On the second and last day of this Inle to Kalaw trekking, we start the early morning after a very pleasant breakfast at the guest house. It’s really cold in the night up here in the mountains, but they have some really nice blankets for us. We leave the village where we slept around 8 AM and my feet weren’t 100% recovered.
Be prepared to see a lot of spiders, and I mean it. They are big and sometimes colorful and they manage to stay really close to each other so you will find many giant spiders webs with up to 20 different spiders hanging there waiting for the next meal. I’m not a spider lover so this isn’t a very pleasant sight for me.
On this second day, we are supposed to walk for 5 hours, but I honestly think I won’t be able to do it. The landscape still surprises with its different colors and the view is totally worth it, but 2 hours after start trekking, I’m already too slow until each step I take is torture. My blisters are back again and they are hurting me terribly. There isn’t one part of my foot that I can touch the ground without feeling pain. I’m trying to walk on my tip toes but that is leading me to ankle pain. Just when I got tears in my eyes of so much pain I realized I’m not able to continue this trek at all. I’m not even enjoying anything around me because of the pain. I started this trek with sneakers and continued with flipflops, but once the blisters are there, I can’t do much about it. So I truly advise a good trekking shoe so you can do it without pain. I also think that if I have done the 3 days, 2-night trek it would be ok. But this Inle to Kalaw trekking is even tougher than the opposite way.
The next village we reach, I tell my guide that I won’t be able to walk anymore and he finds me a motorbike to take me to the next village where we are supposed to have lunch. And so it was. It was around 20 minutes motorbike until the next place, and I’m so relieved that I don’t have to walk anymore. I wait in the restaurant for the guide and Thea so we can have lunch together. We are 2h walk away from Kalaw, so in total, I missed about 3h of this Kalaw trekking, but my friend Thea told me that I had already got the best views, so I’m ok with it.
After lunching some shan noodle soup, which is very tasty and I truly recommend, they continued the Kalaw trekking while I went to a motorbike with a lady. It was a pleasant motorbike journey as I could still enjoy the mountain view. This motorbike journey to Kalaw cost me 7000 kyats (about 4€) and took 45 minutes. I departed from the last village on the trekking which I don’t know the name.
When I reach Kalaw, the luggage hasn’t arrived yet, so I wait for it for a long time. There is some drunk Burmese guy approaching me and making conversation. He told me a bunch of things which I haven’t believed including being the brother of the owner of the place I was staying in Golden Lily Guesthouse. That would be such a huge coincidence no?
So, he follows me until there, and once I got there, the nice lady told me that he is just a drunk guy that uses to chase tourists trying to get some money. Well, he didn’t get anything from me…
Once I reach the Guesthouse my feet are still a huge mess, so all I do the rest of the day is resting and try not to walk much. If I had finished the trekking, I was supposed to reach Kalaw around 3 P.M. so you still have time to do more stuff in this day if you are not too tired from the trek.
After all, this was a very nice experience, and besides not being able to finish it and had horrendous pain in my feet, I would do it again, but with different shoes, as the views and the experience of interacting with villagers is totally worthy.
