Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got...

We drove for seven hours, stayed overnight, drove to the bus station, waited for 30 minutes for the truck to fill up, travelled another 30 minutes up the mountain, and walked up an incredibly steep hill for an hour and a half. But at the end we were ‘rewarded’ with a rock covered in gold leaf, perched on the end of another seaside-like pier.

The longer we were there, the more we appreciated it, but still. It’s a rock.

The trip down was the epitome of inefficiency. We waited for 90 minutes for the truck to fill up (45 people, not including monks and children, or it won’t go anywhere). There was a lot of head counting, shuffling, squeezing and sweating. We finally set off, only to stop a few seconds later to let lots of empty trucks pass down the hill ahead of us. Then we stop again to collect the money – halfway down the hill - obviously.

Had we have used public transport for our Myanmar trip, I get the feeling we wouldn’t have got very far.