Follow the railway

Yangon has been interesting, a city where the streets are splattered red: the local men chew something that colours their saliva and requires them to spit the excess across the street at frequent intervals Clint Eastwood style. I ask the name twice and I'm sure he said "beetlejuice", I can't ask him a third time or Michael Keaton may appear. It's an odd habit for a people that spend so much time barefoot and even with shoes on you dodge the freshest deposits.

We're heading to Southern "My-mar" (the locals drop the middle "an" when pronouncing) but it's an unexpectedly early start that our driver insists is necessary in order to clear Yangon before rush hour. He is right too, the city is far larger than I'd realised and its a good hour before we are out. The driver loves his horn, honks at every car, bike, tuktuk, pedestrian and scabby dog. He is alone in this adoration; it prevents snoozing.

The city behind us, the roadside shops are more dusty, more functional in their wares, the mopeds more numerous and the chaos generally has ramped up a notch. Crossing the road to explore the market is challenging, cars don't stop, mopeds barely swerve and people sprint one lane at a time across the four (bit like Frog-it on the Commodore if you remember that far back). The market itself is as expected offering fruit, veg, chunks of dried river fish - all unrecognisable and unappetising. I'm pretty indifferent to these open markets now, they sell everything imaginable but are all very similar the world over, this one has mopeds weaving through the stalls which is an unusual twist. Around the next corner two huge golden owls stare back at me, they aren't for sale they are for luck.

Moving on, the drive reminds me of the approach to the Amazon in Brazil just before the rainforest but it is definitely Asia, like the Thailand I knew seventeen odd years ago, roadside shacks, fruit sellers, more mopeds but it's relaxed and unbothered by you or anything else. Going through the Mon state I believe the road is following and frequently crossing a notorious railway line built by the Japanese (quickly) in 1942.

Looking down over the road are four Buddhas, one facing each direction of the compass, all slightly different but all with the same hand position, blessing the earth while a young monk (they start at 7yrs old) considers his course for the day.

On leaving, a seller encourages me to try a food she was selling and I take it. It's as slippery as a bar of soap, one of those that is uncoloured and unscented and had been left in the bath too long because it's basically a transparent jelly with no flavour but a weird gloopy texture. This it turns out is the fruit of the toddy palm and if you leave it until later in the day it rapidly ferments to become alcoholic. But I suddenly realise I've broken the golden travelling rule when protecting ones digestion, having taken an unspecified thing from the dirty fingers of roadside stranger I spend an anxious hour awaiting a judgement from my depths... "all good, just a shame you ate it so early in the day".

En route we pass a massive Buddha reclining in a field, this is to be a new Buddha but it's not the one we're visiting, which is smaller than the one we did yesterday and has less detail in its footprints but which was lost to the jungle until being found by an engineer appointed by the British to build a road: He'd been making great progress, but he would do as he'd been stealing bricks from his ancient site to speed his progress. On discovering the practise the British prevented his further pillaging of the site before he started demolishing the main image - all the supporting stupa were already resting under the tarmac. This is Shwethalyaung temple.

Another Pagoda is next, the hillsides are liberally sprinkled with the gold droplets of these buildings, which I think look like handbells. No one has offered a better reason for the shape, this is the tallest in Myanmar but covered in bamboo scaffold while its is re-gilded. It has been tortured by many earthquakes, one year alone ut collapsed to 31 quakes in one year. It has only recently been rebuilt and a section from an earlier incarnation still lies in place:

Two hours later I'm sitting in a truck awaiting a lift to the top of a mountain

Mt Kyaitiyo which hosts Golden Rock stands in front and the road is suddenly steep, very steep, we're cramped six across on a single slat of wood, no leg room and boil whenever the truck stops moving to allow downward traffic or whenever else the driver feels like jumping out to let collection tins appear at the side of the truck. The only other route to the top is the several hours walk that the monks undertake,  this is one of their most important pilgrimages. Either side is mountain jungle where a few tiger still live, sadly way too rare for a chance encounter.

The truck speeds into the very tight hairpins like its a rally stage and we're so wedged in we barely lean, looking back down the spaghetti of concrete path looks like an alpine piste carved into the greenery, this truck ride is fun.

Arriving at the top there is a festival atmosphere, mantra reciting, smells of food and incense fill the air and its busy. Some families are staying overnight here by the rock and are spreading out their blankets ready for a chilly evening. This is how I imagine an Indian festival to be.

The Rock itself is impossibly balanced in a gravity defying repose, legend says it was recovered from the seabed by a King and is the shape of the hermits head who had presented him with two hairs from the previous Buddha which he had secreted away in his topknot some 2500 years ago. These hairs sit under and balance the rock. 

The boat the King used to carry the rock sits nearby, itself now a rock. It's impressive and has defied multiple earthquakes, it was first documented in 14th Century and geological records do show that the area was flooded 2500 years ago so the origin of the story doesn't seem so unlikely.

Like all religious tales, it probably started as a grain of truth or moral became wrapped in exaggeration before being buried deep in metaphor, you do believe it's a special site. We walk clockwise around it - as you every stupa and Buddha - and its position is very precarious, but for us the main attraction becomes the buzz from the worshippers and as sunset approaches a fizz is growing across the mountain top. Oddly we ourselves are attracting attention, several schoolgirls are taking our photo and asking us to pose with them, we're happy to do it but I think they're confusing us with someone higher profile.

A hotel near the boat rock has a roof terrace and we catch the sunset from there. It's bizarre that we're the only ones here and it occurs to us that own hotel room will present us with sunrise the next morning:

A even more rapid decent of the mountain spaghetti and we're continuing south, caves are the destination. 

Driving on the landscape is changing, rice and watermelon fields sprinkled with steep sides huge limestone monolith towers that you also find in Thailand.

It's a few hours to The Kings cave, a place of retirement and meditation for a former king who handed over the reigns to a prince whom acquired the power to converse with the animals, specifically horses, from a dragon he had saved from a bat. That sounds ridiculous now I write it but seemed perfectly reasonable when described to me - this will likely be the case for the next few weeks! The cave will bestow a suitably worthy visitor this power when they enter... It wasn't me. 

Entrance to the cave is up steep steps, shoes left at the bottom as always and shorts pulled down low to fully cover below the knee, as has been necessary at every key site, in fact shorts are the wrong thing to wear full stop.

Deep in the cave bats sweep past your head and the main illumination is the gold of the Bhudda statues that litter the path. 

The entrance is patrolled by monkeys and monks, as one of the monkeys opens a bag of crisps it's unclear which is actually in charge, behind is a monastery and a stunning view across to other limestone monoliths, geo thermal pools provide heated swimming pools.

Further down the road another cave, also well explored by monkeys offers dates back to 700ad and is adorned by millions of miniature Bhudda images made from clay, bigger statues have been adhered to the walks for thousands of years. 

The height these extend is amazing, a single shaft of bamboo lodged in the rocks suggests how it might have be possible to ascend such cliffs, arms laden with pottery Bhudda. 

Many have fallen, apparently over time but possibly its recently and coinciding with the opening of the nearby cement works, so says Lonely Planet.  

We watch sunset from the Welcome Jetty in Hpa-an, where the King welcomed Bhudda. It's being repainted currently, the speedy worker throwing the empty paint tin into the river some 50ft below us is a little surprising and perhaps shows us why most the waterways are so dangerously polluted. I can't equate these acts (more than one empty flies riverward) with the delicate respect I have seen so far.

The hotel is beautifully set beneath one of the limestone mountains and a roadside trader has parrots for sale. The hotel also has a curious selection of essentials you might have forgotten to bring: toiletries, cashew nuts, batteries and whisky - turns out I had forgotten something.