Day 15, Mandalay: Information Density Fail.

(Posted by Andrew about the events of Dec 26; from Yangon to Mandalay, Myanmar.)

Up at 4:30AM today (4:30! In the AM! This is meant to be holiday!) to catch our flight from Yangon to Mandalay. At the airport we spotted the World Cup Trophy plane for a second time (clearly it's following us – maybe Canada will win the World Cup). As proof, here is an awesome photo I took of it during take-off:

After a brief bag-drop at our ship, the Road to Mandalay, we were off for a whistle-stop tour of Mandalay where we saw many things including Kuthodaw Pagoda, advertised as the world's largest book:

(I'm in that photo but you have to look closely.)

Each of those pagodas contains a 4 foot high stone tablet with a single page of the Buddhist sacred text inscribed on it, and there a thousands of pagodas extending in all directions. As far as books go, it is indeed impressive in terms of overall size, but scores poorly when it comes to information density.

(Some back of the envelope nerd math here: each tablet was about 100 lines each with about 100 characters on each side, double-sided (I think), and the centre of each pagoda was about 5 meters from its neighbour. Assuming 8-bit ASCII encoding, storing the 100GB contents of the laptop I am writing this on should require 5.4 million pagodas in a square area 12 km on each side. However, at least it wouldn't have Windows 8 installed on it.)

While not very photogenic, another site of note was the four-square-kilometre palace: a square stronghold, 2 km on each side, with a 10 meter high wall surrounded by a 100 meter moat, plus an army stockpile inside. The reason it is notable is that this is definitely where I want to be when the zombie apocalypse breaks out. (The Walking Dead can keep their prison.)