21st February 2015 boring roads and lumpy coffee

Owen and I had to set off very early this morning as we had to man a main time control in the organic orchard cafe some 150kms from last nights hotel, this early in the morning the roads are lined with monks and street traders, rough roads with little passing opportunity made it difficult for us especially difficult for the cars as they would be leaving two hours later, we arrived at the cafe where lovely coffee was being served, we were here for about two hours drinking lovely coffee and rubbish sweets, we palmed these sweets off on the competitors and laughed greatly at there expressions when they realised they were disgusting!  Once these duties were over we proceeded through busy villages and tight twisty lanes strewn with overladen lorries and even more overladen motor bikes, one particular image in our mind is the queue of Buddhist monks lining the streets waiting for their daily portions of rice!

During the day we followed the clerk of the course down the one road we used all morning and even managed to get some snaps of them running through rural Bhurma 

We even managed to catch the rally leader in the Porsche taking their time to to nearly run over a few locals on their way to getting a deserved win in this long event.

Elephants are becoming a more common sight in this part of the world, mainly being used a work tools for locals everyday life, they seem happy and I'm getting the impression they are being well looked after!

We came across a volvo that had suspension failure and with the extent of the damage looks like game over for them, the Buick has finally blown their engine up and they will be finishing the route on a recovery truck!   More basic houses are in his area but people seem contented and get on with the drudge of life.

We stopped at a restaurant for lunch and enjoyed a mass of foood, far better than UK roadside restaurants but their coffee had lumps of fat in it, ove sweet but rank none the les

Back at the hotel we had a feeling problem on a Merc, points on a Chevy but the most exciting part of the day was being interviewed for local TV and giving one of the countries politicians a tour of the care park, staring to fall in love with this place even though j feel it has an edge to it