Ye Tagun Taung

Waterfall Hill (Ye Tagun Taung) is thirty minutes east of Mandalay (Myanmar's second city) by Mazda B600. This vehicle, produced between 1962 and 1968, top speed 49 MPH, is the only conveyance that you can flag down on the streets of Mandalay. Most people ride motorbikes or bicycles. Very few walk. Tourists who haven't hired cars through a tourist agency take the B600, if they can find one.

The disadvantage is that they are too underpowered to make it up to Waterfall Hill. They can take you out of the city, through the rice paddies and villages to the base of the escarpment of the Shan Hills, which rise up to 1800 meters above the Irrawaddy River valley. But they can't take you up the switchbacked road, semi-paved, that winds its way up the escarpment to the base of the narrow valley. So you get dropped off at the last village in the plain, at the gates of the monastery, and negotiate with one of the motorbike boys for a ride up the hill. (Or you can walk the thousands of steep steps up through the monastery grounds. . . ) Two visits ago, I got

a ride on an underpowered 90cc bike that wobbled and crashed on one of the turns. Now nothing less than 120cc. And my ambition for my middle age is to learn to ride a motorbike. Then I can borrow one from a friend or hire the one at the hotel.

Waterfall Hill is one of four sacred hills surrounding Mandalay. It is known for its monasteries, religious monuments, cave temples, and monkeys. Soon, very soon, it will be known also for its rock climbing. It is the nicest climbing site I've found so far, the most natural setting, and the richest in cultural interest.

The climbers in Mandalay discovered the small training crags where the paved road comes to an end. My first time there, I walked with them further back on the rough road that had been carved out of the valley floor, and we discovered more monuments, more good climbing (30+ meter north-facing cliff faces), and the tea shop. The road was passable by high-clearance trucks.

Three trips and a year later, the road has been obliterated by monsoon rains. The valley floor has been carved back

down to bedrock, leaving a beautiful mountain stream, dry in places, pools of water in others, where a roadbed used to be. It's an improvement in my view. But not according to the monks in the monastery further up the valley. On the day that I was drilling and bolting my routes, they were drilling holes in immense boulders at the side of the once and future road, filling

the holes with dynamite, and setting them off with blasting caps. I didn't know that dynamite was part of the skill set of Burmese monks.

They gave us about five minutes warning before blasting, time enough for me to rap down, scurry down the valley, and hunker down behind a boulder. Then the explosion, and the sound of rock shrapnel falling to the valley floor. This routine repeated itself over and over during the two days I was working there. There will be another road, I'm convinced, and a particularly powerful monsoon season will wash it away, and the monks will restore it.