dear diary, ( ironically ofc, my teenage days are long gone)
I am just now getting round to blogging about yesterday as it was such an exhausting day I couldn't stay awake past 6pm and woke up 20 past 5 this morning... twenty minutes late on my shower schedule, which meant everyone else in the hotel had used up the hot water.. *sigh* talk about a harsh awakening.

Sincerely I see myself adapting to life here quite easily. Burmese people have very basic schedules, wake up at 4.30/5am, have breakfast, work, have lunch at 11ish, work, have dinner at 6 pm and sleep by 7 pm and, get this (diet constricted chicks will love it as much as i do) their mid morning/ afternoon meal is a bowl of noodles! I wish it were socially acceptable ( and physically) for me to have a midmorning dish of spaghetti, I'd be in heaven... sadly it would most likely be because i would've passed away from being overweigh one week into the routine. How these women manage to stay skinny is beyond me.

Burma is a country where men and women carry the same value in society and they know the true meaning of equality, in fact it is not unlikely to see women employed as construction workers.Is hard labour the key to staying skinny while consuming 4000 curry and noodle based calories a day? Pardon me but I'm pretty sure after years of battling the misogenist (?) system even the toughest, roughest, meanest, butchest, braless feminist would object to being hired to build tin roofs and repave roads..

So yesterday, wake up call at 6 am, 7.30 am ready to go on a 'short hike' which turned out to be 18 miles long, taking me over 4000m above sea level, through the mountains.

Like in the best of love stories, in the beginning it' all lovely, it' s a parallel universe where unicorns and rainbows are abundant and birds poop glitter but soon the going got tough. We entered the depths of a tropical forest and get on to this tiny windy dark, wet ( humid is't a wet enough word to describe it) where climbing up required being on all fours and grabbing onto protruding things in the ground with the sole hope being ' omg omg please don't be a snake I am not ready to die'. Obviously, being the snake lover which I am, I rushed through the hike as fast as humanly possible, left with weak legs and bursting lungs and deep. DEEP hatred for my tour guide who had misguidedly decided to join me in the hike despite having initially sent me off with a stumpy local who worryingly resembled Attila the Hun, as they shared the same eerie goatee and tiny, mean blodshot eyes...

After chewing him out for a good quarter hour about how potentially dangerous thi hike was and why on earth me thought I was an appropriate candidate to try the adventurous route rather than the regular, touristic beaten track and him listening calmly, I relaxed at the way was clear now and the hike was less demanding. Relaxation which lasted about 3 minutes, until I saw a Wild elephant. I instantly my worries about the elephants presence posing a threat to my survival, in favour of a more worrisome threat which sprung to mind: Tigers.

I turned and asked the brow, still visibly shaken by my freakout, whether there were tigers in the area;his response was possibly the most annoying one anyone could ever give:the indian side head shake.

WHAT THE F*** is that supposed to mean? In my experience it could mean 'yes/no/maybe/i don't know/ i'm not sure but I am positive in this instance this response was purely due to his self preservation instinct- 'i shall not give her an answer as the answer will make her very mad at once'.

Sensing my fury he stayed silent for a while, only to break the silence with the most loaded question ever: Would you like there to be tigers??

I answer obviously not so he replies 'ok, so there are no tigers'.

Now I am seriously still wondering whether it is a language barrier that separated the brow and I or if he truly was trying to convince me that despite the truth, there were no tigers threatening my life. I am now eager to go home and super zoom into every detail of my photographs and I semi expect to find traces of tiger existence in them.

I really wouldn't be surprised as at times Attila the Hun would stop in his traks, tell us to shush and just stare into the bush.. one time he even threw a stick into the forest screaming. I REALLY had to put a lot of effort into not looking in that direction as knowing for certain what the creature was would've paralysed me with fear making me one easy target.. Thank goodness all went well..

I'm in Singapore now, so let me celebrate surviving by having a drink of water which tastes a lot like vodka.

Night nighty xx