Return to Bagan and Mandalay
Jan. 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
posted by xuanzang @ 7:32 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home