Return to Bagan and MandalayJan. 5, Mandalay
The Christmas vacations are drawing to a close, and I’m back in Mandalay for the second time. My friend Miklos and I are staying here one more night before flying back to Rangoon tomorrow; Joanne flew back this afternoon. Miklos and I had wanted to make a quick visit to Inle Lake, but all the flights were fully booked, and we would not have been able to make it back to Rangoon in time for me to work on Tuesday. So instead we opted for Mandalay and its attendant sights, which we have been dutifully engaged in seeing for the past few days.
When I last wrote, Joanne and I were in Kawthoung, waiting for our dive boat, the Faah Yai, to heave into sight so that we could go diving. We met up with the boat, carrying our fellow divers and our friend Miklos, and headed out for 7 glorious days out in the waters of the Mergui Archipelago. If you look at a map of Burma, you will see that, like a mirror image of Thailand offset a few hundred kilometres to the north, Burma has a long, narrow southern tail extending deep into the heart of the tropics. The mainland portion of this tail is quite narrow, as it shares the Isthmus of Kra with Thailand, but it also has an offshore portion consisting of almost 1,000 separate islands. Isolated by closed borders, a lack of roads and a paranoid government, these islands are a lost world, full of pristine mangrove swamps and uninhabited jungles. Whereas in Thailand almost every island down the west coast has been “developed” for tourism, almost nothing of the sort has happened in the Mergui Archipelago. Most of the islands have nobody living on them; this is partly due to government policy, and partly due to a lack of year-round water supplies on the islands. As well, the islands would be eminently unsuited to farming or livestock raising, as they have only a thin layer of nutrient-poor soil under their rainforests, so it’s just as well that the government has ignored it’s own “log at all costs” philosophy and left most of the islands completely alone. There are a few fishermen, mostly Salone, also known as Moken or Sea Gypsies, a Malay tribe who have been living a nomadic, boat-based existence along the coast of the Andaman Sea for centuries.
Unfortunately, since the Burmese government hasn’t been willing or able to police its own waters effectively, there has been an influx of Thai fishermen to exploit the fish-rich waters. The world’s oceans have been overexploited for decades, and a recent report by an international panel of biologists headed by a Canadian professor concluded that wild fish stocks may be essentially extinct within 40 years, given today’s trends. Fishermen are moving further afield and using unsustainable fishing practices. The most damaging technique used in the shallow coastal reefs of Southeast Asia over the past twenty years has been dynamite fishing, in which explosives are used to stun fish and make them rise to the surface to be collected easily. Unfortunately this destroys the coral reefs which are the nurseries for so many species and results within a few years in a collapse of the fisheries. Another method used in the Mergui, long-lining for sharks with lines several kilometres long, has reduced the shark population of the area drastically. Diving in Burma used to be famous for the number of sharks you would see, but we saw almost no sharks at all. The Burma Banks, an offshore seamount that was legendary six years ago for its silvertip sharks now has none left, thanks to one very successful shark-fishing expedition four years ago.
There are, however, some areas which have remained fairly pristine, and the Faah Yai, with 11 divers from all over the world aboard, spent 7 days exploring them. We stayed in the southern half of the archipelago, from the Thai border as far north as Black Rock. We dived four times a day, ate far too much good Thai food and were completely exhausted by the end of the trip, a combination of the effects of diving (nitrogen hangovers), slight sea-sickness and early mornings. The diving was a mixed bag. Some sites closer to the mainland had a lot of plankton of various sorts in the water, reducing visibility tremendously. Our first dives on the Three Stooges site were a bit like diving in pea soup: green and opaque. The visibility slowly improved, but it was never crystal clear, making it hard to spot bigger stuff at a distance. By the end of the trip, however, we had grown accustomed to spotting lots of rays, including huge blotched stingrays and eagle rays, as well as more moray eels than we’d ever seen before and a truly remarkable number of well-disguised scorpionfish and cleaner shrimp. We didn’t see any turtles, which was a bit disappointing, and our shark encounters were limited to a couple of blacktips and whitetips, along with a lone bamboo shark. We found a few smaller critters, including pipefish, ghost pipefish, seahorses and nudibranchs, but we missed finding the frogfish that we knew were down there somewhere. There were healthy populations of larger pelagic fish such as trevallies (jacks), tuna, rainbow runners and barracuda. Overall I enjoyed it, although I’m not sure the quality of the diving was worth the premium price we paid for it. As well, any live-aboard diving trip can become claustrophobic; I would have liked to have spent more time on solid land, exploring the islets on foot or perhaps by sea kayak. We grew accustomed to bobbing off tiny rock pinnacles, watching Brahminy kites and white-bellied sea eagles soaring overhead, feeling a bit seasick and wishing for dry land. Ironically, once we returned to Kawthoung on December 30th, Miklos, Joanne and I were all very seasick for several hours as our bodies missed the rocking motion of the waves.
Kawthoung town is a bit of a dump, full of dodgy characters living off the border trade and off the daytripping tourists from Thailand who come to renew their Thai visas by nipping across the river from Ranong. We spent much of the 30th in Kawthoung, both downtown and out at the airport, waiting for our flight which departed at a slightly mysterious hour which changed depending on who we asked. We were glad to get back to Yangon that evening just in time to head out to a lavish pre-New Year’s Eve dinner at a fancy French/Indochinese restaurant. We ate ourselves silly and then staggered home for a few hours of sleep before catching the first flight of the morning to Bagan.
Bagan had been transformed since we were there in October. It’s now high season and it was full to bursting with tourists; it took us seven attempts to find a hotel that wasn’t full. There were no bicycles to be had, as they got snapped up first thing in the morning, and the ruins were noticeably fuller, both of tourists and annoying vendors. As well, since the rainy season is now a distant memory, we had spectacular sunrises and sunsets and cool evening temperatures. Joanne and Miklos put their digital SLR cameras through their paces and took zillions of photos while I contented myself with the occasional shot on my oh-so-retro film camera and did some sketching. On New Year’s Eve, worn out by the dive trip, the late night and early morning, we were sound asleep at 9 pm and didn’t raise our heads until 8 o’clock on New Year’s Day. Luckily we had anticipated this and toasted the New Year in at sunset atop a 13th-century temple.
We flew up here after another bleary-eyed early morning, made palatable by the spectacular sunrise we watched dawning over the ruins, and set off for U Bein’s bridge in Amarapura. Mandalay was only the capital of Burma for a couple of decades in the mid-1800s, but the immediate vicinity contained four other cities which served at one time or another as capitals for most of the six centuries between the coming of the Mongols in 1284 and the British in 1886. Amarapura’s main attraction is a huge bridge over a seasonal lake. It’s 1.2 km long, shows up clearly in Google Earth satellite images and is made more or less entirely of teak (give or take a few concrete pillars added lately to shore it up). It’s a wonderful place for photography of monks and villagers passing along the bridge, silhouetted against the setting sun. We stopped on the lakeshore some distance from the bridge to take a few photos, and when we returned to the taxi my daypack had vanished, presumably taken by light-fingered locals who happened to be passing by. Nothing of huge monetary value was stolen; I had my moneybelt and camera on my person as I took photos. The main losses were my cherished shortwave radio, which had shared all my travels for five years, and my sketchbook, which had drawings I had done for the past two years and was, of course, irreplaceable. I was irate, and, by coincidence, so was Miklos. Just before leaving our hotel in Mandalay, he had found that his moneybelt had been skimmed in the hotel in Bagan. All three of us have had the same experience before in Indonesia: someone, presumably a hotel employee, comes into the room, opens the moneybelt and takes out some, but not all, of the money. Enough to be useful to the thief, little enough that it’s not immediately obvious to the victim. I hate experiences like this, causing one to lose faith in one’s fellow man.
The next two days in Mandalay were spent in more of the old capitals and ruins around the city. We went out to peaceful, bucolic Inwa (also known as Ava), a little island little touched by the twentieth century. We bumped around in the obligatory pony carts and saw lots of ruined walls and pagodas dating back a couple of hundred years. The most impressive was a monastery built entirely of teak in which many of the small boys of the village were getting a monastic education: learning how to read and write and chant. The monastery seems to be doing much more for the kids than the government is in terms of education. We ended the day in Sagaing, across the Irrawaddy, a mass of stupas sprawled across a hillside. I really liked the atmosphere on Sagaing Hill, above the hurly-burly and noise of daily life, surrounded by monks. It reminded me of some of the great Tibetan monasteries near Lhasa such as Ganden and Drepung.
We went to Mingun, the last of the old cities in the vicinity, yesterday. It involved an hour of put-putting up the Irrawaddy, much shallower and narrower than it was in October, to the site of two pieces of audacity. One of the 19th-centuries kings expended years of slave labour on trying to build the world’s largest stupa. Had it been completed before his death, it would have been truly monumental, something like 200 metres high. What was left after his unlamented demise was merely the base and bottom layer, but they still form a Pyramids-of-Giza-sized pile of bricks, split picturesquely by subsequent earthquakes. We clambered up the path to the top and were rewarded with great views out over the dry, East African-looking hills and the very un-East-African stupas adorning all of the summits. In the other direction we could see the Irrawaddy and the haze over Mandalay city, into which we returned all too soon.
Yesterday evening Miklos and I, bereft of Joanne’s company, headed out to the nightly performance of the Moustache Brothers comedy troupe. Having gotten into trouble for telling anti-government jokes which earned one brother 5 years of hard labour, they are banned from performing outside their house, but they still pack in the backpacking crowds. The routine suffers a bit from being conducted in English instead of Burmese, but it’s still both an interesting insight into traditional Burmese arts, and into the sad, convoluted politics of Burma today.
And now a trip back to Yangon on yet another Air Bagan flight awaits, followed by a quick jaunt to Bangkok to get a new 6-month Burmese visa and to post these most recent posts.
Hope you enjoyed these scribblings,
Graydon
Two Months Later......Dec. 22, Kawthoung
The episodic nature of this blog is becoming more pronounced over time. I haven’t written a word for more than 2 months, since our expedition to Bagan and Inle in October. Partly this reflects the lack of novelty; partly it reflects the tiredness that has enveloped me like a wet blanket since then. Only now, after a week of Christmas vacation, do I feel slightly more human. I’m not sure what’s causing this tiredness: the insomnia which has afflicted me for a while, or the stress of having a real job for the first time in ages. I think that teaching, while in some ways a good job for me, doesn’t give me nearly enough mental stimulus; I thought I would find it more intellectually fulfilling than I do at the moment.
Anyway, to recap two months in a few paragraphs: work, work, and the occasional trip somewhere. I came back from Inle with the resolution to try to get out of town every weekend that I could, but in the event, I only escaped Yangon twice, once riding my bike to Bago and once going with Joanne and another teacher to the lovely beach at Ngwe Saung. Because of the government’s rescheduling of night trains, it’s no longer possible to catch night trains north out of Yangon towards Mandalay, which, combined with the lack of flights leaving Yangon after 3 pm (when work ends on a Friday), makes it hard to get away for the weekend. But now I have three weeks of glorious liberty, and I’ve already used the first week up on a bike trip along the old Burma Road from Lashio to Mandalay. The second week is earmarked for a diving trip here in southernmost Burma, and then after that we will have a week of touristing somewhere in central Burma—Bagan again and then Mandalay, perhaps?
The time has flown by since our return from fall break in mid-October. Partly this has been due to the haze of exhaustion which has enveloped me without good reason, and partly this has been since it has only been 8 weeks of school which have run into each other seamlessly. Trying to tease out some individual happenings of interest to you, dear readers, I have come up with the following.
1) End of the rainy season.
As unlikely as it seemed at the time, our rain-soaked, flood-dodging holiday in October was the last hurrah of the rainy season. It hasn’t rained a drop in Yangon since then, and it has become noticeably drier and dustier in the city. Restaurants have outdoor seating now, and in the evenings and early mornings the streets are clogged with promenading people. The puddles both inside and outside have dried up, and the killing humidity which sapped our will from August until October has finally abated. Although we’ve been told that this year’s weather has been anomalous, with heat and humidity lasting far longer than is usual (blame it on El Nino, or else on global warming), it’s finally cooled off a bit in Yangon, with morning temperatures dropping below 20 degrees for the first time. It’s even slightly nippy diving into the swimming pool in the mornings, although nothing that a bit of willpower can’t overcome; it’s nothing like the first swim in a Canadian lake in May! The downside is that without rain to clear the air, Yangon is noticeably more smoggy than it was, although still much cleaner than places like Bangkok or any city in China.
2) Better orientation in Yangon.
I’m getting around town on my bike much more regularly now, which is helping me get to grips with the layout of Yangon. Yangon has a dearth of through streets, so traffic gets channelled down a few main potholed, crowded routes. With the bike, I’m able to scout out alternate routes, skipping the hopeless lineups of cars at the main intersections. I can now get to most points west and north of where we live as quickly as a taxi can, which removes the tedium of having to find a taxi and then bargain with the driver to get a reasonable price.
3) Tennis, squash and softball.
I have finally found some more sociable ways to get some exercise. Now that it’s stopped raining, I try to get out to the tennis courts once or twice a week. I haven’t found anyone to play matches with, but I have practice sessions with a sprightly 55-year-old who was Burma’s top player for twenty years. He’s a good player and knows lots of useful drills, and I feel the rust slowly being chipped off my groundstrokes. I still hope to find someone to play competitively, but in the interim, it’s much better than nothing.
I also have found a semi-regular squash partner in the person of Bo, a Canadian who’s a longtime Burma resident. We meet at the leafy compound of the Australian Club on a Sunday afternoon and play for an hour or two, sometimes doing a bit of a round robin with other members who happen by. Most of the time I win, and it’s not the most competitive squash in the world, but my last game was with an Australian who grew up playing squash in leagues and with proper coaching. He hadn’t played much for the past few years, so I was able to split games with him, but I’m sure that if we were to play again, I’d get pummelled as he got back into the rhythm of the game.
Once a week I also play slowpitch softball, a rather silly sport but a sociable way to meet a few other sporty types. Our team consists of a lot of teachers from various schools and a few other oil and embassy folk. We’re actually quite good compared to the opposition and so far have only lost one game, when we were short-handed, to the Myanmar national baseball team who play softball in order to get a bit of game practice in. I hit the first pitch I saw over the left field fence, but since then I’ve been scratching out singles and the occasional double.
4) Bago
The first weekend back from fall break, I rode my bicycle 85 km down the main national highway to Bago, one of the plethora of old capital cities dotting the Burmese countryside. It was a fairly hot and hilly ride, at least for the first 30 kilometres or so. Along the way I passed by a Commonwealth war cemetery and stopped in. It’s full of thousands of British, Indian, Nepali and African soldiers who died in WWII fighting in Burma. I was surprised at how many Indian soldiers lost their lives here, as well as how many African troops were used by the British to recapture Burma. Since the British didn’t trust the loyalty of their indigenous Burmese subjects, they didn’t use many Burmese troops in the country at all. To this day, in central Burma, there are entire villages of descendants of the Gurkha and Punjabi troops who came here to fight in WWII and never went home again.
I had an unwelcome fellow rider for the last hour of the ride, a drugged-out psychopath from a small dusty town who saw me coming, ran off to steal somebody’s bicycle and rode with me all the way to Bago, loudly and persistently begging for money. Usually I can outlast locals who want to ride with me, but this guy had stamina. Apparently he’s a well-known hazard of the road, hitting up just about any passing Western cyclists.
Bago, when I got to it, was a small and noisy truck stop/traffic snarl. Once I was off the main street, however, it was peaceful and quiet and full to overflowing with monks and religious pilgrims. The biggest stupa in the country, 10 metres taller than the Shwedagon in Yangon, dominates the skyline, and two of the longest reclining Buddhas (one ancient, one brand new) are found in the temple-filled countryside. I wandered around, taking photos and enjoying the views and the atmosphere, and then got up early on Sunday morning to see more of the temples before the tourist buses, and the resultant ticket collectors, arrived. On the way back to Yangon, I met two Germans on bikes who accompanied me back to town; it was nice to have the company on the flat, dull back route which I followed.
5) Ngwe Saung Beach
After two false starts caused by transport snafus, Joanne and I, along with our fellow Canadian teacher Ken and our houseguest Kent, hopped into an outrageously overpriced charter taxi in Yangon on the first Friday in December and drove to the nearest decent beach, Ngwe Saung. It’s about 220 km or so to the west, across the pancake-flat Irrawaddy Delta and then over some coastal hills. Looking at the distance, you might imagine that two and a half hours might suffice to get to the coast, but you’d be wrong. Given the nature both of Burmese roads and Burmese cars, it took almost exactly six hours of driving to get there. It was worth the long drive, though, to fall asleep to the sound of pounding waves, and to spend a day and a half beachcombing, eating prawns, bodysurfing and generally relaxing. The beach is very pretty, a long crescent of white sand, very clean and welcoming. We’ll certainly try to get back a few more times over the course of the second half of the school year.
6) Monastic Peace and Quiet—Not!!
We live right next door to a monastery. While travelling through the Middle East, I used to think that a mosque was the worst next-door neighbour you could have. I now know better. On an average night, the monks next door wake up around 3 or 3:30 in the morning and start hitting their temple bells. This in itself is not so horrible, but it wakes up the stray dogs and the local roosters, and the resultant cacophony makes it very hard to sleep. I’ve slowly almost gotten used to the racket, sleeping with earplugs to muffle the noise, but there are times when the monks go to special lengths to keep the entire neighbourhood awake. At the beginning of December, they spent five solid days and nights berating the local residents over a highly amplified, highly distorting set of loudspeakers to give them money. The noise was so loud that our window panes were rattling in their frames, making sleep an impossibility. The local Burmese seemed unaffected by five days of little sleep, but we Western teachers, perhaps unaffected by the spiritual content of the caterwauling, were murderously grumpy at being kept up all night again and again. Since then we’ve had one or two repeat performances that only add to my ongoing sleep deficit and make me think rather a lot less of Buddhism as an organized religion, at least as the religion of my immediate neighbours.
7) Lashio and the Burma Road
On the last day of the first semester, I left school half an hour early and dashed to the airport to catch a flight up to Lashio, a town northeast of Mandalay on the road to China. Once it was an important transport hub, the end of the railway and the beginning of the truck road to Kunming that was supposed to keep China supplied with war materiel to use against the Japanese: the Burma Road. I brought my bicycle with me on the plane and rode back for three days to Mandalay across the modern, freshly paved version of the road. It’s the best road in the country, and full of trucks plying the lucrative border trade with the economic colossus to the north. The riding was surprisingly easy; on the map it looked far more mountainous than it really is. This part of Burma, northern Shan State, is a big limestone plateau that rolls but doesn’t really rear into real mountains. The first day’s ride, 110 km to Kyaukme via Hsipaw, was quite easy, past small villages full of poinsettias where farmers were processing the rice and corn harvests. The second day saw the only serious climbing of the trip as I plummeted down into the Gokteik Gorge and pedalled slowly back up. This limestone gorge is bridged by the Gokteik Viaduct, an old engineering marvel from a century ago; I got a few photos of a train inching its way across the steel span. I spent the second night of the trip in the old colonial hill station of Maymyo, full of the ghosts of the Raj in the form of brick cottages and Victorian hotels. I had hoped to visit the famous botanical gardens, but a vast festival to mark its 75th anniversary was in full swing, attracting most of northern Burma, and the deafening noise of the loudspeakers reminded me too much of Yangon for me to venture inside. Instead I went birdwatching in the forests around the edge of town before hurtling downhill off the Shan Plateau into the last capital of independent Burma, Mandalay.
I liked Mandalay: small and quiet compared to Yangon, but full of character in a way that most Burmese towns I have seen are not. I think that any place which was once a national capital maintains a sense of this historical significance which shows in a greater sense of culture and decorum than is found elsewhere; in this sense, Mandalay reminded me a lot of Hue, in Vietnam, and Luang Prabang in Laos. I spent a happy morning wandering around town and climbing Mandalay Hill (to get precisely no views, thanks to morning mist and haze) before cycling to the airport along back roads through the old capital city of Amarapura and its famous old teak bridge (U Bein’s Bridge) an immensely long structure clearly visible from a great height on Google Earth. I absorbed some more atmosphere there and then hightailed it for the airport, getting lost along the way in a hopeless maze of dusty back roads and barely making in time for my flight back to Yangon.
Report from Inle LakeSunday, October 15, 2006
It’s an early morning here in Nyaungshwe, the little tourist town at the northern end of Inle Lake. Chanting monks and barking dogs woke me up early and I’ve been sitting outside in the faint morning chill, watching the town come to life and listening to the profusion of local birdlife chirping away.
It’s our last day in Nyaungshwe; we fly back to work in Yangon this afternoon. It’s been a wonderful few days here, and I’ve enjoyed Inle tremendously, more than I had anticipated. It’s a magical place in terms both of scenic wonder and friendly people. The smiles on people’s faces are genuine, despite the influx of loud, camera-toting tourists. The way of life of so many lake-dwellers is distinctive, living a semi-aquatic existence in houses built on stilts, growing tomatoes in floating gardens which bob atop rafts of buoyant lake vegetation, weaving silk and rolling cheroots in Dickensian workshops and gathering, along with the tribal people living in the surrounding hills, in markets bursting with colour, noise and distinctive headgear.
We spent two nights out at the Golden Island cottages, paying through the nose for food and accommodation but enjoying the peace and quiet and lake views. We went out one day on a boat trip, as all tourists here do, visiting a market which was especially well-thronged since it was the morning after an all-night festival and thousands of people from mountain villages had spent the night making merry and offering vast amounts of food and gifts to the local monastery. The main focus were four Buddha images which had just finished making a week-long triumphal procession around the lake on huge ceremonial barges and had now returned to their home monastery. As happens all over the country, pilgrims dip into their meagre savings to buy 500-kyat pieces of gold leaf (about 40 US cents) and stick them to the images. So much has been applied over the years that the Buddhas are now just shapeless golden blobs. Only the menfolk can touch the statues, so the women and children sit in the temple watching a scrum of men approaching the blobs with outstretched fingers holding tiny sheets of precious metal. The atmosphere is tremendously festive, with picnics happening in every corner, flasks of rice wine and huge cheroots making the rounds and kids running riot. Not being a religious person myself, it didn’t seem a terribly religious affair, just an excuse for a good party, but maybe that’s the genius of organized religion: making merry-making holy.
The market outside was a photographer’s paradise, with half a dozen ethnic groups gathered to buy and sell, see and be seen. Every village that appeared in its own overcrowded long-tail boat wore the same outfits, colour-coding themselves for easy identification. You could see distinct differences in faces and statures between the groups, but it was in the women’s headdresses that the tribes distinguished themselves the most. My personal favourite was the boatload of women who showed up dressed to the nines sporting orange teatowels wrapped around their heads.
We spent the rest of the day touring various villages, seeing lotus thread and silk being woven by women who toiled for 8 long hours in some of Blake’s dark satanic mills for 1000 kyat (80 cents) a day, making the mill owner very wealthy. It always irritates me in Burma that when you pay over the odds for handicraft work simply because you’re a foreigner, it’s not the average working Aung Kyaw Zaw who benefits; the mill owner or shop owner makes a tidy profit and the worker sees precisely none of the extra cash that you fork over. It’s the sort of Dickensian sweatshop exploitation that launched Karl Marx, and I found myself converting to Marxism as I asked questions about wages, costs and profits at each place.
The cheroot factory was little better. Burmese are addicted to small green cheroots which they buy for 20 kyat each. They consist of a small amount of tobacco rolled in a huge green leaf from a tree which grows around Inle Lake. A workforce consisting, as in the silk mills, entirely of women rolls 1000 cheroots a day for 1000 kyat a day, meaning that labour costs make up one twentieth of the final price of the cheroots. Since everything is rolled by hand and nicotine is absorbed through the skin, I’d be interested to know the rate of skin cancer among the workers.
Several of the souvenir shops along our way had an extra attraction: the long-necked women of the Padaung. Living just to the south of Inle, some women of the tribe wear long coils of a copper-gold alloy which stretch their necks (or, to be more precise, lower their shoulders to make their necks appear longer). In the shop we went into, three Padaung women, one matron and two teenaged girls, worked away at their looms while curious tourists circled them as though they were giraffes in a zoo, clicking away with their cameras. Apparently the women are hired as seasonal workers for a tiny salary, food, housing and the opportunity to sell some of their weaving. It smacks a great deal of a human zoo, and yet they come of their own free will since, as I was told, “there is no business in their home village. They come here or they go to Thailand to make some money.”
Despite the monetary squeeze on the workers, the average Inle Lake dweller seems enormously happy, and the smiles and waves of welcome as we put-putted by in our boat were warm enough to melt the Grinch’s heart. Perhaps it’s their vibrant culture, perhaps it’s religious faith, or perhaps it’s living in the magical light that seems to bathe Inle all day long. At any rate, it made for wonderful pictures, particularly of submerged pagodas near sunset in the last village.
We moved back into Nyaungshwe village at the end of the second day, wading through knee-deep floodwaters to do so; the incredible rains which inundated northern Burma in the wake of a Vietnamese typhoon caused tremendous flooding across the north, and made the countryside resemble one huge lake as seen from our airplane. The river leading through Nyaungshwe into Inle Lake had burst its banks and was still flowing through half the town, including our chosen guesthouse. It took a bit of hiking and wading to find a dry hotel to stay in.
Joanne wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed in bed while I took to my heels, riding a rental bike to the end of the road and then hiking into the surrounding hills. It was great to escape from the noise of engines and into the sound of birdsong as I climbed higher, past cheroot-leaf plantations and recent landslides to a small village perched 500 metres above and 200 years behind Nyaungshwe. I love walking in the hills, and this was perfect: alone, with no map or real idea of where I wanted to go, just drinking in the sights and smells and stretching out my deskbound legs.
Yesterday we rented another boat and headed to Indein, site of another all-night festival which had just ended, and of a remarkable hillside of stupas. Hundreds, maybe thousands of small stupas ascend a steep slope, crumbling picturesquely with the mountains behind and the lake in front. Most are whitewashed and look less abandoned than do the Bagan ruins, but they still have an air of delightful decay to them. With menacing storm clouds gathering behind, we had a perfect backdrop for photography.
So now it’s time for a return to the city, refreshed and excited about Burma. Until next time, I remain
Your Faithful Correspondent
Graydon
October 11, 2006
It’s dusk on Inle Lake, and the egrets are flying in noisy formation from the reed beds out towards the middle of the lake. The last embers of a fiery sunset are lighting up the sky in front of me as I type this on the balcony of our lakeside tourist cottage. It’s an unbelievably peaceful spot, despite the occasional rumble of a passing long-tail boat. Across the lake occasional spots of electric lights point out some of the villages and pagodas on the opposite “shore”; with the lake being so marshy and the surrounding villages being flooded, it’s hard to define where the lake starts and dry land begins.
Joanne and I arrived here from Bagan today. On the flight, we looked down on heavily flooded areas in central Burma. Torrential downpours over the past few days have caused major and minor rivers to burst their banks and flow through fields and villages and over roads. It’s the last gasp (or so we’re told) of a rainy season that we hoped might be over by now. Two days ago we tried to take a taxi to Mt. Popa, a religious site about 50 km from Bagan, and were turned back by the aftereffects of flooding, which had left vast swathes of road buried under a metre or more of soft river sand. Unlike the tour buses full of worried German tourists, our taxi made it through, only to be turned back by landslides further ahead. Today it seemed as though the road between Mandalay airport and the city was cut by floods. Here at Inle Lake, we had to take a different route from the airport to the lake to avoid heavy flooding, and we arrived at Nyaungshwe, the main tourist town at the northern end of the lake, to find a metre of water flowing down its main street. We decided to head out onto the lake just in case the flooding got any worse and inundated the whole village. We saw plenty of villagers in outlying areas drying out soaked clothing and bringing blankets and mats from their now-subaquatic houses to sleep on higher ground. It was a bit reminiscent for Joanne and I of our diving holiday in Indonesia that ended in a tsunami. Maybe we could make money by threatening to visit countries, and accepting bribes not to show up.
Our five days in Bagan were excellent. I love ruins, and Bagan is one of the big boys in the international ruins rankings. It was the capital of the first really Burmese kingdom from 1057 to 1284, during which time an absolute mania for pagoda building swept the city. Spread out over a plain about 8 km by 5 km, over 4400 pagodas of all sizes and shapes were built. If you’re counting, that’s about 20 new pagodas each and every year. The capital was situated in the “dry zone” of central Burma, and was never really good for agricultural production. When the Mongols appeared on the horizon in the mid-1280s, the last king turned tail and fled, and the trade connections which kept Bagan’s residents fed fell apart. The city was abandoned, and fell into a truly picturesque state of decay. Over the centuries the gold leaf was stripped off the pagoda spires, the bronze statues were melted down and the plaster and stucco fell off in great chunks, leaving the red brick structures standing. In 1975 a major earthquake flattened a lot of the remaining buildings and sparked a big reconstruction boom. Now some of the temples look distressingly new, while others are more pleasingly ruined. Apparently 300 new pagodas have gone up in the last 8 years as modern Burmese seek to acquire merit the way their Bagan forefathers did.
We clop-clopped around the site for 2 days in the back of a horse-cart, a relaxing way to see the major sights and to hear some of the standard lore of the temples. Bagan is famous for its sunrises and sunsets, with a horizonful of stupa spires puncturing the skyline while either backlit or set on fire by the red sun. Unfortunately, of the 6 mornings and 5 evenings we had at our disposal, precisely none provided a real sunrise of sunset, so we had to be content (and content we were) with occasional bursts of midday sun and dramatic cloud-filled skies as the backdrop to photos of the atmospheric piles of brick.
Bagan is overwhelming in its scale and in its number of ruins, but a few buildings stood out for their scale and proportions, soaring skyward like Mayan pyramids or looming like European cathedrals. As well, the fresco paintings adorning some of the walls provided variety, although most were of Buddhist images. A few showed everyday life, and were by far my favourites. Some of the temples, with their gilded giant seated Buddhas surrounded by frescoed walls, were reminiscent of Florentine Renaissance chapels, and provided Joanne with endless photo opportunities.
The area has never recovered its pre-Mongol prosperity, and most of the local villagers still graze cows amongst the ruins, or grow corn, cotton or sugar cane. With so many rich Western tourists around, though, come the inevitable effects of mass tourism: hundreds of postcard-selling boys who should be in school, hundreds of purveyors of sand paintings buzzing around on motorcycles, gantlets of kitsch-selling souvenir stands to run on the way into the temples, opportunistic begging (“one bonbon, one stylo, money’). One of our fellow teachers, a definite soft touch, went walking along the road one day and by the time he’d reached the market, he’d dispensed 8000 kyat to various folks who’d tried their luck with him. Given that the average wage here is 1000 kyat a day, you can see how begging could become a lucrative alternative to work.
We left Bagan well satisfied with the sights we’d seen and the history we’d imbibed, and with Joanne’s wonderful digital images. I now know that the time has come for me to break down and get a Nikon digital SLR camera; the quality of pictures that Joanne was able to take was tremendous, and since it costs nothing to take extra photos, you can take as many shots as necessary to get that one perfect image. You can see some of her shots at her photo page:
jsandrin.spaces.live.com
