It’s been months since I updated this blog, and it’s high time I put that to rights. I have my new Nikon D80 to take better digital photos, and I have a few trips to report on that I took in the last few months of last year.
At the end of April, Joanne and I and our friend and colleague Ken Allison headed south and east on a long weekend road trip. Our hired van and driver first drove us to the premier Buddhist pilgrimage site of Kyaikhtiyo, and then to the Mon State capital of Hpa An, where our hope to take a boat down the Salween River foundered on the vagaries of ferry schedules. We drove instead to Moulmein/Mawlamyaing, the port city at the mouth of the Salween that was once the British capital of Lower Burma. We made it as far south as Thanbyuzayat, the western terminus of the Siam-Burma railway of Bridge On The River Kwai fame, before turning around and heading all the way back to Yangon.
It was a pretty photogenic trip, and it gave rise to a few articles which I wrote up for To Asia With Love, a collection of travel writing to which I am going to be a contributor. I’ll append the articles to this post, along with a few photos. Enjoy!!
Mawlamyaing
When I finally made it down to Mawlamyaing for the first time, I didn’t know what to expect. I was a bit jaded by Myanmar’s cities; all too often any sort of faded colonial charm has disappeared, leaving nondescript huddles of concrete. I was immediately captivated by the first British capital of Burma, however, and spent a happy day wandering its streets, soaking up its sights and its atmosphere of bygone glory.
Mawlamyaing, or Moulmein as the British spelled it, has a beautiful setting. It’s located at where the Thanlwin (Salween) River, one of Asia’s least-known great rivers, is joined by its last two major tributaries. The city sprawls along the left bank of a broad estuary, with a spine of hills hemming in the downtown. A series of grand-looking monasteries crown the ridge, providing a visual focus to the city that’s much closer at hand than, say, Mandalay Hill is to the city of Mandalay. Below the hill, streets run in labyrinthine fashion because of the topography, providing many an opportunity to get happily lost as you meander along on foot.
I’m far from the first visitor to be captivated by the setting. Over a century ago Rudyard Kipling made a brief stop in Mawlamyaing, the only town he visited in the entire country. Although the poem he wrote is called “Mandalay”, the beginning lines are set in Mawlamyaing:
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say;
"Come you back, you British Soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
There is still a profusion of colonial-era architecture in Mawlamyaing, perhaps even more so than in Yangon. This may have something to do with the fact that the British made the city the capital of Lower Burma from 1827-1852, during their piecemeal conquest of the country. Old schools and grand churches of various Christian denomination crumble picturesquely on all sides, while houses and shop buildings seem to date from the days when George Orwell was in town, shooting his elephant. Because of the relative lack of prosperity compared to Yangon, there is very little traffic on the streets, making walking a pleasure. The city buses make Yangon’s look positively modern; Mawlamyaing may have the only fleet of wooden municipal buses that you will ever see.
Not that many tourists make it down here, and as you walk around, you will find a lot of genuinely friendly waving and smiling and invitations to sit down to tea. Although there are a few official “sights” to see, such as the Mon State Museum and some of the monasteries, it is more the city itself, its quiet streets redolent of tropical languor and genteel decay, that catches the eye. Unlike Europe, few cities in modernizing Southeast Asia really have much atmosphere or appeal as historic cities; Luang Prabang is one, but Mawlamyaing is another, much less well-known. For a contemplative day or three of walking, sketching, photographing or sitting beside the Thanlwin, watching the tide roll upstream or the fishing boats setting out to sea, Mawlamyaing deserves a place on your itinerary. As you sit down to dinner watching the sun set over the river, you might just feel yourself back in the lines of Kipling’s poem.
Kyaikhtiyo
One of the most appealing things about Asia is the profusion of pilgrimage sites, be they Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Muslim or other religions. Buddhism in particular, with its penchant for temples and shrines located atop picturesque peaks, offers wonderful combinations of religious devotion, great scenery and a good stiff walk in places as diverse as China’s Emei-shan, Tibet’s Mt. Kailash and Japan’s Mt. Fuji.
Myanmar is no exception. In a country chock-a-block with temples, there is no doubt that Kyaiktiyo, the Golden Rock, holds pride of place as the leading pilgrimage destination. Sitting in stately isolation 180 km from Yangon, a bruising 3 to 6 hour drive from the capital, it draws in throngs of the faithful to contemplate a huge basaltic boulder teetering atop a precipice, and to add to its encrustations of gold leaf. As a crowd spectacle, hike and terror experience, it has no equal in the country.
After the rigours of the road trip, through an increasingly unpeopled landscape of rubber and cashew plantations, the sheer number of pilgrims thronging Kimpun, at the base of the mountain, comes as a shock. On a busy weekend in the cool season thousands of pilgrims flow through to the trucks which ferry the multitudes most of the way to the top. The trucks, ancient five-ton flatbeds with wooden planks set at kneecap-shattering distances, are packed more fully than physics should allow and then driven uphill in convoy by aspiring Michael Schumachers. There’s nothing to induce contemplation of reincarnation like the wild rollercoaster ride in the back of a truck, packed in with 70 Buddhist faithful, knuckles white with fear, trying not to think about the rumoured accident rate.
The walk to the Rock from the top parking lot is short but exceedingly steep, either along the continuation of the road or, more pleasantly, along a forested path. Every step of the way provides another people-watching shutterbug moment: monks proceeding at a stately pace uphill, souvenir stands offering everything from cold drinks to bamboo machine guns to illegal wildlife products, children daubed with thanaka paste, and parties of exhausted pilgrims sitting beside the path.
More in keeping with the spirit of pilgrimage, and less likely to result in grey hairs and fractured patellas, you can walk up from Kimpun. It’s a surprisingly easy three to four hours through forests, climbing gently to a long, gradual ridge which culminates at the Rock. It’s a shady, breezy path, far from the road and relatively empty of pilgrims, although ubiquitous tea stalls provide sustenance and cold drinks to keep your spirits up. The bird life in the forest is impressive, and is more fun to contemplate than truck-induced intimations of mortality.
At the top, the profusion of buildings takes you by surprise. The Kyaikhto and Mountain Top hotels cater expensively to foreigners, while sprawling pilgrim accommodation provide cheap sleeping to Burmese travellers. A marble-paved piazza leads past endless food and souvenir stands to the main attraction, the Rock. A huge egg-shaped boulder, it is merely the largest of a number of similar rocks which adorn the crumbling ridge. It is only when you see it from beneath that you realize how delicately it is balanced; legend has it that the Buddha himself steadied it with one of his hairs. Now painted gold, topped with a pagoda “umbrella” and covered with layers of gold leaf pressed on by the faithful, it sits, swaying almost imperceptibly in the breeze, as the focus of mass devotion.
If your budget stretches far enough, spending the night in one of the hotels up top is well worth it. Watching sunset set the gold alight is magical, while the crowd atmosphere at night and at sunrise is at its best, with hundreds of devotees praying, lighting incense and offering cafeteria trays of food and drink. As a view of how important Buddhism is to the vast majority of Burmese people, it’s an experience not to be missed. Careening back down the road, getting hang time on the steeper downhills, you’ll be glad that you’ve improved your karma.
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
September 26, 2006
Another couple of weeks have glided by here, leaving barely a ripple in their wake. The monsoon rains have returned with a vengeance, although this time bringing occasional thunder, a sure sign according to the Burmese that the monsoon will soon be over. There are still occasional sunny days, but most days are grey again, dampening the spirits.
Just after writing my last entry, I had the misfortune of stepping on a nail while running. It was the classic rusty nail, and it poked right through the sole of my runner, throught the sole of my foot and out the top of my foot. Miraculously, it missed any tendons, arteries, bones, ligaments, nerves or muscles that it could have severed, and after an exceedingly painful tetanus booster, it seems to have healed well, with no infection. I was on a residential street at the time, and the inhabitants of the nearest house ran out when they heard me howling in pain and helped me, pulling the nail out, bathing the cut in lemon juice, then water, then Betadine, and finally loading me into a taxi and sending me home. As always, I was impressed with the helpfulness and generous hospitality of people here. The visit to a local clinic cost 2100 kyat for the doctor (about $1.50) and 3000 kyat for medicines and the tetanus booster (another $2.20). It could have been much worse, and I’m already back to running.
It was good to see my friend Ray as he and his girlfriend Akiko passed through town that weekend. He fired us up to do our own exploring of the hinterland starting next week, and wowed us with his array of magic tricks; he even left us with one to use for ourselves. This weekend we’re on a visa run to Bangkok, with a side trip to Kanchanaburi to see the remarkable tiger temple there. After that, we’ll be off the following Thursday afternoon to Bagan, the huge ruined capital city in central Burma, and then Inle Lake, the beautiful lake nestled in the mountains of Shan State.
I can’t wait. Much as teaching here has been fun, it’s still a job and it still ties us down, preventing us from seeing much of the country. I’ve been reading up on various bits of the country that I really want to visit, and getting quite excited to see new sights. I chatted with a man from Chin State who runs a handicrafts store in the main Bogyoke Market and was once again reminded how much I would like to visit this hard-to-get-to corner of the country, full of medium-sized mountains, head-hunting tribes and ethnic and cultural diversity.
Yesterday, for the first time, I ventured out of the school at lunchtime to eat at a local food stall on the street corner next to the school. The Burmese language teacher and a security guard were there as well, and I settled in for a meal of rice, fish-ball curry, vegetables and a water-spinach soup. It was very reminiscent of the meals I had most days in northern Vietnam, except that it was even cheaper; only 400 kyat ($0.30). I can’t believe that it’s taken me this long to sample the street cuisine here; I’ve allowed myself to be trapped in a strange expatriate bubble of (relatively) expensive restaurants and taxis, rather than my usual street-food-and-public-transport exposure to a country. I haven’t even learned the numbers in Burmese, a sign perhaps of how much basic English is spoken here, but also a sign of how little I’m really trying to get into this country and its culture. Having come to this realization, it’s time to start taking Burmese lessons and learning to decipher the delightfully bubble-like alphabet. On the weekend I purchased an oversized poster of the Burmese consonants (all 33 of them) to hang on my wall for contemplation. Now I need another chart for the 36 different combinations of vowel sound, tone (3 of them), nasalization and glottal stopping, and I’ll be ready for reading.
Joanne and I were discussing the other day why the streets seem less frenetically crowded and miserable than in your average Indian city. We decided that the near-absence of beggars (although I’m starting to notice them more often here and there; the fear of the police, enforcing anti-vagrancy laws, may play a big part here), the lack of people sleeping out on the streets at night and the relative scarcity of children (Burma is said to have one of the lower population growth rates and lower fertility rates in underdeveloped Asia) make it easier to be on the streets here. As well, Buddhism plays its part, as it seems to make for a less in-your-face culture than Hinduism. Although the British administered Burma for 50 years as part of the British Raj, Burma has largely retained its distinctive culture and feel. Despite the number of Indian immigrants to Rangoon, there is little of the atmosphere of India here. Partly that may be due to the government’s coercive Burmicization policy, whereby in order to get any access to telephones, government documents and services, everyone, whether Burmese, Indian, Chinese or tribal minority, has to adopt a Burmese name.
I would like to close with a recurring vignette from my 8th-storey bird’s-eye view of the neighbourhood. I love standing at my classroom window watching the trains run past the school on the main Rangoon-Mandalay line. The freight trains are always loaded down with people, hoboes hitching a lift into town from the countryside for work; sometimes a single 10-car train will have over a hundred non-paying passengers sitting on it. The passenger trains, especially the big ones headed up-country, are another attraction, as they exude the freedom of the road to those of us trapped in the 9-to-5 routine. My favourite, though, are the occasional steam engines chugging by, hauling freight cars. Unlike steam locomotives in most of the world, these are not tourist attractions; these are working train engines chugging by with the distinctive chug-a-chug-a rhythm of The Little Engine Who Could, punctuated by the evocative strains of a steam whistle. The steam locomotives are Burma in microcosm: once the last word in prosperity and state-of-the-art modernity, now an amusing and charming anachronism in which time has barely budged since independence in 1948.
September 28, 2006
Yesterday the monsoon started to retreat, I think. Suddenly the prevailing winds shifted 180 degrees and began to howl. The air suddenly felt drier, and various middle-aged teachers began complaining that their joints were beginning to ache, a sure sign of changing weather (or so I’m told). It’s amazing how definitive a change it seemed to be; although it’s still raining, there’s an air of finality about the monsoon.
Off to Bangkok today for a visa renewal run, a trip to the tiger temple in Kanchanaburi and some general rest and relaxation. I shall post this there.
Happy Reading!
Graydon
September 14, 2006
It’s been three and a half weeks since I last wrote, although this might not get posted for some time yet, depending on the status of access to Blogger. Since I last put fingertips to keyboard, the big news is that the monsoon rainy season has apparently ended early. Although it still rains from time to time, it’s far less frequent an occurrence, and between showers we get periods of hot, sunny weather, clear skies, distant views of towering cumulo-nimbus and stunning sunsets. It’s wonderful to be able to look up at night and see stars, something we couldn’t do for the first five weeks of our sojourn here. It lifts the spirits to look out to blue skies, rather than to an uninterrupted curtain of grey. Strangely, the monsoon only came to Assam, the Indian state neighbouring Burma, on August 29th; only one range of hills separates monsoon-drenched Assam from drying-out Burma.
We have yet to venture beyond the boundaries of Rangoon on the weekends. Only now that we are coming out of our monsoon-induced hibernation are our thoughts turning towards getting out to explore more of the country. My colleague Ray, with whom I was recently teaching in Japan, is on his way through the city tomorrow with his Japanese girlfriend; they will likely be our first overnight guests at our grand mansion. I’m sure that talking to him about Inle Lake and Bagan and the hill country beyond Mandalay will just fuel our wanderlust to see more of this strange and wonderful land.
I’ve continued my weekend bicycle jaunts with my colleague Viola, heading out into the countryside beyond the triangular riverine confines of the city. It’s a wonderful city for biking; traffic is nowhere as busy as in most of the rest of Asia, and on the secondary roads and back streets the only competition for road space is other bicycles, trishaws and pedestrians. For a city of 5 million people, Rangoon really feels like an oversized village. Just 5 minutes’ run from my front door is a large settlement of bamboo huts that could have been lifted from any village in the country, rather than from a major suburb of a national capital. There is none of the frantic rush that characterizes so many major Asian cities; in fact, there is little to indicate that we are in the year 2006. The buses date from the days of the Raj, at least in design, although they have been retrofitted to burn compressed natural gas. Because of draconian police restrictions, there are no motorcycles on the streets of Rangoon, nor are there any of the blaring horns that bedevil the roads of India or Vietnam. We ride a 30-km loop, stopping off to eat watermelon and take pictures, and it’s the best way to see life here off the main thoroughfares.
I love the street scenes we come across while cycling or while I’m out running. Stately processions of monks make their way down the road, begging bowls held resolutely forth, their crimson robes shining bright in the unaccustomed post-monsoon sunlight. Trishaws trundle by with shrill sounds of bells, carrying plump matrons, schoolgirls, monks or office ladies. There is the over-amplified clamour of the lottery man or the monastery fund-collectors, or the roar of the occasional car or truck long overdue for an engine overhaul. The women in the street are dressed in long tube skirts of striking silk designs and sporting face masks of yellow thaunaka paste that makes them look completely alien. The men all wear longyi skirts and frequently have a massive chaw of betel-nut in their mouths which stains their lips and teeth a preternatural shade of red, giving them a vampirish air.
Despite being a city of, apparently, 6 or 7 million people, most of Rangoon feels like a large, sprawling village. Only a few minutes on foot from my house, past a Beverly Hills-like subdivision, lie vegetable gardens and bamboo huts. Between the major streets, large blocks of green land remain. Only in the downtown area is there a feeling of unremitting urban development, mitigated there by the frequent splashes of colonial grandeur. For the most part Rangoon has less traffic, noise, pollution and concrete than most Asian cities, which is A Good Thing.
August 24, 2006
It’s hard to believe that almost a month has flown by since I last wrote. Work, adjusting to the different pace of life as a teacher, jet lag and general tiredness have made the time slip by quickly without necessarily leaving a memorable trace. It’s all too easy when working to avoid any of the more intense, interesting and educational experiences that await us when we’re traveling and encountering new environments and people and experiences every day. Particularly living as we do, in a little self-contained world of expat teachers and apartments right across the street from the school, it’s too easy to ignore the fascinating world outside our doors.
The torrential downpours don’t help, making us feel like hibernating indoors. It rains most days still, and every few days we have an afternoon storm straight out of Genesis. I’ll be teaching up in my 7th floor eyrie and I’ll look outside and see the sky as dark as twilight with curtains of rain blown in on powerful winds from the Indian Ocean. In a few minutes it will be upon us, assaulting our concrete tower with primeval force and forcing rainwater through cracks in the wall and openings around the edges of windows. I love watching storms like this, feeling very small and insignificant. One of my math classes did a calculation of how much water falls on Rangoon in a cloudburst like this. Assuming the surface area of the city to be about 500 square kilometres, we came up with a figure of 100 million tons of water falling in a storm which deposits 2 cm of rain on us, a not unreasonable figure given the ferocity of the rain. After an hour or two the rain will peter out, leaving our neighbourhood ankle-deep in water for the next day or so. Rangoon is built on the marshy land of the vast Irrawaddy Delta and the water table is never far from the surface, so a good rain completely saturates the soil right to the surface.
We live in Thingangyun township, about 10 km by road northeast of downtown. It’s a fascinating concatenation of opulent mansions that look to have been plucked out of Beverly Hills and dirt-poor neighbourhoods of bamboo shacks crowded cheek by jowl, surrounded by open sewers and piles of rubbish. Walking or running through these areas my senses are overwhelmed with all the sounds, sights and especially smells, both pleasant and noisome, of the Indian subcontinent: spices, incense, food, garbage, sewage. It’s amazing how quick the change from slum to suburban palace occurs, sometimes within half a block. The slums in our neighbourhood seem to house a disproportionate number of Indians, whose darker skin and pointy features stand out from the rounder, flatter, more Mongolian faces of the Burmese majority. We live a few hundred metres from the main Rangoon-Mandalay train line, and, as always, the train tracks seem to attract squatter settlements aplenty.
The train line is relatively busy, with a number of passenger trains chugging past the school every day. I really want to take a night train to Mandalay some weekend soon, spending Saturday and Sunday in and around the old capital and then taking another night train back just in time for school on Monday. I’ve been watching, and the trains seem to leave on time and, most of the time, arrive in Rangoon on time as well, so it’s doable. Once the rains abate……
In most Buddhist countries right now is the rainy season, and Buddhists traditionally have a rainy-season meditation retreat in which the monks and teachers stay put for the duration of the monsoon, praying and fasting (the Buddhist Lent is a name I’ve heard applied here). This is a good idea, but it has a very unfortunate corollary here. Last Saturday I heard a noisy procession making its way down our street, led by a monk with one of the resonant flat chimes, shaped like the silhouette of a bell, which all monasteries have here. He was followed by a number of figures in sombrero-sized bamboo hats with collection jars and, ominously, a loudspeaker. Megaphone man kept up a droning appeal for donations as they walked from door to door and street to street. I saw them again on Sunday during the day. On Tuesday night, though, a man with a megaphone began blaring the same litany at 3:00 am at the volume of a typical Motorhead concert. He was outside the monastery which lies over our garden fence. It was a bit like having monks in bed with us. Even with earplugs in, it was deafening. The teachers who were here last year tell me that the din only gets worse and more frequent until the end of the rainy season in the middle of October. I can only wait. The usual night noises of monks gonging bells and chanting (unamplified, luckily) and the resultant howling of the myriad stray dogs is finally fading into the background for me and no longer wakes me up much, but I don’t think that 110 decibels of begging can be ignored. It seems to me a counterproductive tactic to wake people up to importune them for cash; it’s hardly likely to make them kindly disposed to your patter. I fell as though I’m trapped in a never-ending NPR end-of-financial-year fundraising marathon, only without the nonstop broadcasts of Fawlty Towers and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
My blogging has been curtailed by the government here, who blocked the Blogger login page two days ago. I was pleasantly surprised to find the page unblocked and usable when I got to Burma, since most free web-based communication tools (GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Geocities) are blocked; I guess that Big Burmese Brother has cottoned on to the existence of Blogger. It just means that I will have to post while out of the country on my every-10-weeks visa runs.
So far Joanne and I have seen little of Rangoon. Despite staring at Shwedagon Pagoda every day from my office (and an impressive sight it is, even 7 km away, dominating the skyline), we haven’t even gone in there despite our best intentions. We have spent our weekends furnishing our flat with impressive quantities of potted trees and plants and rattan furniture. I think our acquisition phase is almost over, though, as we don’t have much more space to put new furniture nor Burmese kyat to pay for them. We’re living in some style, in a better-furnished place than I’ve ever lived in, I think. A set of decent stereo speakers and we’ll be set, other than putting some photos on the walls. The plants make a big difference, giving a lived-in jungly feel to the place. I hope that they survive being kept indoors, given how much we’ve spent on them!
We have visited the nearby Reclining Buddha a couple of times. He’s an impressive size and I really like the realistic, expressive blue glass eyes. Joanne really likes the wood carving and laquer-ware shops clustered around it, and we have bought a number of nice carvings and bells and a lovely bloodwood Buddha there. I really like the Buddha and so, after initial apprehension, does Joanne. He’s a uniquely Burmese depiction of the Buddha, with straight hair and a high-collared monk’s cowl that looks as though he stole it from a Franciscan friar. He sits in our entrance hall with a serene expression on his face, a nice reminder of Buddhist calmness and non-attachment as we scurry frantically out the door in the morning, trying not to be late.
The extraordinary friendliness and courtliness of the Burmese is wonderful to encounter. There’s little of the hustling and rip-off-the-foreigner feeling of, say, Bali or Bangkok or Rajasthan (aside, inevitably, for the taxi drivers). When I go into the local market, I get charged, as far as I can tell, local prices, which are really low, even by Southeast Asian standards. Having run out of glue, I had a bike tire patched the other day for 200 kyat (15 US cents) and had a shave for 250 kyat. Rice sells wholesale here for 200 kyat a kilo, although we pay 500 in the supermarkets. One of the only really expensive things here are mobile phones (sold by the government monopoly for the ludicrous sum of US$1000, or on the black market for $2000) and cars (a 20-year-old clapped-out pickup truck will still set you back $12,000, and I saw a 1997 Honda Accord for sale for a whopping $50,000). As foreigners, we have to pay artificial rates for hotels, domestic plane tickets and train tickets, but we pay the going rate for everything else, including buses, which means that foreigners who are watching their budgets ride buses a lot.
I’m looking forward to the end of the rains in mid-October. We will have a 10-day break then and I think Joanne and I will head north to Mandalay and the ruined cities in the vicinity before making the pilgrimage to Bagan, one of the three great ruined cities of the Indianized states which dominated Southeast Asia until 600 years ago. (The other members of the Ruined Trinity are Borobodur, on Java, and Cambodia’s Angkor.) After that I want to get out of town a lot on weekends, and I’m scouring the Lonely Planet for ideas. Sadly there are no domestic flights leaving Rangoon after 3 pm, which cuts down on the chances of weekend flying jaunts around the country.
I must go to bed, but I will write more soon, and will post this in Bangkok at the end of September when we go on our first visa run out of the country.
Saturday, July 29
I'm sitting at my desk in the palatial apartment that Joanne and I have here in Rangoon, listening to the clamour of the evening and celebrating the fact that for the first time in 4 nights I'm able to stay up past 10 pm. Jet lag has hammered both Joanne and I and for the first three nights we crawled into bed exhausted at 7:30 or so. This has compensated for waking up every morning at 4 am, but it would be nice to be able to sleep uninterruptedly until sunrise at 6 am.
Let me fill in a few chronological details. I left Thunder Bay 8 days ago on a supper-time flight to Toronto (not that WestJet fed me supper), met Joanne in the remodelled and highly confusing Terminal 1 at Toronto airport and then took a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong via a refueling stop in Anchorage. The flight was long and fairly sleepless for me, as the seats were even closer together than usual and I had no legroom. We got into Bangkok airport and were met by Devron, one of the returning teachers who has been a one-woman Welcome Wagon for the 9 new teachers. We spent 2 days in Bangkok getting our first 10-week business visas and sleeping a lot. We stayed in a fancy-ish high-rise hotel on Silom Road and while it was far more salubrious than the Khao San Road dives I have usually stayed in, I missed the bustle and energy and feel of Khao San. Our visa situation is strange; we have to come into the country on 10-week single-entry business visas, after which we have to leave the country and reapply (usually in Bangkok) for a new visa. After a few of these 10-week jaunts we're eligible for a 6-month multiple-entry visa, but we still have to leave the country every 10 weeks; we just don't need to apply for a new visa to re-enter the country, and we don't have to go to Bangkok; we could fly to Bangladesh or Kathmandu or the Maldives if we want to.
On Wednesday morning we trooped off to the airport. I had all my luggage and my bike with me, having retrieved all my stored luggage from the Khao San guesthouse where I had stored it for a week; the lady at the guesthouse was from Burma and gave me a 50% discount on storage fees because I was headed to her country. At the airport all the other teachers got most of their luggage out of left luggage and we headed to the check-in desk with luggage trolleys groaning under the weight of suitcases. Our school reimburses us for up to $500 in excess baggage fees and so we weren't travelling light. It looked like a line-up of trucks at an international border crossing. The flight was quick and painless, and we were soon disgorged into tiny Rangoon airport, a complete contrast from the huge, slick, professionally-run airport in Bangkok. I felt as though I'd landed in a poorer Asian version of Thunder Bay airport.
Our school director, Greg von Spreecken, was on hand to greet us and we moved our mountain of possessions through customs and onto two waiting buses. It's the rainy season here and it was pouring rain on our arrival. We rolled through the suburbs of Rangoon which resemble a large village more than the capital of a country of 50 million people to our apartments. Most of the teachers live a stone's throw from school, in a purpose-built apartment block. Joanne and I were stunned by the scale of our apartment when we first walked through it, and it still makes us giggle. We have a three-bedroom, two-floor ground-floor apartment with no fewer than SIX bathrooms. There are two rooms on the ground floor (a living room/entryway and a TV/family room) with cathedral ceilings, and the rest of the rooms are large with high ceilings. It's sparsely furnished at the moment, and our mountain of luggage seemed to evaporate in the huge spaces available to us. We've both staked out separate bathrooms, dressing rooms and studies, while one of the ground floor bathrooms has become my bicycle shed. There is abundant space for guests; two or three rooms could easily be made into guest bedrooms, and there's still the TV room and Joanne's study for extra floorspace, so we could sleep at least 6 more people without undue crowding. It's the most spacious place I've ever lived in, other than my father's house, and I will probably still be marvelling at its size two years from now.
We live in the northeast part of the city, Thingangyan, about 7 kilometres from the Shwedagon pagoda, the symbol of Rangoon and indeed of all of Burma. From my classroom on the 7th floor of the school I have an uninterruped view over the rooftops, treetops and gold-covered pagodas of this sprawling city to where Shwedagon rises golden and enormous over its surroundings. There are worse views to have from your desk. Our neighbourhood is a curious mix of modern opulent mansions and village shacks. I go running every morning to explore, and I'm entranced by the diversity of people and buildings and activities that I see. Rangoon reminds me a lot of rural India, but also a lot of East Africa, with the same air of decaying colonial buildings and very little material progress since independence from Britain. On a 20-minute run I pass ice factories, dozens of tiny tea shops, a few more substantial restaurants, innumerable tiny shops and kiosks offering betel, tailoring, samosas, pens, teak furniture and newspapers, hundreds of Burmese clad in cotton longyis (wraparound skirts) for men and tmeins (longer, fancier longyis, often made of silk) for the women, lots of Muslims in white skull caps, dozens of scarlet-clad Buddhist monks out begging for alms, lots of Indian labourers, Hindu temples, Catholic churches, mosques, monasteries, bicycles, tiny cycle rickshaws, antique buses and a few cars. Compared to the rest of Southeast Asia it's so much quieter, slower and less motorized than just about anywhere except for Laos. I really like the feel of the place so far, although it's just a superficial impression.
I'll write more soon about this strange, new and wonderful country soon. Until then, I will leave you with my contact information here.
Graydon Hazenberg
Yangon International School
999 Thumingalar Housing
Thingangyan
Yangon
MYANMAR
yis024"at"ilbc"dot"net"dot"mmgraydonhazenberg"at"gmail"dot"comObviously, replace the text bits with the appropriate symbols (I'm trying, probably futilely, to avoid spam).
(Note: I can't access my Yahoo Mail accounts here very easily, so please use one of the two addresses given above, or both to be sure I get your messages.)
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
A further update. This week is devoted to getting ready for school. I'm teaching grades 7-10 math, and although I have excellent textbooks and small classes, there's still a certain amount of thinking, preparation and trepidation involved before I'll be ready to teach on Monday.
The rainy season here lives up to its billing. It doesn't rain 24 hours a day, but it rains at least four separate times every 24-hour period. Sometimes it's intense cloudbursts, sometimes it's steady rain, and often it's heavy drizzle. The soil is absolutely saturated, so many of the streets are submerged along their lowest-lying sections. When I go running, I often have to pick my way through ankle-deep puddles or long stretches of glutinous mud. On the positive side, though, it's not terribly hot here since the sun rarely shines.
I got my bicycle ready for riding on Saturday, which involved rotating the tires (badly worn both front and back, but not suprising after 6000 fully-loaded kilometres), putting on a new chain, cleaning the accumulated gunk from the chain rings and derailleur and putting back the saddle and pedals that I had to take off for the flight. On Sunday I went for a ride with one of the other teachers, Viola, who showed me around the neighbourhood. It's a wonderful city for cycling, full of narrow back streets with very little vehicular traffic and full of colourful markets, smiling people and lots and lots of monks and gilded pagodas. I hope to explore all of the outlying districts of this sprawling city over the next 2 years, as well as getting further afield to the mountains of the northeast and north. I'd like to ride piecemeal from Rangoon up to Mandalay and Bagan and then as far north and northeast from Mandalay as I'm allowed to go. It will have to be on weekends, so I will take a night train or (horrors!) a bus up to where I had left off earlier and then ride for two days before scuttling back to Rangoon. This will have to start once the rainy season has left us, some time in October. I'm certainly looking forward to riding around Rangoon and hence avoiding the annoyance of taxis and negotiating fares with their larcenous drivers.
On Saturday all of us new teachers toured around Rangoon on a bus that looked as though Elton John had once used it for his concert tours: red plush ceilings with sparkly chandeliers and a big horseshoe-shaped couch at the back with an (empty) bar compartment. We saw the enormous Chaukhtatgyi Paya, site of one of the world's largest reclining Buddhas. It had remarkably expressive painted eyes, and seeing the monks scurrying around his torso cleaning him brought home how big he really is. On his feet there are, of course, the 108 signs of Buddha-hood (108 on each sole, actually) and his robe is gilded. There is an astonishing amount of gold leaf lavished on Buddhist temples here; the Buddha himself would doubtless not be impressed. We then drove by the immense Shwedagon Paya (100 metres high and surrounded by a vast complex) and marvelled at the changing colours of the gold against the leaden skies; I think I will be taking rather a lot of photos of it at sunset over the next few months. We headed past pretty Kandaugyi Lake, where I will be cycling this coming weekend, and on to the downtown core of Rangoon, the only part of the city where you really seem to be in a major urban centre. Lots of old colonial architecture along Merchant St. and the Strand, and, my favourite touch, a centuries-old stupa, Sule Paya, in the middle of a traffic circle right in the heart of town. All in all, Rangoon seems like quite a manageable city to get around, unlike gridlocked Bangkok or immense, sprawling Tokyo or Cairo, and there seem to be enough green spaces and enough trees everywhere to alleviate the urban blues. Much of the city is still timber-built houses, which is a welcome change from so many modern Asian cities.
One sight that takes some getting used to here is women wearing thanakha, a yellow paste smeared on the face as sunblock and skin lotion. It gives them an other-worldly, slightly frightening appearance a bit like African tribal dancers. As in many Asian countries, women have a horror of tanning their skin and hope that the thanakha will lighten their compexions. I think it's more effective as a way of scaring away ghosts, myself.
We went to an opulent brunch at a luxury hotel, the Dusit, on Sunday. It was interesting to see who showed up to spend a fortune by Burmese standards on a sybaritic spread. There were Japanese expats, a few tables of Europeans and several groups of wealthy Burmese. They may be the same ones whose lavish mansions are clustered here and there around the school.
Off to bed. I will post more soon.
Cheers
Graydon
The Adventure Begins......
Today we leave for Burma. I'm flying to Toronto this evening to meet Joanne and we will take a long and winding road to Bangkok, via Anchorage and Hong Kong for a few days before all the newbie teachers fly together to Rangoon on July 26th. I'm excited but a little apprehensive over how life will be in one of the most repressive countries on earth, especially after reading Emma Larkin's Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Tea Shop. I just hope that the culture and the sights and the non-Western feel of the place will outweigh any negatives.
Stay tuned!!
