Burmese Days
June 11, 2007
I am truly sorry to those of you who have been living vicariously through me, that my notes have been conspicuously absent these past couple of weeks. A combination of exhaustion, lack of time and painfully slow internet connections has kept my emailing to a minimum, and above all, the heat has been getting to my brain. However, despite extraordinary exhaustion (18-hour bus ride followed by two flights), I feel that if I don’t write now I never will.
Myanmar (Burma) was simply mind-blowing. As a traveller, I know that there are varied opinions about going there. Many people oppose travel to Burma as it supports the current military government who are only in power through very dirty tactics. But as a Burmese man said to me on my first night in Yangon, “Politics is dirty business.” The Burmese people really want travellers to see their country, and of all the places I have ever been in my life, it was by far the most eye-opening and touching experience.
How to summarise ten days? Yangon, which used to be Rangoon in the British colonial days is the largest city and entry-point for most travellers. It used to be the capital but the government has a tendency to change these things rather frequently — about two months ago it was relocated to an unpronounceable place that doesn’t feature in the Lonely Planet, and where foreigners aren’t allowed to go anyhow. The first thing that one notices when arriving in Myanmar is the clothes. The men all wear longhi, which look like sarongs, mostly in dark colors and checked or plaid patterns, usually with short-sleeved dress shirts or teeshirts on top. The women also wear these sarong-like shirts, but often coordinate tops with bottoms, and usually wear floral patterns that look rather lovely. They use this natural paste called tanaka as a sun block which they paint onto their cheeks (usually in circles or rectangles) which gives them all an extremely different look (it’s a kind of pale yellow in colour).
Yangon was busy and dirty and a bit noisy and run down. There are hardly any western influences and all of the cars and trucks come if not from the last decade, from the ones preceding. The people are incredibly friendly and helpful, and as there are so few tourists tend to stare a whole lot. (After ten days this did get a little tiresome). And lots of monks. Before my trip to Burma I had an entirely different impression of monks. You know…devout, meditative, always in monasteries. This is very much not the case in Burma where every man becomes a monk as an apprentice (around age 8-14) and then after age 20. There were some seriously bad-ass monks. Monks just chilling out; monks smoking cigarettes; riding motorbikes; checking out Western girls. A lot of them even have a little strut in their walk. As wrong as it felt, Ornella (my partner in crime) and myself definitely had a thing for them. But maybe that was just because it was so wrong…
Enough about the monks though, certainly the highlight of our trip was at Inle Lake, an absolutely magical area in the highlands where we got to really see how the people lived in a place that felt like stepping back in time. The word magic doesn’t nearly do it justice. Oxen wandering around by the streets, bicycles everywhere, the people donning conical bamboo hats to shade themselves from the sun. Rice paddies in a green so bright it almost hurts to look at. Horse carts. Ancient ruins of pagodas (that actually have an Indiana Jones feel to them), tinkling bells on the tops of them, booming thunderstorms that never actually rained on us.
There was a monastery where the monks, just for fun, had taught some cats how to jump through hoops. The abbot, reclining in his chair, mutters “sit – tea” before a small boy demonstrates that cats’ bizarre taught skill. Disco buddhas were a favourite (there is a tendency to have bright and gaudy lights around a lot of the buddhas in the temples – go figure).
Then we went down the road to Mandalay (our first bus trip and first break-down. No one wants to say how long these trips take because it’s supposed to be “bad luck.” We were two for two, buses to breakdowns. I don’t think luck had anything to do with it. Fortunately all of the Burmese men seem to be mechanics and got the problems fixed within a few hours). One crazy day in Mandalay was spent at the jade market – sort of like the stock market but crazy and hot and with bits of green rocks.
Other forms of transport included a day boat to Bagan (slow boats go really slowly) which was crowded full of people sitting together on the floors, and every time we stopped people flooded onto the boat selling food and blankets and all sorts of other things. A long and interesting day, it really highlighted the poverty in this country. Many people live off less than a dollar a day, there are just so many of them who have nothing, and even with university degrees, can’t find any work aside from driving rickshaws and selling whatever they can to the few tourists.
Bagan is comparable with Ankor Wat in scale and ancient splendour. Pagodas have been built all over the area, and there are thousands of these thousands-of-year old buildings housing buddhas of all shapes and sizes (although usually gold). I will post pictures, I don’t think I can really do it justice. Ornella and I took a tour in a horse-cart, which was a good choice as the heat was stifling.
I’ll leave it here, I’m tired and hungry and want to go for a swim and collect myself.
Please write! I’d love ot hear what’s going on at home. Myanmar food was the one downer about the place. Everything (I mean EVERYTHING) tasted like fish. And not just sort of fishy, it’s like they make this concentrated putrefying fish oil and sprinkle it on everything. I’ve been fantasizing about eating out at home. But the food in Thailand is alright and I’m excited to get to Vietnam for culinary delights too.
