Day 43, March 1

At long last, we arrived. It was only 12 noon, but after such a walk I was already hungry and tired. We bought tickets to the park for $5 per person and immediately went to the restaurant.

The restaurant was beautiful - wooden tables, a view of the garden and pond, the food prices were higher than usual but not by much. We relaxed and ate our fill, now we can go for a walk.

First, we found an exhibition of amazing petrified trees. I was very struck by it, how a tree turned into a beautiful multicolored stone. I had never seen anything like it before. There were huge pieces of wood standing there, only cold to the touch and as if covered with a thick layer of multicolored varnish — I don’t even know how to describe it properly.

There were pieces that were half-polished, smooth and shiny, and multicolored. And the second, unpolished half looked just like a piece of wood; the wood structure was still visible there too — its veins and the mineral crystals in them.

Such a tree is formed over millions of years while lying in water. The water washes cellulose out of it and replaces it with minerals — that is how the tree turns to stone (I read all this later on Wikipedia).

Unfortunately, the photos don’t show anything — you can’t see how huge these petrified trees are or how beautiful their shape is, with smooth lines throughout. You can’t see the lovely pattern and bright colors either. We walked there for a long, long time, admiring this wonder of nature.

Then we followed a wooden path through the forest and came out into a bamboo grove. According to the sign, there were many kinds of bamboo here. Then a pine forest began, just like by the Kyiv Sea.

Soon we reached the aviary.

There were beautiful multicolored parrots in cages, and a talking bird that we had already seen in Thailand. There were also many peacocks and such an amazing bird that ate wood. It had funny shaggy little feet and was very comical overall, with a huge beak. It ran amusingly along the fence and jumped from branch to branch — the birds there are almost free, if you don’t count the net overhead.

There was also a strange bird standing in the swamp, looking like a stone statue. It stood motionless on one leg and only from time to time made very loud sounds (the birds there are not labeled, so I don’t even know what they are all called).

After the poultry house, we walked along another wooden path laid through the forest. There were huge trees growing there. They had very, very long branches and large roots that stuck out from under the ground.

We reached the butterfly museum. There were many butterflies from all over the world here, and there was even the largest butterfly.

Dead butterflies are not much of a sight, but on the other hand, in nature it is very hard to appreciate how beautiful they are because they are almost always in motion, or their wings are folded so that the amazing pattern cannot be seen.

By this time we were already very tired, but there was still the observation tower left - so off we went there. There was an elevator to the top of the tower, and from there there was a view of the entire garden and the town.

Surprisingly, we spent more than 5 hours in the garden; when we were leaving, it was already around five o'clock and we somehow had to get back from there. We had absolutely no energy left to walk to the hotel. We left through another gate, and there were no horse-drawn carriages there. Only greedy taxi drivers were standing around. Instead of cars, they had something like a motorcycle with a trailer. After negotiations, we managed to bring the price down from 80 UAH to 40 for them to take us to the hotel.

In the evening we decided to eat at our hotel restaurant. The prices there turned out to be high, the highest we had seen during our entire stay in Myanmar, which was very strange. But we ordered two kinds of potatoes and sat waiting. After some time the waiter came and asked whether we wanted rice as a side to the potatoes. We didn’t immediately understand what he meant. We said no, thank you, we just want to eat potatoes.
And then they brought it. Volchiy commented on it like this: “My dad would have fallen off his chair at the sight of such potatoes.”
One of the dishes looked even appetizing - pieces of potatoes (though, as usual, undercooked and therefore slightly crunchy) together with vegetables - all of it stewed. But the second dish was simply baffling. Potatoes, cut into thin narrow strips, were floating in some kind of red slop. In short, it’s impossible to describe in words, and we had forgotten the camera in the room - it was very hard to eat. I don’t know how they managed to ruin potatoes like that…