The trip officially ended on New Year's Day, but we decided to hang around in Burma for a few more days. We got up very early in the morning and headed to the riverfront port, which looks like a cross between Mad Max and Waterworld. We climbed aboard a barely seaworthy vessel and began our couple hour boat trip upriver to Mingun, yet another abandoned capital. 
We then spent the rest of our tour of Mandalay inspecting Burma's industrial revolution. As you can see, Burma is unlikely to be the next export dynamo coming out of Asia. 
While the factories are antiquated, the city itself has got a pretty modern, bustling city center. Chinese investment has been pouring into the country, and Mandalay is a big beneficiary of this. As a result, the business district looks quite similar to a small Chinese city.
Right next door to the giant book is 
this classic teak temple, which is covered inside and out with beautifully carved panels. The building was actually part of the royal palace, and served as King Mindon's bedroom. When he died, his son had it moved here and converted into a temple. Since the rest of the palace was destroyed during the second world war, this is the only building left to give an idea of what the palace used to look like.
There's a large collection of recordbreaking religious buildings just outside the palace/fort. 
While this sort of vanity building created ancient wonders like the pyramids, it's a testament to the backwardness of the Burmese monarchy that they were able to muster enough slave labor to create these structures in the mid to late 1800's. The Kyauktawgyi Paya (not pictured), built in 1878, is famous for its huge seated Buddha carved from a single block of marble. It took ten thousand lucky men two weeks to lug the marble block to Mandalay. What is pictured here is Kuthodaw Paya, which is actually not a building but the world's largest book. The king thought it would be fun to have the entire Buddhist scripture, the Tripitaka, engraved in marble on stupas, so the entire book is engraved on 730 marble slabs, and each slab is mounted on its own stupa. The 730 whitewashed stupas is an amazing sight, although not very practical as a book, definitely not something you can bring to the beach for some light reading. When it was finished, a team of 2400 monks formed a nonstop relay, and read the slabs day and night continuously for six months.
We returned to the boat around sunset, just in time for some pretty sunset photos of Sagaing. We had another good dinner on the boat,then had a few drinks at the bar, pictured here to reinforce my earlier comment that the boat was a bit dowdy. Unfortunately, Somchai got an upset tummy (that was a euphemism) and was stuck in bed the next morning, so we missed a big group expedition. Instead we hung around the deserted boat, and got to take some nice photos of Somchai modeling without the distraction of the other annoying guests.
Just when the scenery was moving from relaxing to monotonous we began to approach Mandalay, signalled by the big white bridge crossing the river. The boat docked across from Sagaing, just outside Mandalay. It's a series of hills that served as the capital of Burma after the fall of Bagan, for all of about fifty years during the 1300's. As usual, they busied themselves covering the hills with stupas, although thanks to its proximity to Mandalay, these religious buildings are still in use. The hills are covered with dozens of temples and monasteries, and the gleaming stucco and gold stupas are quite a remarkable sight.
