A fleet of flying foxes

Cheyenne loves bats. Like a lot. And Sittwe had several trees full of fruit bats. After napping through to hot part of the day after our flight from Yangon, we spent the rest of the day watching bats. My neck spent at least two hours gazing upwards at the bats sleeping, squabbling and flying around.

Sittwe also had an incredibly old mosque, but unfortunately Sittwe was the site of a lot of violence in 2012, a lot of it against the Muslims of the area. Currently, there is a really heavy military presence. The mosque is guarded 24/7 and off limits to everyone. In the quick afternoon and evening we were there, we felt like we did much of the sight-seeing that we could do (fruit bats and wandering around), so we were excited to get on a small ferry the next day to head to Mrauk U.

Loved the red umbrella.

Mrauk U is a decent sized town with not a lot of tourists making it this far west to see it. What's amazing about the town is that it sits amid several hundred year old temples. Unlike Bagan or Angkor Wat where they have cleared all the villages out from the temples to make it more of an archaeological tourist site, the people still walk between temples to get water from the well or herd their cattle.

The manual labor required for building roads is mind blowing.

Wow.

A parade for a boy going to live in the monastery. Every young boy must go be a novice monk for at least a week. 

MASSIVE Buddha footprint.

The Mrauk U Kingdom was powerful from 1430 to 1785, and the town continued to be populated after its downfall. It was an important trading city during British colonization.

He really wanted to pose for us. Then ask us for money.

We spent a day on a tour of some Chin villages and the "tattoo faced women." They get their faces tattooed when they are like nine or ten years old and the pattern is based on their tribe. The practice is no longer done, largely because women want to have clean faces like westerners. Our tour guide was this lovely man named Ko Soe who took us to several villages and introduced us to lots of people, showed us a ton of really cool stuff and put up with our endless photos of little kids and random stuff like cute puppies.

Granddaughter and grandmother

We got to have a really interesting conversation with him on our boat ride. To pay for university, he went over to Thailand to work illegally for a couple of years. His stories from this time in his life sounded filled with fear. They would bribe a Thai policeman and they were essentially at the mercy of that man. This was especially terrifying for the women. And he saw some of the men take full advantage of that power. He also explained that they were terrified to go out after dark, and he saw one of his friends get stabbed. Strangely, this conversation took a turn from the dark and terrifying to his regret that he never visited a Thai brothel. (Myanmar doesn't have any, according to him.)  He also mentioned how he really wanted to "live with a woman." Eventually we figured out that "live with a woman" was key for sex. So this man wanted to get laid. And it was clear he had no knowledge of safe sex or STDs. 

Chatting with a monk

Cooking for a boy's initiation party to go to the monastary

Not even posing.

He then turned around and said he would never marry a woman that was not a virgin. I finally asked him why he thinks it's ok that he as a man could go visit brothels or live with a woman he has no intention of marrying, yet he expects his future wife to be a virgin. He laughed and I'm not even sure he saw the contradiction in what he was saying. Oh goodness. I just let it drop.

They loved the photos so much.

Couldn't ask for a better pose.

Loading a motorcycle into the boat. Seems legit.

We then switched to talking about the Rohingya Muslims and how they were being treated. It was mind blowing. In his mind, those people are trying to take their land and bombing them, so it doesn't really matter how they are treated. When I said something like "Don't you feel like in this world everyone just wanted to feel secure, happy, and able to feed their family?" he would agree with me easily. But it seemed he didn't include these people in that definition. The compartmentalization of the human brain is amazing. He was gracious, open, helpful and patient with us but had massive pride for the Rakhine people and dismissal for the Rohingya. I don't think in his brain he could see us as all just "people."

Offerings to Buddha, AKA goat snack

Unquestionably one of the best images on the interwebs.

These two beauties adopted us for the few days we were there. I wish I could have taken them home with me.