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.
posted by xuanzang @ 7:30 AM
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