{"id":1248,"date":"2019-02-15T13:06:14","date_gmt":"2019-02-15T13:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/?p=1248"},"modified":"2019-02-16T10:03:12","modified_gmt":"2019-02-16T10:03:12","slug":"myanmar-oz-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/?p=1248","title":{"rendered":"MYANMAR & OZ. 13"},"content":{"rendered":"

5th February – 11 days ago now!<\/p>\n

First, we had a visit to a silver workshop,<\/p>\n

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then a ride up the narrow, steep and meandering road to a hill top monastery, the Swenandaw Monastery, and the associated temple.<\/p>\n

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This is getting a bit samish.\u00a0 Bouncy road.\u00a0 Shoes off then on.\u00a0 Bouncy road. Shoes. Etc etc.<\/p>\n

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Then things got better.\u00a0\u00a0 We had a nice peaceful champagne sunset at U-Bein Bridge at Amarapura to look forward to.\u00a0 Lovely jubbly!<\/p>\n

But I guess the coach ride through narrow congested streets down to the lake should have given us a clue about what we were going to find there.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of buses, cars, taxis, Trishaws and all other means of transport that could get there, had got there.\u00a0 The bridge is famous for it being the longest teak built bridge in the world (when it was built).<\/p>\n

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It was built about 1850.\u00a0 It is thought to be the oldest surviving teak-built bridge and runs for about 1.2 kms.\u00a0 Allegedly, it’s unlucky not to make the full crossing.\u00a0 However, it’s so rickety and wobbly with no side rails and plenty of trip hazards, AND millions of people it’s probably less unlucky to get off ASAP.\u00a0 So we disembarked at the half way point and joined our fleet of sampans.<\/p>\n

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We were arranged in a fairly neat and organised raft about 300 m long with a nice view of the sun setting behind the bridge.<\/p>\n

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That and a couple of glasses of bubbly…<\/p>\n

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… made the experience rather unique – unique in a sort of communal way!\u00a0 By pure chance Our sampan was positioned absolutely ideally to capture photos of the local fisherman casting his net in front of the bridge and the sunset!!!<\/p>\n

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To be fair I think he was fishing for tips rather than fish – but hey, the photos were neat!<\/p>\n

Then we had another hour on the road in the dark. Although we didn’t hit any toll booth barriers, we made some pretty fair attempts to unseat a few motorcyclists.<\/p>\n

Enough for now!<\/p>\n

A 90 year old lady was playing golf.\u00a0 But she was too good and hit the balls so far that she kept losing them.\u00a0 Her 95 year old husband didn’t play golf but had 20\/20 vision so he came along to help.\u00a0 She drove off from the first tee.\u00a0 “Did you see where it went?” “Sure I did!”\u00a0 “OK, so where did it land?”\u00a0 “Sorry, I’ve forgotten!!!”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

5th February – 11 days ago now! First, we had a visit to a silver workshop, then a ride up the narrow, steep and meandering road to a hill top monastery, the Swenandaw Monastery, and the associated temple. This is… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-myanmar-2019"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1248"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1279,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1248\/revisions\/1279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tappstravels.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}