[* Or Myanmar-ese Days for those who don’t wish to be accused of lingering colonialism….]

We’ve been on the road now for over 6 months and, I’ve got to confess, we’re getting a bit tired.  Still LOVING the travelling gig, but every now and again we do sort of start to wish that a giant magic fairy would appear and create our next few weeks itinerary for us.  Preferably an itinerary involving lots of uber-luxe hotels for ridiculously cheap prices, plenty of adventure and a large dollop of cool factor thrown in for good measure.  And most definitively, no sleeping on floors.

As it is, however, I am that fairy.  And this fairy willed pretty strongly coming into Burma that we were due for a bit more of a relaxed time than we’ve chosen to take on most of our travels.  Some high living, fine dining, and maybe even throw in a cocktail or two (I blame the influence of my Mum and Dad, and all those gin and tonics we had in Cambodia.  Medicinal don’cha know).  And definitively no sleeping on floors.  All this to be achieved, however, with no dialing down of the patented James & Lucy adventure-o-meter.

I’m a bad fairy.

Day one had us in perfectly civilised fashion gawking at the Shwedegon Paya, the most famous religious monument in Burma.  And mighty fine it was too, big and gold and gleaming, although frankly less gold and gleaming than somehow I’d envisaged (though James mocks me for this statement, with some fairness given the fairly high levels of goldness and gleamingness on display.  But the damn thing is entirely gold leafed or plated, and I just thought that would make it more densely gold than it was.  My bad).  We’d show you photos but we’d left the SD card in the laptop… oops. Day two had us in a little town up near Inle Lake, cosied up watching Skyfall on Burmese DVD.  So far, so good.

Day three we started our 2 day hike up to Inle Lake.  The hike itself was a nice pretty hike, but this is where I ran into my big failure.  Yep, we slept on the floor.  And, amazingly, for a country that averages 30 deg C or more during daytime, it was FREEZING at night (cold enough to frost).  And as usual, insufficient bedding, blah, blah.  All of which gave James a bad cold / asthma attack and left me slightly fearful he may not ever speak to me again….

Fortunately, Inle saved me.  Not only is the lake gorgeous and the ethnic fishing style picturesque (they row with their legs.  See piccies – I still haven’t worked out exactly how or indeed why they do this but sure looks good), but we were staying in a pretty kick-ass hotel, made up of bungalows on stilts built out over the water.  AND we managed to wangle an upgrade (I looked so desolate at our initial room having hard twin beds they took pity on us. Result!).  We had a lovely lazy couple of days messing round on boats and James has consequently just about forgiven me for the floor disaster, despite the fact that we didn’t manage to see the famous jumping cats of the Jumping Cat Monastery (I really don’t make this stuff up) actually jump, and also despite the fact that the Lake’s famous golden Buddha turned out to be a big golden blob due to slightly over-enthusiastic application of gold leaf.

I think the rum sours helped.

Now if I can only find some fine dining, I’ll be right back on track…..Although this is Burma, not necessarily the world’s great culinary epicenter.

Arrgggh.  Being an itinerary fairy’s tough!