A Real Motorway of Sorts.

We left Inle Lake behind this morning to trace our route back over the hills through all the good farming land. We stoped at the town of Heho for market day, each village has a market day every 5 days. At this market everyone brings his or her produce or whatever it is that is they sell. We spent a nice half hour around the market with our guide finding out what all the different food items were that we didn’t recognise.

Then it was over the hills and far away! Maybe I got a bit carried away with that line, it was over the hills and on to the plains to join the motorway the runs from Yangon to Madalay.

Using the word “Motorway” is a fairly loose term for the road, it was dual carriage way and it was a toll road. Actually nearly every road in Myanmar has a toll on it as we are forever stopping at toll station paying tolls from 10c to $1.50. Back to the motorway, it’s the best bit of road we have had for the trip to date and we did travel at 100+kph for the time we used it. It sure beat the old road we’d used for a while with and average speed of about 45. The intersections are basic junctions but work very well for the low volume of traffic.

No truck seem to use the motorway which I guess is to do with the higher toll, however we did have one experience with a local motor bike coming towards us and not on the shoulder but in the lane as if was a standard 2 lane road.

As we headed south the farms are getting bigger and we have seen the first Combines for rice harvesting, not big one like we see in Australia but little one’s with a 8 foot cut. The rice is just left in piles on tarps in the middle of the field ready to be bagged by hand to carry out to the store, instead of being put into trucks.

We arrived in Taungoo for the night with plenty of light so I fuelled Penny ready for tomorrow as we head further south to the Golden Rock.