We all boarded small boats to watch the sun set over the lake, which as you can see creates a really beautiful sillhouette of the bridge and the monks walking their bikes across it. Weirdly, I was reading a fictional book about life in colonial Burma called the Glass Palace, and the cover of the book was exactly this picture, I think with the same monks in the same position.



We then returned to the boat for our New Years Eve celebration, which included an elephant dance, fireworks and lots of drinking.

There are four ancient, almost deserted cities surrounding Mandalay that used to be capitals. We ended the day at one of these, Amarapura. As usual, it was only the capital for a few decades, and when it's time of glory was over, the king had all the old buildings dismantled to provide building materials for the new capital. There is a huge monastic school here, where thousands of young boys study to become monks. And there's the extremely picturesque U Bein bridge. When the capital was moved from Amarapura to Inwa, the king used some of the Amarapura building scrap to build this impressive bridge, which crosses the Taungthaman Lake en route to Inwa. Of course, once everything was moved over the bridge from Amarapura to Inwa, the bridge wasn't really needed since Amarapura no longer existed, but it's still here, and at 1.2 kilometers, it's the longest (and narrowest and most rickety) teak bridge in the world.