing, ... just about everything... Sgt. Tawnee was a poor soldier who realised that people were forgetting about how their ancestors went about to solve everyday's problems and consequently started collecting anything and everything -- a truly remarkable and beautiful collection! After a so-so Thai massage (see forthcoming blog entry), we quit the city by bus to arrive in Sukhothai about an hour later, where we were met by the pickup van of the guesthouse we had booked, also following the recommendation of the TAT director: we are staying at the Ruean Thai Guesthouse, a place with cozy rooms, a swimming pool, and very friendly staff, for about 10 EUR a night -- the best guesthouse I have been to in three vacations in Southeastasian countries, three thumbs up, I can recommend it to anyone coming to the area! We had just settled and taken a shower when the hotel clerk notified us that the director was waiting downstairs to take us to the "light show". We boarded his van, together with his family and colleagues, and drove about an hour to Srisatchamalai Historical Park, where we arrived just in time to witness an impressive ceremony, part of the New Year celebration: old people were sitting in rows on chairs, and younger folk passed from one to the next, pouring drops of water into their hands as a form of respect to the elderly to help them stay cool in the dreadful heat of the month. Naturally, we lined up and did as the others did -- and found us filmed and greeted by a television crew afterwards for an interview. Not wanting to be a burden to the director and his family, we followed the suggestion to stroll around in the park for about an hour, until we returned to the agreed meeting point. There, we found that mats had been rolled out on the lawn in front of one of the temples, and maybe 200 Thais were sitting and dining. The director invited us to join them, and we enjoyed Thai cuisine until dusk, when everyone got up for the national anthem and the show began. At first, a famous Thai singer (so we were told) performed a couple of folk songs and we learnt that, (to my knowledge) unlike European folk songs, the Thai sing songs telling real events in history. A fashion show of old, traditional Thai clothing followed, and finally, the stage was set for a performance of the history of Sukhothai. People were all over the place, fighting, dancing, or just "ruling" (as the king(s) would do), and a voice recounted the story, which one of the director's daughters translated for Aline, I was busy taking pictures. Fireworks accompanied the scene, along with flying objects consisting of a real flame underneath a balloon made of rice paper. Most flew high and far away, some got stuck in trees and went up in flames. After the show, I had a chance to see some of the costumes and must say that I am deeply impressed, not only by how Thai people used to dress, but also by the love and care the people put into the show to make it as authentic as possible. Interestingly, only one other tourist ("fallang") was at the event, something the tourist director wants to change in the future -- good thing we witnessed the "pure event"... I seem to prefer places not frequented by tourists, and in the Thais seem to be continuously surprised that we are not heading for the beaches in the south following our time in the north. Back at the hotel, we fell into bed, exhausted from the day and the nightswim in the pool. I got up this morning to find my ear clogged with water -- must have been the late swim. The guesthouse owner insisted to take me to a pharmacy to find some eardrops, and I hope this nuisance will go away soon. We rented a motorcycle for the day and headed in direction of the old Sukhothai city, or the Sukhotai History Park, as it is also called. Waiting for our photo chip to be beamed to CD, we made our first encounter with the way young people like to celebrate the New Year (which officially started today): all over the city, people rode around on the back of pickup trucks, emptying buckets of water over other people. We bought ourselves a water gun and plunged in for the fun. It didn't take 30 minutes until we were soaked, but nothing could stop us. The old city is maybe 10 kilometres away, and the drive was the most unforgetable motorcycle ride I'd ever had: all along the sides of the road, people were filling buckets and splashing everything that passed -- being on a motorcycle with merely a water gun, and as "fallang" (foreigners), we were naturally the primary target for just about everyone, so by the time we had reached the city, we had soaked up half an ocean each. We stopped by a group of kids, gave our water gun to the smallest one, bought a new one, and teamed up with them to fight the passing vehicles. Oh what fun! Dripping, we made our way to the park after a while, and strolled around some temples, the market, and many more water fights. Even though the water obscured the heat, we still didn't feel like taking the barrels of water we had collected for a walk and didn't last too long before we were on our way back, destined to stop again with our allies (the kids) to make sure no car and no passenger got by unwashed. The Thai also crumble up chalk, mix it with water, and smear it into each other's face -- you can imagine how we looked like after a few minutes: soggy and chalked. Finally, we made a run for the hotel and got back at about 16:00 o'clock for the first time of feeling "dry" in eight hours. Now, after some time at the pool, we are loathing for dinner but daren't go for the city as we are wearing our last set of clean, dry clothing; I doubt the Thai lay their buckets to rest at seven and call it an evening. Fortunately the hotel offers food too, so we'll likely be boring and stay in. Tomorrow morning is our flight to Chiang Mai for more of the wet fun. I'll keep you posted. Thanks for reading along.