Buddhas and Murals at the Po Win Caves – 1

The very next day we organised a major outing to go and see the Po Win caves which are west of Monywa, and around 150km away from our base.

For reasons that are not clear we hired the same driver as the one we had had so much trouble with the day before – but maybe he was getting used to our strange ways, because he much less trouble on this trip.

All over Myanmar there are long queues for petrol because of the sanctions that have been applied on the country. Sanctions, of course, doesn’t affect the Generals or the rich, only the poor worker with his run-down motorbike who has to queue for hours to get enough petrol to go to work or to market.

Tourist cars are, I think, exempt from these queues, so when we had to fill up it didn’t take all morning, as it very well might have done otherwise.

It took us around 3 hours to reach the caves, which is really not bad, seeing that the driver didn’t know where they were, and we had to keep stopping and asking people.

We had one rough patch where the road had collapsed, and we had to drive chasis-deep through the waters, but apart from that it was not difficult, and the road from Mandalay to Monywa is in good condition.

This was probably our biggest “find” on the trip and there are more photographs from Po Win Daung than there are from any other site. Because of this I will highlight them over two days here, with some more information about the site itself tomorrow.

For the high-definition files, slideshow and more photographs please see the SOURCE.

View of the Caves