Golden Boulders, Mack trucks, and Happy Hotels....

So we left Mawlamyine a while ago, and had quite the adventure getting back to Yangon via the Golden Boulder of Mt. Kyaiktiyo(pronounced Chai tea O.)
We left Mawlamyine in the morning and hopped on a bus to the city of Kyaikto. Kyaikto has nothing of significance except for a big main street, a train station, and that's about it. We got to Kyaikto and hopped on a shared truck to Kinpun, basecamp for the golden boulder. It costs 50 cents a person to sit in the back of a truck with about 15 other people for 20 minutes. Kinpun sucks.
It's basically a generic tourist trap of a truck stop where endless souvenir stands and hawkers disrupt your every moment. The town is basically a nightmare where any moment a tourist bus, pickup truck bus, tourist van, local truck, or modified 18 wheeler tourist mover could run you over without even the interest to check if you were a pothole or a person.
Once of the shared pickup truck we wanted lunch, but only had about 15,000 kyat(pronounced chat) left, about $15. We got some super cheap noodles and a few mini hot dogs on a skewer for less than a dollar in the bus station parking lot, sitting on mini stools six inches off the ground while busses backed up in to parking places behind us, beeping just beyond the flies circling our heads.
To get to the golden boulder you sit in what looks basically like a Mack truck, but with the back of a pickup truck. In the back, there are slats of wood across every 12 inches or so, or just enough leg room for your average 10 year old. People sit about 8 to a row, with about 8 rows of benches. It's quite uncomfortable. The trucks leave from a giant garage/shed with 3 lanes of trucks, 3 trucks in a line. Each truck has a set of concrete steps, about ten steps high that lead you up to the pickup. It was mighty hot.
We walked right from our noodles, past the only bank in town without even noticing it, staring intently at the shade and chaos of the garage full of pilgrims, curious locals, and a few foreigners trying in vain to document the chaos on their cameras. Likewise the locals did the same, snapping pictures of us snapping pictures of them. A crossfire of tourist shenanigans.
The busses, though full, hesitated to leave. Intent on not spending the night in the holiest of truckstops, me and Jin threw our giant backups in the cargo hold of our Chinese Mack Trucks, alongside the giant sacks of cauliflower and onions being brought up to the tourist hotels on top of the mountain. The truck left and started off to the mountain road.
We made it a few kilometers, seeing the Golden Boulder just up at the top of the mountain as we pulled out of the shed. We headed for the backside of the mountain, going through to the end of town and circling around to the unseen forest behind. We stopped for about ten minutes as the other trucks from the shed slowly lined up behind us and the workers did their best to get the 5 dollar fare from each of the fifty people on the truck. Seriously sweating, knees rubbing against the girl in front of me(and the wooden board she was sitting on,) hips nestled snuggly against my middle aged neighbors longyi(pronounced "Long gee"(basically a Burmese sarong for either men or women)) I tried to breath deep and not drench everyone in sight with my overhydrated perspiration.
We watched as truck after truck came down the mountain, curving down the switchbacks from above. Finally, all the trucks had passed us, and it was our caravans turn to head up, us leading the way. We went a few kilometers and stopped again.... same thing.
40 godforsaken(buddhaless?) minutes later we arrived at the top. Porters rushed to offer us the possibility of paying them to carry our bags to one of the many hotels we were intent not to stay at. We tried to find a currency exchange among the thousands of people wandering around between hotels, restaurants and tourists stands at the peak of the mountain. An ATM would have been better. We went in the "foreigners ticket office" and tried to pay the 6 dollars that only tourists were allowed to pay, but we seemed to be the only foreigners trying to buy tickets(there was no ticket takers, much less gate) and they offered us an absolutely horrid exchange rate for our US dollars, so we told them we'd come back after we found some kyat. We didn't. No one cared.
With a supreme lack of eagerness, we took off our shoes as we entered the temple area. The gesture, was feable as the dirt from shoes perhaps would have spruced up the piles of garbage, stains of betel nut spit, and general filth that lurked at every nook and cranny of the many nooks and crannies. There were thousands of pilgrims, or possibly vagrants sitting with their fuzzy ecstasy blankets propped in to makeshift tents, shielding them from the blinding sun at the mountains' peak. We wandered around, tiptoing through the sludge to make our way to the giant golden boulder at the edge of the mountain. We saw it, we took pictures, we even had others take pictures of us(or at least try to.) It was hot, sunny, dirty and golden.
I'm not sure how I feel about the golden rock. Perhaps it was amazing, perhaps it was awful. Looking back it reminded me of the final moments of Woodstock, tents in shambles, trash everywhere, people rambling around, and all with taste of something vaguely monumental in the air.
We carried our large backpacks around, trying to find a way to save our last kyat and walk down the mountain, but it was impossible. As some clamored to watch the sunset, I clamored for sanity, hiking back through the chaos to one of the trucks waiting to take us back down.
Back at the giant shed, we unloaded from our trucks and immediately saw the now closed bank and ATM directly outside where we had walked just hours before. We got offered similarly terrible exchange rates, refused, and spent 25% of our kyat on the 1000kyat ride back to Kyaikto.
We got dropped at the train station, and were told that the night train to Yangon, a 6 hour ride away was sold out. Mightily disappointed, we were told the next train was the following morning and that there was no need to buy tickets in advance. We trudged back to main st Kyaikto and went to the Happy Hotel where we were told rooms were $20. A bit steep we thought, walking outside to look for other options.  A stroke of luck came our way and we noticed another hotel, part of the same building the Happy Hotel, but just 50 feet further back off the street. I was ecstatic when they offered us a ten dollar room with a flat screen tv, fan, internet, bathroom, and even a hint of cleanliness. Buddha smiled from above the golden boulder, for all the glory of the moment was his.