Monywa

Monywa 

We left Mandalay this morning and headed for Monywa about two hours up the road. 

I am feeling better but had a horrid case of heartburn last night. My stomach is still delicate, apparently.   But aside from a burning hacking cough, my cold is better today. I had a good lunch of steamed rice and some chicken and pineapple. 

Near the end of the day I got pretty tired out but I see progress on the horizon. 

We visited three places today. All of the places were pretty off the beaten track. Bumpy and dusty roads. Tourism is way down in Myanmar so we found few crowds anywhere. In fact, I wouldn't even go so far as to say "crowds". The weather also cooperated. It was warm and dry. I don't think we broke a sweat all day. 

The first place was out to see the second tallest standing Buddha in the world. It is also accompanied by a large reclining Buddha. They are building a seated Buddha at the same complex but it is not completed yet. Before we reached them, we stopped in a forest where there were over 1,000 seated Buddhas. 

The second place we visited was Thanboddhay Paya. It's an impressive temple containing over 500,000 Buddha images. 

After lunch we drove about an hour on horribly bumpy roads to visit Po Win Daung Caves. It's a Buddhist cave complex containing 947 decorated caves. It's carved into a sandstone outcrop and there are lots of carved Buddha statues and mural paintings. The estimate is that these were carved around the 14th century. 

The last picture is sunset photo overlooking the small lake from the porch of my hotel room.