Did he mention having seen any species deserving a TLD "Lucky bastard" comment?
~Thylo
Chlidonias Goes To Asia, part three: 2013-2014
- Thread starter Chlidonias
- Start date
Did he mention having seen any species deserving a TLD "Lucky bastard" comment?
~Thylo
zooboy28
Well-Known Member
Just catching up on this thread, and now definitely looking forward to the Burma updates.
Couple of questions:
-I probably read this wrong, but what was the sixth primate species you saw at Bukit Fraser? You said you saw six of the seven (missing slow loris), and mentioned the two langurs, pig-tailed macaque and siamang, and I can imagine you saw long-tailed macaque and didn't mention it, but what was the other primate?
-How do you avoid snake bites - do you wear boots everywhere and just keep and eye out. Did you know the snake you moved off the road was harmless? I'm guessing you are fairly competent with snakes?
Couple of questions:
-I probably read this wrong, but what was the sixth primate species you saw at Bukit Fraser? You said you saw six of the seven (missing slow loris), and mentioned the two langurs, pig-tailed macaque and siamang, and I can imagine you saw long-tailed macaque and didn't mention it, but what was the other primate?
-How do you avoid snake bites - do you wear boots everywhere and just keep and eye out. Did you know the snake you moved off the road was harmless? I'm guessing you are fairly competent with snakes?
zooboy28
Well-Known Member
nanoboy
Well-Known Member
Maybe it was his girlfriend
~Thylo
I wonder if he is hanging out with the Danish/Tasmanian princess who is in Myanmar at the moment?
I'm back!
Last day in Burma and I finally get a connection strong enough to get on Zoochat!
The internet in Burma is not so good. It is widely available and almost all the places I stayed had free WIFI, it is just that it was basically useless most of the time. At the first place I stayed (Aung Si Guesthouse in Yangon) my laptop wouldn't even connect to the internet. At the second place (Winner Guesthouse in Bagan) the connection was so slow that it kept timing out: it literally took an hour for me just to open my email account on the first night and then I couldn't read more than a couple because they took so long to open that the “try again” message would come up. On the second night I gave up trying to access my emails after two hours. The third place, Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary, didn't have either electricity or WIFI so that one doesn't count. Back at the Winner Guesthouse in Bagan it surprisingly took only 15 minutes to get into my emails and with numerous hiccups I managed to not only delete all the unrequired ones but actually send replies to others! In Mandalay at the ET Hotel I couldn't get the connection at all for two days but then for most of the third day I had it running at a regular broadband speed! When I got to Kalaw, the place I was staying (Pine Land Inn) only got their WIFI set up the day after I arrived and it was very good. In Nyaungshwe (by Lake Inle) my guesthouse had no WIFI but the nearby restaurants did and it was a good speed. Back in Yangon, the Yoma Hotel had a good connection, and right now I'm in Aung Si Guesthouse again where the WIFI is perfect (!)
Honestly though, I was just amazed that there even was internet over almost my entire route through Burma!
So, with mostly no possibility of getting onto any forums while in the country, I was just saving the blog entries on my laptop and will now post them one every couple of days. They are mostly written as if I was posting them on the actual days (with just a few minor additions from later days if required).
Tomorrow morning I fly out to Bangkok – and then I've got a lot to catch up on after a month with no Zoochat!!!
Last day in Burma and I finally get a connection strong enough to get on Zoochat!
The internet in Burma is not so good. It is widely available and almost all the places I stayed had free WIFI, it is just that it was basically useless most of the time. At the first place I stayed (Aung Si Guesthouse in Yangon) my laptop wouldn't even connect to the internet. At the second place (Winner Guesthouse in Bagan) the connection was so slow that it kept timing out: it literally took an hour for me just to open my email account on the first night and then I couldn't read more than a couple because they took so long to open that the “try again” message would come up. On the second night I gave up trying to access my emails after two hours. The third place, Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary, didn't have either electricity or WIFI so that one doesn't count. Back at the Winner Guesthouse in Bagan it surprisingly took only 15 minutes to get into my emails and with numerous hiccups I managed to not only delete all the unrequired ones but actually send replies to others! In Mandalay at the ET Hotel I couldn't get the connection at all for two days but then for most of the third day I had it running at a regular broadband speed! When I got to Kalaw, the place I was staying (Pine Land Inn) only got their WIFI set up the day after I arrived and it was very good. In Nyaungshwe (by Lake Inle) my guesthouse had no WIFI but the nearby restaurants did and it was a good speed. Back in Yangon, the Yoma Hotel had a good connection, and right now I'm in Aung Si Guesthouse again where the WIFI is perfect (!)
Honestly though, I was just amazed that there even was internet over almost my entire route through Burma!
So, with mostly no possibility of getting onto any forums while in the country, I was just saving the blog entries on my laptop and will now post them one every couple of days. They are mostly written as if I was posting them on the actual days (with just a few minor additions from later days if required).
Tomorrow morning I fly out to Bangkok – and then I've got a lot to catch up on after a month with no Zoochat!!!
no you weren't reading it wrong -- I was writing it wrong! It should have said SIX species of primates at Bukit Fraser total, of which I saw five (although, yes, seven total if including humans). The five were dusky and white-thighed langurs, pig-tailed and crab-eating [long-tailed] macaques, and siamang. The sixth, unseen, was slow loris.zooboy28 said:
Snakes: I just keep my eyes open. Doesn't always work though. I almost stepped on a king cobra in Taman Negara in 2006 and a brown snake I think it was from memory in Tasmania. I do wear boots everywhere but they're not much use against real snakes (only the weeny ones who can't bite high enough, poor wee things). Snakes are more interested in leaving you alone though so I'm not bothered by them.
....and it begins! Yangon (Day One)
And so the Burma adventure begins. My planned route around the country was following the standard tourist path which, as luck would have it, is also a good path for bird-watching. A lot of the country is closed to foreigners, although much of that can still be accessed if paying hefty fees for “official tours”, but there is free movement within a certain prescribed area, a sort of “tourist quadrangle”. With the way Burma is progressing I would not be surprised if it is only a couple of years away before the whole country is open – and then I'll be back for the Burmese snub-nosed monkey!! By then it might be too expensive to visit though, because the yearly price increases here are ridiculous and the costs of accommodation, taxis, etc are already far in excess of what they should be. My travel plan went like this: start in Yangon (visit the zoo one day, visit Hlawga Park for birds the next), bus up to Bagan for birds, bus from there to Lake Inle for birds and then on to the hill-forests at Kalaw for birds, then bus up to Mandalay to visit the zoo, bus from there to Bago to bird at Lake Moeyungyi, and finally bus back to Yangon for departure to Thailand. Twenty-two days total. That was the original plan but there were some changes at the last minute and along the way, including adding in two “non-tourist” wildlife spots (which ramped up my average daily expenditure rate for the country!!) and rearranging the order a little so from Bagan I took a boat upriver to Mandalay and then went from there by bus to Kalaw and Lake Inle.
Burma is one and a half hours behind Malaysia which is a rather odd time difference (normally time differences are in solid hours I thought). I got my first look at Burma from the plane, looking down as we lowered in altitude. Burma is.....brown. Everything is brown – brown earth, brown rivers. And the entire landscape seemed to be divided up into fields, so from the air it had the appearance of the cracked mud of a parched lake bed. It was 18 degrees when we landed, a pleasant change from the high 30s of Kuala Lumpur, although later in the day it got up to around 28 or 30 degrees. My “Airport Bird” (the first bird seen in a country when I arrive at the airport) was a white wagtail. I was booked at the Aung Si Guesthouse in Yangon for US$20. I normally prefer winging it but this is the main tourist season in Burma and apparently the hotels in Yangon get booked up easily because only a percentage of the total hotels available are allowed to accommodate foreigners. Burma may not seem like it would be a popular tourist destination but it is getting to be just that now that it is opening up; it has been described as being “the new Thailand”. So I had pre-booked, and the booking included a free pick-up at the airport which was handy. Outside the airport there were drongos in the trees by the parking lot.
I think I'm going to like Burma. Yangon is a totally old-school kind of Asian town, all chaotic with dusty streets, with bicycles and rickshaws wending through the smoke-belching traffic, with skinny long-limbed dogs roaming everywhere, and with half the people wearing “local” dress rather than “western”. It reminds me of Indonesia. I saw a train on the way from the airport which seriously looked exactly like a full-size version of those tin train models you would have played with as a child if you were born in the 1920s. But in amongst the old is the new, starting at the airport with the giant Coca Cola sign saying “welcome to Myanmar”. Things are changing rapidly in Burma, and I've already noticed several things that are at odds with what my apparently-dodgy research had told me. First up was that I had read you need to declare cameras and computers and such at the airport and keep the document to show on the way out again, and that video cameras weren't allowed in, and that you were only allowed one camera. None of that is true. Motorbikes and bicycles outlawed in Yangon? Rubbish. Everything I had read said there were no ATMs in Burma; you had to bring in all the money you needed for your whole stay and hope you didn't run out. That is no longer the case. At the airport there is a big signboard saying “Get out your Myanmar kyat at the nearest ATM with Mastercard” or something along those lines. If there was going to be an ATM anywhere it would be at the airport of course, but if there weren't any ATMs in the country the sign might be construed as being a little disingenuous. However just a couple of hundred metres from my guesthouse I saw an ATM at a bank. There were some men working on it, but I don't know if they were installing it or just re-filling it. There was a little crowd around them, either waiting for them to finish or simply being awestruck at this wondrous creation that spews forth money like magic. The next day I saw three more from a bus. There's at least one in Bagan that I saw, and they're in Mandalay and Bago and Naypyidaw as well. There's even one in Kalaw and one in Nyaungshwe (by Lake Inle) which are nowt but tiny villages! They are obviously starting them off in the tourist areas, but I expect in six months there will be ATMs at every street corner in the country! The machines only give out the local currency, kyat (pronounced “chat”; there are about 823 of them to one New Zealand dollar; the conversion in your head is easier for Americans because there are about 985 kyat to one US Dollar, so for example, 15,000 kyat equals roughly US$15). I don't know what kinds of foreign cards they accept so you still need to bring in all your money, but no longer are you up the creek without a paddle if you underestimated your spending requirements. I had brought in far more US dollars than I would actually need, because better to have too much than run out with no way to get more! The dollars need to be in perfect condition, not even the tiniest tear or pen mark or folded corner. I checked with the girl at the reception of the Aung Si Guesthouse as to how accurate this information was and she said that is correct; you can't even fold your notes in half because then they won't be accepted. The local kyat notes though, they look like scraps of old paper you found in the gutter. I changed US$200 into 197,000 kyat at the airport, which is only about a dollar different from the amount I got when checking an internet currency site beforehand. I had read that nobody in Burma will accept US$100 notes with a serial number starting with CB because they are associated with forgeries. I had therefore checked my 100s on getting them in Kuala Lumpur, and all of them were brand new and had L serial numbers. Apparently L serial numbers are also not accepted in Burma as I found out when I got there!! Just as well 100s weren't the only denominations I had!
Oh, also, the cable tv system in Burma is called Skynet. That's right, when the rise of the machines happens it will be starting in Burma!! I think that alone is worthy of its own paragraph.
Yangon is a city of crows. They are everywhere, noisy black maelstroms swirling in the sky, out-competing even the feral pigeons and mynahs in number. I couldn't work out which species they were though – when I first saw the flocks I thought they were house crows just from the size of the birds but they don't look like them and they don't sound like them (they sound like seagulls!); then I thought they must be large-billed crows but they are much smaller than the ones I'm used to and again don't sound anything like them. I have since seen written in a Birdquest trip report that they are indeed house crows – very odd appearance! There are both house sparrows and tree sparrows here, and it is interesting seeing mixed flocks of them feeding at the roadsides. The house sparrows are big muscular brutes compared to the delicate little tree sparrows.
I arrived at the airport at 8am but it took an hour to get to the guesthouse (lots of traffic here!) and then after sorting out information and a bus ticket to Bagan and food and everything else it was already after 11am. The Yangon Zoo is only about thirty or forty minutes walk from where I was staying and as this was probably the only day I would get to visit, that is where I went. I made a short stop at a pet shop on the way because outside in a couple of cages there were about forty vernal hanging parrots. Inside was all captive-bred animals (hamsters, Asian arowana, freshwater stingrays, goldfish, etc). There is no Burma forum yet so a review of the zoo will have to wait, but really I don't know how I'm even going to write one. Most of my recent ones have been direct walk-throughs of the zoos in question with random additional information, rather than being actual reviews. The Yangon Zoo though is such a big rambling hotch-potch of paths that walking around it is like a little Lego man trying to make his way through a plate of spaghetti bolognese. There are dead ends and back-tracks and loops and extra entrance points. At one point I was walking back along a path I thought I had just come along – and I saw a paddock of elephants! Where the heck did that come from?! The zoo is very green, it is like walking through a park, but the cages sadly are often still the original cages from when the zoo opened a century ago (such as the Carnivora House from 1915). As usual the bears get royally screwed. (I'll cover all this in my review, but the zoo does have an over-population problem with certain animals, where they have so many that there will be, as an actual example, two sun bears in an outside enclosure and then behind that will be four tiny barred cells each containing two or three more sun bears. There were at least fifteen sun bears at the zoo, about the same number of Asiatic black bears, maybe ten or so tigers, at least eight or nine fishing cats, I counted twelve cassowaries, and so on). But at least they did have some small cats and other small carnivores on display, unlike the last few Asian zoos I visited. (And I'll just leave TeaLovingDave to twiddle his thumbs now waiting for the species lists......)
After the zoo I tried to find the Aquarium (yes, Yangon has an Aquarium too!). It is right near the zoo somewhere, by the lake, but I couldn't find it so I gave up. I think it must be inside the area that you need to pay to get into to see the temples and whatever else is there. I might have time to try again when I come back to Yangon in three weeks time.
Most of the birds seen today were not new for the trip but all were still new for my Burma list which was starting from zero!! The only additions to the year list were the jungle mynahs around town and the large flock of lesser whisting ducks on the zoo lake (which I am taking to be wild birds). For mammals there was a black rat stealing food from the Burmese star tortoises at the zoo. There were also squirrels everywhere in the zoo which must be red-bellied (Pallas') squirrels because there don't seem to any other possible candidates, but they look really different in colour to ones I've seen elsewhere.
And so the Burma adventure begins. My planned route around the country was following the standard tourist path which, as luck would have it, is also a good path for bird-watching. A lot of the country is closed to foreigners, although much of that can still be accessed if paying hefty fees for “official tours”, but there is free movement within a certain prescribed area, a sort of “tourist quadrangle”. With the way Burma is progressing I would not be surprised if it is only a couple of years away before the whole country is open – and then I'll be back for the Burmese snub-nosed monkey!! By then it might be too expensive to visit though, because the yearly price increases here are ridiculous and the costs of accommodation, taxis, etc are already far in excess of what they should be. My travel plan went like this: start in Yangon (visit the zoo one day, visit Hlawga Park for birds the next), bus up to Bagan for birds, bus from there to Lake Inle for birds and then on to the hill-forests at Kalaw for birds, then bus up to Mandalay to visit the zoo, bus from there to Bago to bird at Lake Moeyungyi, and finally bus back to Yangon for departure to Thailand. Twenty-two days total. That was the original plan but there were some changes at the last minute and along the way, including adding in two “non-tourist” wildlife spots (which ramped up my average daily expenditure rate for the country!!) and rearranging the order a little so from Bagan I took a boat upriver to Mandalay and then went from there by bus to Kalaw and Lake Inle.
Burma is one and a half hours behind Malaysia which is a rather odd time difference (normally time differences are in solid hours I thought). I got my first look at Burma from the plane, looking down as we lowered in altitude. Burma is.....brown. Everything is brown – brown earth, brown rivers. And the entire landscape seemed to be divided up into fields, so from the air it had the appearance of the cracked mud of a parched lake bed. It was 18 degrees when we landed, a pleasant change from the high 30s of Kuala Lumpur, although later in the day it got up to around 28 or 30 degrees. My “Airport Bird” (the first bird seen in a country when I arrive at the airport) was a white wagtail. I was booked at the Aung Si Guesthouse in Yangon for US$20. I normally prefer winging it but this is the main tourist season in Burma and apparently the hotels in Yangon get booked up easily because only a percentage of the total hotels available are allowed to accommodate foreigners. Burma may not seem like it would be a popular tourist destination but it is getting to be just that now that it is opening up; it has been described as being “the new Thailand”. So I had pre-booked, and the booking included a free pick-up at the airport which was handy. Outside the airport there were drongos in the trees by the parking lot.
I think I'm going to like Burma. Yangon is a totally old-school kind of Asian town, all chaotic with dusty streets, with bicycles and rickshaws wending through the smoke-belching traffic, with skinny long-limbed dogs roaming everywhere, and with half the people wearing “local” dress rather than “western”. It reminds me of Indonesia. I saw a train on the way from the airport which seriously looked exactly like a full-size version of those tin train models you would have played with as a child if you were born in the 1920s. But in amongst the old is the new, starting at the airport with the giant Coca Cola sign saying “welcome to Myanmar”. Things are changing rapidly in Burma, and I've already noticed several things that are at odds with what my apparently-dodgy research had told me. First up was that I had read you need to declare cameras and computers and such at the airport and keep the document to show on the way out again, and that video cameras weren't allowed in, and that you were only allowed one camera. None of that is true. Motorbikes and bicycles outlawed in Yangon? Rubbish. Everything I had read said there were no ATMs in Burma; you had to bring in all the money you needed for your whole stay and hope you didn't run out. That is no longer the case. At the airport there is a big signboard saying “Get out your Myanmar kyat at the nearest ATM with Mastercard” or something along those lines. If there was going to be an ATM anywhere it would be at the airport of course, but if there weren't any ATMs in the country the sign might be construed as being a little disingenuous. However just a couple of hundred metres from my guesthouse I saw an ATM at a bank. There were some men working on it, but I don't know if they were installing it or just re-filling it. There was a little crowd around them, either waiting for them to finish or simply being awestruck at this wondrous creation that spews forth money like magic. The next day I saw three more from a bus. There's at least one in Bagan that I saw, and they're in Mandalay and Bago and Naypyidaw as well. There's even one in Kalaw and one in Nyaungshwe (by Lake Inle) which are nowt but tiny villages! They are obviously starting them off in the tourist areas, but I expect in six months there will be ATMs at every street corner in the country! The machines only give out the local currency, kyat (pronounced “chat”; there are about 823 of them to one New Zealand dollar; the conversion in your head is easier for Americans because there are about 985 kyat to one US Dollar, so for example, 15,000 kyat equals roughly US$15). I don't know what kinds of foreign cards they accept so you still need to bring in all your money, but no longer are you up the creek without a paddle if you underestimated your spending requirements. I had brought in far more US dollars than I would actually need, because better to have too much than run out with no way to get more! The dollars need to be in perfect condition, not even the tiniest tear or pen mark or folded corner. I checked with the girl at the reception of the Aung Si Guesthouse as to how accurate this information was and she said that is correct; you can't even fold your notes in half because then they won't be accepted. The local kyat notes though, they look like scraps of old paper you found in the gutter. I changed US$200 into 197,000 kyat at the airport, which is only about a dollar different from the amount I got when checking an internet currency site beforehand. I had read that nobody in Burma will accept US$100 notes with a serial number starting with CB because they are associated with forgeries. I had therefore checked my 100s on getting them in Kuala Lumpur, and all of them were brand new and had L serial numbers. Apparently L serial numbers are also not accepted in Burma as I found out when I got there!! Just as well 100s weren't the only denominations I had!
Oh, also, the cable tv system in Burma is called Skynet. That's right, when the rise of the machines happens it will be starting in Burma!! I think that alone is worthy of its own paragraph.
Yangon is a city of crows. They are everywhere, noisy black maelstroms swirling in the sky, out-competing even the feral pigeons and mynahs in number. I couldn't work out which species they were though – when I first saw the flocks I thought they were house crows just from the size of the birds but they don't look like them and they don't sound like them (they sound like seagulls!); then I thought they must be large-billed crows but they are much smaller than the ones I'm used to and again don't sound anything like them. I have since seen written in a Birdquest trip report that they are indeed house crows – very odd appearance! There are both house sparrows and tree sparrows here, and it is interesting seeing mixed flocks of them feeding at the roadsides. The house sparrows are big muscular brutes compared to the delicate little tree sparrows.
I arrived at the airport at 8am but it took an hour to get to the guesthouse (lots of traffic here!) and then after sorting out information and a bus ticket to Bagan and food and everything else it was already after 11am. The Yangon Zoo is only about thirty or forty minutes walk from where I was staying and as this was probably the only day I would get to visit, that is where I went. I made a short stop at a pet shop on the way because outside in a couple of cages there were about forty vernal hanging parrots. Inside was all captive-bred animals (hamsters, Asian arowana, freshwater stingrays, goldfish, etc). There is no Burma forum yet so a review of the zoo will have to wait, but really I don't know how I'm even going to write one. Most of my recent ones have been direct walk-throughs of the zoos in question with random additional information, rather than being actual reviews. The Yangon Zoo though is such a big rambling hotch-potch of paths that walking around it is like a little Lego man trying to make his way through a plate of spaghetti bolognese. There are dead ends and back-tracks and loops and extra entrance points. At one point I was walking back along a path I thought I had just come along – and I saw a paddock of elephants! Where the heck did that come from?! The zoo is very green, it is like walking through a park, but the cages sadly are often still the original cages from when the zoo opened a century ago (such as the Carnivora House from 1915). As usual the bears get royally screwed. (I'll cover all this in my review, but the zoo does have an over-population problem with certain animals, where they have so many that there will be, as an actual example, two sun bears in an outside enclosure and then behind that will be four tiny barred cells each containing two or three more sun bears. There were at least fifteen sun bears at the zoo, about the same number of Asiatic black bears, maybe ten or so tigers, at least eight or nine fishing cats, I counted twelve cassowaries, and so on). But at least they did have some small cats and other small carnivores on display, unlike the last few Asian zoos I visited. (And I'll just leave TeaLovingDave to twiddle his thumbs now waiting for the species lists......)
After the zoo I tried to find the Aquarium (yes, Yangon has an Aquarium too!). It is right near the zoo somewhere, by the lake, but I couldn't find it so I gave up. I think it must be inside the area that you need to pay to get into to see the temples and whatever else is there. I might have time to try again when I come back to Yangon in three weeks time.
Most of the birds seen today were not new for the trip but all were still new for my Burma list which was starting from zero!! The only additions to the year list were the jungle mynahs around town and the large flock of lesser whisting ducks on the zoo lake (which I am taking to be wild birds). For mammals there was a black rat stealing food from the Burmese star tortoises at the zoo. There were also squirrels everywhere in the zoo which must be red-bellied (Pallas') squirrels because there don't seem to any other possible candidates, but they look really different in colour to ones I've seen elsewhere.
if it helps, I visited five zoological collections of which Yadanabon Zoo in Mandalay had the most "new" species for me. Five reviews just waiting to be posted......Damn you
We'll have to get a Burma forum up ASAP then!
Excellent 
the next few days will be interesting ones reading this thread I suspect.
the next few days will be interesting ones reading this thread I suspect.
zooboy28
Well-Known Member
Thanks
Looking forward to your blogs on Burma, should be great reads. Hopefully the Burma forum gets added soon.
Hlawga Park (Day Two)
Outside Yangon is a place called Hlawga Park. You pronounce Hlawga (at least to my ears) as if the H is silent and the “law” to rhyme with “cow”: so “low-gah”. Park is pronounced “park”. This is a spot popular with visiting birders and what I understood was that it is a nature reserve surrounded by a fence but the operators have released animals in there to make it “better” (hog deer, sambar, muntjac, wild pigs and pelicans). It is actually a safari park – hence all the released animals – with a “mini zoo” attached. There aren't many exotic mammals in Burmese zoos which is why all the safari park animals are local species, apart for one hippo in a pen. You can get to Hlawga Park by taxi or by bus. In a birding trip-report from a couple of years ago the cost of the taxi was given as the equivalent of NZ$70 or so which was a bit rich for my blood. Instead I took the number 124 bus from just around the corner from my guesthouse for 300 kyat (less than 50 cents). Going by bus takes a little longer obviously – about an hour – but it is so much fun being back in a country with absolutely nutty bus rides. The bus is one of those old clatter-buckets, with one guy leaning out the door yelling the destination and another inside collecting fares. Each bus has a number on the front but it is in Myanmar script so you need to have it written down and compare each bus as it arrives with the squiggles you have on your paper. The buses appear to be on timers where if they sit still for more than twenty seconds they automatically start driving again, so when there's a few people getting on they all have to grab on where-ever they can and try to get in before falling under the wheels. If there's only one person at a stop the driver doesn't even bother stopping, he just slows down a bit, the passenger grabs the handle by the door, and is hauled physically on board by the two conductors. Even little old people bound in and out the door like langurs. I suspect the reason all the old people here are so sprightly is because the ones that aren't don't live long enough.
After an hour the bus dropped me off by the side of the road and I got a motorbike the rest of the way, twenty minutes or so down another road, for 4000 kyat which seemed a bit excessive. When I left the park later in the day I got another motorbike but to a road in the opposite direction which only took five minutes and cost 500 kyat (which was a true price because I asked at the park's ticket counter first). At the road I jumped on the first bus that stopped, after the conductor guy confirmed they were heading for Yangon. I didn't have a clue where in Yangon it was going, Yangon is a big sprawling city, but I worry about things like that later. I just look out for landmarks I recognise (which in Yangon would be almost nothing!) or get off at the end of the line and then see where I am. The trip to Yangon took two hours, twice as long as the trip out of Yangon, because of the late afternoon traffic. When we got to the city the end of the line in this case was the docks by the Yangon River at the very opposite end of downtown from where I needed to be. It would have taken me a couple of hours to walk it so I took a taxi.
Anyway, back to Hlawga Park. The entry price was 800 kyat (maybe NZ$1.50 or so) with an additional 500 kyat for the shuttle around the safari park. I had looked at the big map-board just nearby but not really been able to make head nor tail of it so I didn't really know what the story was with birding here. The lady at the ticket counter said you weren't allowed to walk into the safari park, you had to take the shuttle or a car, but once inside you could walk around and there were lots of birds. The shuttles only left on the hour so I had half an hour to wait and the lady suggested I go around the mini zoo in the meantime. I questioned whether half an hour would be long enough and she said yes because there wasn't much to see there. I asked if there were any small cats and she totally misunderstood my accent and replied “yes, yes, many small cages”. It turned out that despite the implications of the name “mini zoo” the animals were well housed here in spacious enclosures, far better than at the Yangon Zoo itself, except for the circular house for small carnivores which had small dimly-lit concrete cages. There weren't many animals in the zoo – it is indeed a zoo which is mini – but I ended up spending an hour because there were lots of birds in the trees (including rosy minivets and black-naped monarchs). I saw some red-whiskered bulbuls and thought I'd never seen them with such bright red faces before, and it is because the local subspecies has a much larger and hence more obvious red ear-patch than the ones I've seen elsewhere. Asian openbill storks were circling in a big flock overhead too (they breed at the nearby lake).
The safari park is basically a large area of dry broadleaf forest (dry as in bone-dry!) enclosed in a low wire fence with a one-way dirt road winding through the middle in a loop around a large multi-armed lake. It is easy to see hog deer and sambar but they can't be counted for my wild animal list. However there are rhesus macaques here too which I am counting on the basis that they occur naturally in this region, the low fence is in no way a barrier to them, and there are probably hundreds of them here waiting for free food. But mainly it was birds I was after. I think I got here too late in the morning though because I didn't see a lot. I walked the whole road and then back again which is a fair distance but I didn't end up with much of a list. Actually I didn't walk all the way back along the road because when I came around a bend there was a bull gaur blocking the way. I'm not much of a fan of free-roaming domestic cattle when I'm birding because even the bulls of those can be a bit aggressive sometimes, and a bull gaur is an altogether more gigantic beast! It was, no doubt, pefectly placid but nevertheless I waited for another shuttle to come by. It was a good day for minivets, with rosy and small minivets both seen, and then some other common birds like green bee-eaters, common ioras, ashy drongos, scarlet-backed flowerpeckers and red-throated flycatchers, but overall not much to show for the day. I didn't see even a whisker of Davison's bulbul. On the lake the only waterbirds seen were a couple of lesser whistling ducks, a little cormorant, a few little egrets and cattle egrets, and a white-breasted kingfisher (and a released spot-billed pelican which didn't count).
Outside Yangon is a place called Hlawga Park. You pronounce Hlawga (at least to my ears) as if the H is silent and the “law” to rhyme with “cow”: so “low-gah”. Park is pronounced “park”. This is a spot popular with visiting birders and what I understood was that it is a nature reserve surrounded by a fence but the operators have released animals in there to make it “better” (hog deer, sambar, muntjac, wild pigs and pelicans). It is actually a safari park – hence all the released animals – with a “mini zoo” attached. There aren't many exotic mammals in Burmese zoos which is why all the safari park animals are local species, apart for one hippo in a pen. You can get to Hlawga Park by taxi or by bus. In a birding trip-report from a couple of years ago the cost of the taxi was given as the equivalent of NZ$70 or so which was a bit rich for my blood. Instead I took the number 124 bus from just around the corner from my guesthouse for 300 kyat (less than 50 cents). Going by bus takes a little longer obviously – about an hour – but it is so much fun being back in a country with absolutely nutty bus rides. The bus is one of those old clatter-buckets, with one guy leaning out the door yelling the destination and another inside collecting fares. Each bus has a number on the front but it is in Myanmar script so you need to have it written down and compare each bus as it arrives with the squiggles you have on your paper. The buses appear to be on timers where if they sit still for more than twenty seconds they automatically start driving again, so when there's a few people getting on they all have to grab on where-ever they can and try to get in before falling under the wheels. If there's only one person at a stop the driver doesn't even bother stopping, he just slows down a bit, the passenger grabs the handle by the door, and is hauled physically on board by the two conductors. Even little old people bound in and out the door like langurs. I suspect the reason all the old people here are so sprightly is because the ones that aren't don't live long enough.
After an hour the bus dropped me off by the side of the road and I got a motorbike the rest of the way, twenty minutes or so down another road, for 4000 kyat which seemed a bit excessive. When I left the park later in the day I got another motorbike but to a road in the opposite direction which only took five minutes and cost 500 kyat (which was a true price because I asked at the park's ticket counter first). At the road I jumped on the first bus that stopped, after the conductor guy confirmed they were heading for Yangon. I didn't have a clue where in Yangon it was going, Yangon is a big sprawling city, but I worry about things like that later. I just look out for landmarks I recognise (which in Yangon would be almost nothing!) or get off at the end of the line and then see where I am. The trip to Yangon took two hours, twice as long as the trip out of Yangon, because of the late afternoon traffic. When we got to the city the end of the line in this case was the docks by the Yangon River at the very opposite end of downtown from where I needed to be. It would have taken me a couple of hours to walk it so I took a taxi.
Anyway, back to Hlawga Park. The entry price was 800 kyat (maybe NZ$1.50 or so) with an additional 500 kyat for the shuttle around the safari park. I had looked at the big map-board just nearby but not really been able to make head nor tail of it so I didn't really know what the story was with birding here. The lady at the ticket counter said you weren't allowed to walk into the safari park, you had to take the shuttle or a car, but once inside you could walk around and there were lots of birds. The shuttles only left on the hour so I had half an hour to wait and the lady suggested I go around the mini zoo in the meantime. I questioned whether half an hour would be long enough and she said yes because there wasn't much to see there. I asked if there were any small cats and she totally misunderstood my accent and replied “yes, yes, many small cages”. It turned out that despite the implications of the name “mini zoo” the animals were well housed here in spacious enclosures, far better than at the Yangon Zoo itself, except for the circular house for small carnivores which had small dimly-lit concrete cages. There weren't many animals in the zoo – it is indeed a zoo which is mini – but I ended up spending an hour because there were lots of birds in the trees (including rosy minivets and black-naped monarchs). I saw some red-whiskered bulbuls and thought I'd never seen them with such bright red faces before, and it is because the local subspecies has a much larger and hence more obvious red ear-patch than the ones I've seen elsewhere. Asian openbill storks were circling in a big flock overhead too (they breed at the nearby lake).
The safari park is basically a large area of dry broadleaf forest (dry as in bone-dry!) enclosed in a low wire fence with a one-way dirt road winding through the middle in a loop around a large multi-armed lake. It is easy to see hog deer and sambar but they can't be counted for my wild animal list. However there are rhesus macaques here too which I am counting on the basis that they occur naturally in this region, the low fence is in no way a barrier to them, and there are probably hundreds of them here waiting for free food. But mainly it was birds I was after. I think I got here too late in the morning though because I didn't see a lot. I walked the whole road and then back again which is a fair distance but I didn't end up with much of a list. Actually I didn't walk all the way back along the road because when I came around a bend there was a bull gaur blocking the way. I'm not much of a fan of free-roaming domestic cattle when I'm birding because even the bulls of those can be a bit aggressive sometimes, and a bull gaur is an altogether more gigantic beast! It was, no doubt, pefectly placid but nevertheless I waited for another shuttle to come by. It was a good day for minivets, with rosy and small minivets both seen, and then some other common birds like green bee-eaters, common ioras, ashy drongos, scarlet-backed flowerpeckers and red-throated flycatchers, but overall not much to show for the day. I didn't see even a whisker of Davison's bulbul. On the lake the only waterbirds seen were a couple of lesser whistling ducks, a little cormorant, a few little egrets and cattle egrets, and a white-breasted kingfisher (and a released spot-billed pelican which didn't count).
I'm in Bangkok right now, just using some days to catch up on internetty things. I'm trying to get through the photos I want to upload to Zoochat but the gallery is doing funny things and it is taking a long time. Fortunately there are no Burma galleries yet so I don't need to worry about uploading any of those for a while. Still have to write some of the blogs for the Burma bit as well.
When I left Burma, the front of the airport building's roof at Yangon was literally lined with house crows. It was kind of scary, like Hitchcock's The Birds! The flight left Yangon late, but got to Bangkok half an hour earlier than scheduled -- work that one out! In Bangkok it took four hours to get from the airport to a guesthouse (I'm somewhere near Khao San Road, not sure where exactly). There are protests all over the city and many areas are blocked. I was told at the airport I can get a taxi to the city for 850 Baht -- instead I took a local bus for 30 Baht, except it turned out to be free. I think all the buses might be free at the moment because they can't actually get to where they're supposed to go! My bus drove in ever-decreasing circles for an hour and then dropped me a long way from where I was heading, but right outside a BRT station, so I used that plus a water taxi to get to the general area where I am now.
photos of various Malaysian critters now in the gallery including freaky giant spiders, orange monkeys, stripey squirrels and even a colugo.
http://www.zoochat.com/gallery/malaysia-wildlife
will it get confusing if I do little Thailand updates while still posting big Burma blogs?
Today I went to the Chatuchak Weekend Market, ostensibly to look for new shoes to replace my South Korean ones which are starting to get a little the worse for wear, but also I renewed my acquaintance with certain sellers at the tragic stalls of baby squirrels (see the Thailand-Other gallery for a couple of photos). I lost a few more kilos in Burma, I only weigh about 85kg now, I'm starting to feel really weedy. My shoulders are losing the most because I'm not lifting anything heavy and shoulder muscles are relatively small compared to other muscle groups so get lost the fastest. I've lost 5 inches off my biceps since I left New Zealand 
EDIT: forgot to add a photo: Thailand hates balloons apparently!
Today I went to the Chatuchak Weekend Market, ostensibly to look for new shoes to replace my South Korean ones which are starting to get a little the worse for wear, but also I renewed my acquaintance with certain sellers at the tragic stalls of baby squirrels (see the Thailand-Other gallery for a couple of photos
). I lost a few more kilos in Burma, I only weigh about 85kg now, I'm starting to feel really weedy. My shoulders are losing the most because I'm not lifting anything heavy and shoulder muscles are relatively small compared to other muscle groups so get lost the fastest. I've lost 5 inches off my biceps since I left New Zealand EDIT: forgot to add a photo: Thailand hates balloons apparently!
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Bagan (Burma, days three and four)
My first port of call after Yangon was a place called Bagan in central Burma where I would be looking for dry-country birds. There are night buses and day buses from Yangon to Bagan. Night buses can be good because they are your accommodation and transport all rolled into one, but I had heard from a few people how terrible this particular night bus was – it wasn't a bus where you could actually get any sleep. I knew it couldn't be any worse than the 20-hour nightmare-bus I took in northern Sulawesi one time with blaring dance music, stops every twenty minutes to let passengers on and off, people and freight packed in like sardines, chicken-pox-infected children rubbing themselves against everything and everybody they could – but nevertheless I decided the day bus would be better because then I could look at the scenery along the way. Most of the other major routes I'll be taking later only have night buses though, so no choices there! The bus was at 8am and I needed to check-in at 7.30am. I was told by the people at the guesthouse that it was “a long way” to the bus station so I would need to get the taxi at 6am – it only took half an hour. The bus ride to Bagan took ten hours and it was freezing cold. If you've ever ridden in a long-distance bus in Thailand, same thing: it is like they are so proud of their air conditioning that they set it to “Deep Space” just so you can't miss it. You'd think the fact that everyone who gets on the bus immediately puts on their jackets, and even hats and gloves, might tip the driver off that they have it set too cold, but no.
For the first seven hours the scenery didn't really change much – mostly flat with occasional low hills, dry sparse grass and what little vegetation was left was scrubby secondary growth. I imagine in times past this whole area would have been covered in the dry broadleaf forest like that still left at Hlawga Park. For this part of the trip the bus was on a highway which surprisingly, after the manic traffic of Yangon, was almost empty of anything except other buses. For the last three hours of the trip the bus left the highway and took to a narrower road, also with not many other vehicles present, and this road ran through what I guess you would call wooded savannah, or in a more long-winded way, open forest in arid grassland where sometimes the forest was almost entirely made up of fan palms and sometimes of broadleaf trees with the palms scattered through them. There were introduced red river gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) scattered along the roadsides as well
Bagan was not what I imagined. I had been expecting a city but it is barely even a town, and the parts you see from the bus on arrival give the impression of only existing to cater to the tourists who come to see the temples. The landscape around the village is arid lightly-wooded savannah on the edge of the Irrawaddy River, and the entire area is dotted with ancient stone temples and pagodas; I read somewhere that there are 2200 temples here. It is certainly impressive birding here. Whichever direction you look in there will be the peaks and spires of a dozen temples visible amongst the trees. It reminds me of being at Angkor in Cambodia, but fortunately without the same intensity of pestering to buy souvenirs. Most of them are small temples, often smaller than a standard-sized house, but others are a lot bigger.
I arrived in town at about 5.30pm and discovered that every guesthouse and hotel was full. I don't normally travel at this time of the year and it was a bit of a shock to see the sheer number of Europeans here. I don't mean Europeans as in “white people”, I mean actual Europeans, predominantly French from the accents. It took quite a bit of walking before I found a place called Winner Guesthouse which, although full, gave me a little spare room with a mattress on the floor for US$7. It sounds like every accommodation in Mandalay is also full, and possibly the same at Lake Inle and Kalaw as well. I may end up in some tight spots as I continue onwards.
The next morning I headed off on a bicycle to look for some birds. It's pretty chilly here at night, so much so that you're wearing a jacket or jersey in the morning, but it gets quite hot in the day. All the habitat is the same here so I just cycled along the main road and took any dirt side-roads that looked interesting. As the morning progressed more and more tourists emerged from their beds and spread out into the countryside but luckily most people gathered at certain temple sites (I suspect the ones mentioned in Lonely Planet!) so it wasn't too difficult to find quiet areas. Only one mammal is common here, the Irrawaddy squirrel. In fact it is very common but so darn quick that I only managed to get a photo of one individual and it doesn't show it to its best. The Irrawaddy squirrel is a very dapper little squirrel, mostly sort of a grizzled grey with whitish underparts and face. They were often seen in pairs, chasing each other through the trees, over the temples, and between the cactus trees. The squirrels are surprisingly shy – as soon as you see one it is off like a shot. I was trying to sneak up on one squirrel which was on a little temple but instead I found a pair of spotted owlets which were much more relaxed about being photographed. The owlets were almost as common as the squirrels, and I saw several over the course of the day. Hoopoes were even more common: I saw eleven in one day, which is more than my previous record of two!
The first new bird of the day, before I saw a squirrel or an owlet or a hoopoe, was a flock of vinous-breasted starlings which are gorgeous birds and as it turned out another very common bird here. The next new bird was a group of white-throated babblers, another common one but also one of Burma's few endemic birds. They behave in the bold manner of Australian babblers rather than the skulking manner of most Asian babblers, so they are easy to see. After some pied bushchats and scarlet-backed flowerpeckers (both common – seeing a pattern here?) another new bird in the form of a Burmese shrike, possibly one of the nicest-looking shrikes around with its sharp colour patterns. This one fooled me though because despite the name it isn't endemic to Burma, but that's still the best country to see it in for the first time. Burmese bushlarks are endemic but took a bit longer to nail down; they are common but have a habit of flushing from the side of the track and when they land they scuttle quickly off across the ground into the undergrowth before you can see them. I only got a good look at two birds. The other two endemics found here, the Jerdon's minivet and the hooded treepie, I did not find today, but I did see river lapwings and plain-backed sparrow which were new for me.
Tomorrow I will be trying to get to a place not on most visitors' radars, the Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary. I'm going there for a particular species of mammal of the hooved variety but it has the same sort of habitat as at Bagan and both the minivet and treepie are found there so I might see them there. Then I'll have another day at Bagan on my return, so we'll see what happens.
My first port of call after Yangon was a place called Bagan in central Burma where I would be looking for dry-country birds. There are night buses and day buses from Yangon to Bagan. Night buses can be good because they are your accommodation and transport all rolled into one, but I had heard from a few people how terrible this particular night bus was – it wasn't a bus where you could actually get any sleep. I knew it couldn't be any worse than the 20-hour nightmare-bus I took in northern Sulawesi one time with blaring dance music, stops every twenty minutes to let passengers on and off, people and freight packed in like sardines, chicken-pox-infected children rubbing themselves against everything and everybody they could – but nevertheless I decided the day bus would be better because then I could look at the scenery along the way. Most of the other major routes I'll be taking later only have night buses though, so no choices there! The bus was at 8am and I needed to check-in at 7.30am. I was told by the people at the guesthouse that it was “a long way” to the bus station so I would need to get the taxi at 6am – it only took half an hour. The bus ride to Bagan took ten hours and it was freezing cold. If you've ever ridden in a long-distance bus in Thailand, same thing: it is like they are so proud of their air conditioning that they set it to “Deep Space” just so you can't miss it. You'd think the fact that everyone who gets on the bus immediately puts on their jackets, and even hats and gloves, might tip the driver off that they have it set too cold, but no.
For the first seven hours the scenery didn't really change much – mostly flat with occasional low hills, dry sparse grass and what little vegetation was left was scrubby secondary growth. I imagine in times past this whole area would have been covered in the dry broadleaf forest like that still left at Hlawga Park. For this part of the trip the bus was on a highway which surprisingly, after the manic traffic of Yangon, was almost empty of anything except other buses. For the last three hours of the trip the bus left the highway and took to a narrower road, also with not many other vehicles present, and this road ran through what I guess you would call wooded savannah, or in a more long-winded way, open forest in arid grassland where sometimes the forest was almost entirely made up of fan palms and sometimes of broadleaf trees with the palms scattered through them. There were introduced red river gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) scattered along the roadsides as well
Bagan was not what I imagined. I had been expecting a city but it is barely even a town, and the parts you see from the bus on arrival give the impression of only existing to cater to the tourists who come to see the temples. The landscape around the village is arid lightly-wooded savannah on the edge of the Irrawaddy River, and the entire area is dotted with ancient stone temples and pagodas; I read somewhere that there are 2200 temples here. It is certainly impressive birding here. Whichever direction you look in there will be the peaks and spires of a dozen temples visible amongst the trees. It reminds me of being at Angkor in Cambodia, but fortunately without the same intensity of pestering to buy souvenirs. Most of them are small temples, often smaller than a standard-sized house, but others are a lot bigger.
I arrived in town at about 5.30pm and discovered that every guesthouse and hotel was full. I don't normally travel at this time of the year and it was a bit of a shock to see the sheer number of Europeans here. I don't mean Europeans as in “white people”, I mean actual Europeans, predominantly French from the accents. It took quite a bit of walking before I found a place called Winner Guesthouse which, although full, gave me a little spare room with a mattress on the floor for US$7. It sounds like every accommodation in Mandalay is also full, and possibly the same at Lake Inle and Kalaw as well. I may end up in some tight spots as I continue onwards.
The next morning I headed off on a bicycle to look for some birds. It's pretty chilly here at night, so much so that you're wearing a jacket or jersey in the morning, but it gets quite hot in the day. All the habitat is the same here so I just cycled along the main road and took any dirt side-roads that looked interesting. As the morning progressed more and more tourists emerged from their beds and spread out into the countryside but luckily most people gathered at certain temple sites (I suspect the ones mentioned in Lonely Planet!) so it wasn't too difficult to find quiet areas. Only one mammal is common here, the Irrawaddy squirrel. In fact it is very common but so darn quick that I only managed to get a photo of one individual and it doesn't show it to its best. The Irrawaddy squirrel is a very dapper little squirrel, mostly sort of a grizzled grey with whitish underparts and face. They were often seen in pairs, chasing each other through the trees, over the temples, and between the cactus trees. The squirrels are surprisingly shy – as soon as you see one it is off like a shot. I was trying to sneak up on one squirrel which was on a little temple but instead I found a pair of spotted owlets which were much more relaxed about being photographed. The owlets were almost as common as the squirrels, and I saw several over the course of the day. Hoopoes were even more common: I saw eleven in one day, which is more than my previous record of two!
The first new bird of the day, before I saw a squirrel or an owlet or a hoopoe, was a flock of vinous-breasted starlings which are gorgeous birds and as it turned out another very common bird here. The next new bird was a group of white-throated babblers, another common one but also one of Burma's few endemic birds. They behave in the bold manner of Australian babblers rather than the skulking manner of most Asian babblers, so they are easy to see. After some pied bushchats and scarlet-backed flowerpeckers (both common – seeing a pattern here?) another new bird in the form of a Burmese shrike, possibly one of the nicest-looking shrikes around with its sharp colour patterns. This one fooled me though because despite the name it isn't endemic to Burma, but that's still the best country to see it in for the first time. Burmese bushlarks are endemic but took a bit longer to nail down; they are common but have a habit of flushing from the side of the track and when they land they scuttle quickly off across the ground into the undergrowth before you can see them. I only got a good look at two birds. The other two endemics found here, the Jerdon's minivet and the hooded treepie, I did not find today, but I did see river lapwings and plain-backed sparrow which were new for me.
Tomorrow I will be trying to get to a place not on most visitors' radars, the Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary. I'm going there for a particular species of mammal of the hooved variety but it has the same sort of habitat as at Bagan and both the minivet and treepie are found there so I might see them there. Then I'll have another day at Bagan on my return, so we'll see what happens.
