Day 47, March 5

We bought tickets. The train was delayed again. We watched the sunrise at the station. We had some coffee. But the train still hadn’t arrived. Instead of 7 a.m., we left at 9. This time our tickets were also in a first-class carriage, but not nearly as nice.

The seats in this strange carriage rotated 360 degrees, so the conductor turned our seats so that we wouldn’t be sitting face to face with the Myanmar passengers. He fussed around, ran off for a hammer and then for a screwdriver — it all looked quite amusing. The seats were comfortable and soft, though they swayed a little, apparently because they were being turned back and forth.

It was a narrow-gauge railway, and the little carriage sometimes swayed from side to side. We were going uphill, gaining altitude, very slowly — about 12–15 km an hour. The railway was laid through forests, so we often seemed to be traveling through a narrow tunnel, brushing against branches, and through the window there was nothing to see but impenetrable thickets.

Because there were sometimes steep climbs up the mountain, a couple of times we rode in what seemed like a zigzag: first the train went forward, then it seemed to back up the hill, then forward again. Like a mountain road, only made of railway tracks.

We passed through small, very poor villages.

At one of the stations, the train was doused with water - apparently it had overheated badly.

And so, after 6 hours on the road and only just, we arrived at our destination for today, the town of Kalev, located at an altitude of 1300 meters above sea level.

This little town is popular with tourists because treks are organized from here through fields, mountains, and villages to Inle Lake. At first we also thought of going on such a trek, but then we changed our minds when we saw what the mountains are like here.

So we simply decided to spend the night here and see what kind of town it was. It wasn’t far from the station to the hotel, so we went on foot. We were quickly checked into one of the hotel’s best rooms — with windows and a balcony, overlooking the town.

We ate at the café next door, once again having green tea salad and noodles with vegetables. We were already stuffed with the salad; it’s tasty, but it’s very hard to eat a lot of it — it’s somehow very oily and concentrated.

We climbed the hill by the stairs — and found a monastery with monks and a beautiful view of the town. Kalaw turned out to be a small town, so one night here is quite enough. We wandered a little more through the streets of the town, and then went to the hotel.

We really wanted to sleep after a sleepless night, so we went to bed at 8 p.m. and slept until 8 a.m. like logs.