From Burma to Myanmar Read online

  I wasn’t really enamoured of Bagan. It had an over-touristed atmosphere that I did not care for, and it was difficult to get around. There is not much to do except visit the temples, and they are spread out over a broad plain. Most accommodation is located a distance away, except hotels in Old Bagan which were either grossly overpriced or government owned. Between Nuang U, the transport hub north of Old Bagan, to New Bagan, is a twenty kilometre oval circuit. There are no houses in Old Bagan any longer, only hotels. In 1990 the government forcibly removed the villagers from there to New Bagan, a few kilometres south.

  My first visit to Bagan had been very different. It was Pagan then, there was no New Bagan. We stayed in a small hotel in what is now Old Bagan. Being on site, it was easy to visit the temples.

  That evening I had a meal on the outdoor tree-shaded area of decking that served as the Kumundra’s restaurant. It looked toward Old Bagan where stupas could be seen rising among the greenery of the temple-strewn plain.

  I slept some more and in the morning had a good breakfast of fresh fruit salad with a tomato and onion omelette.

  Venturing out to the front of the hotel, I was accosted by a horse driver, one of several who wait for custom there on a regular basis. These little carts are the most practical way to get around on the dirt roads and tiny rough tracks, and there are 240 of them in the district.

  The driver and I struck a deal for a tour around New Bagan. Just as well I did as it would have proved a long walk along dirt roads in the heat. I climbed in the small wooden cart covered by a hood. Drawn by a small horse, I was clip-clopped up and down the wide dusty streets of the town. It offered little except a few basic stores, a couple of hotels, restaurants and guest houses.

  From the town we drove down to and along the riverside, which is nice in a laid-back sort of way. Urged to get out and view the town’s gold-painted pagoda, I baulked. They all begin to blur after a while. I was more interested in the horse. A small brown mare with a pink plastic rose on top of her head, she was called Madonna. ‘My family like Madonna’s music,’ her owner, Bo Bo, told me. The horse should be the one to be insulted. Fancy calling a dear little mare after an uncouth old tart like that.

  Madonna, Bo Bo and I continued on at a slow jog trot. The little mare seemed tireless. When I got out of the cart I put out my hand for her to smell so that she would know I was harmless, and then I patted her neck. She had stood half the morning outside the hotel waiting for a five dollar fee.

  We located the village’s travel agent so that I could enquire about a train or boat from here to Mandalay. They knew nothing about trains, but said that boats were not travelling north now except the government one that went once a week. There were no tourist jaunts. I decided that the bus was the best option, especially after I learned that the train left at five in the morning. The bus also would collect me from my hotel. This saved an expensive taxi back to the bus or train station in Nuang U.

  Bo Bo took me to a restaurant and announced, ‘Lunch’. I did as I was told even though it was only 11.15 am. The people at the eating place were very nice. In an outdoor open-sided pavilion I ordered local red curry. Boy it was hot. I am used to hot and usually it makes my nose run a bit, but this made my eyes water until tears ran down my face. Still, it’s good for sterilising the gut—and the nasal passages. For five dollars I got the curry and rice and a plate of peanuts, and some funny looking sweet balls, two bananas and a lime juice were thrown in as well.

  Then it was back to my air-con room to recover, passing groups of children walking to school after their lunch break. Girls and boys both wore uniforms of white blouses and dark-green longiis.

  I rested until evening; it’s not advisable to venture out here during the afternoon unless you want heat stroke. Towards sunset I met Madonna and B B again to go temple visiting and watch the sunset from the Shwesandaw Paya, a pyramid-style pagoda whose name means Golden Holy Hair. It has 360 degree views from its five levels and the circular top platform is the most popular place from which to view sunsets.

  We jogged a long way on dirt tracks, past brown brick stupas and pagodas sitting among scrubby growth. Then we came to the main road that goes through the village of Myinkaba. Once a large bus passed close to us but Madonna was bomb-proof and didn’t flinch. I flinched for her.

  The Shwesandaw Paya was a horror of hawkers. They descended on me like a plague of smiling locusts, entreating me to buy as I climbed out of the sanctuary of the cart. I said, ‘No thank you’ repeatedly, but I did promise to look at one appealing young girl’s longiis on my way back in order to get rid of her. No such luck. She was waiting at the bottom of the steps when I came down and led me away to her longiis arrayed on a wall. I could not escape, so I bought one at the inflated price of seven dollars. Hard bargaining had got it down from twelve. In Yangon it would have been four at the market, and probably two for a local. The girl’s cheeks were smeared with the two round patches of thanka that many women adopt. It is powdered sandalwood and is good for your skin, but I didn’t understand why it is acceptable to wear it all day. She said she loved my lipstick.

  The Shwesandaw is one temple you are allowed to climb in Bagan—not all are anymore, unlike my other visit when we not only almost had the place to ourselves but went wherever we pleased. Then only a few children pestered us, asking for pens.

  At the entrance to the site three officials sat at a wooden table to check the ticket I’d bought to enter the zone. Everywhere I went was similarly encumbered with staff. I wondered what they were there to prevent. Whole platoons of boys stood or sat about hotel entrances. Guards or just lookers? And there were never less than three people behind any desk. It took ten to serve breakfast at the Kumundra.

  I began the climb. The steps were not for the arthritic or unsteady, but at least there were guard rails alongside them. I used these to haul myself up the steps, which were twice the height of normal steps. The temple is solid stone and rises, cone-shaped, for about two hundred feet in five tiers. On each tier there is a platform and a walkway around the outside. The edges of these have battlements not nearly high enough to appease my acrophobia. It was best not to look down but instead outwards. I made it to the penultimate level, but then my phobia clicked in and I seized up. I stayed there on a corner where the edge was a little higher, still low enough to fall over but at least providing some sense of security if I sat way back from it.

  Up there I looked out over the surrounding temples rising from the bushland below for as far as I could see. The view, against a backdrop of a colourful, changing sky, was spectacular. I sat on the stone floor and after a while a Norwegian tourist who said she worked for a travel magazine joined me. Finally nothing could be seen except the dark outlines of temples against a sky aflame with a glorious red-yellow sunset.

  After the sun had gone and the light began to fade, I carefully edged my way down those steep steps, backwards and very slowly, clinging on for dear life to the handrail.

  Madonna and I jogged back to the hotel. As we trotted homewards in the dusk I looked back, watching the red sky fade. It was a long way for a little horse at the end of the day. This morning I had asked Bo Bo when we stopped about a drink for her. He had said, ‘In the morning and evening.’ I should have known that, but I thought in the heat it might have been more.

  At the hotel I climbed down from the cart and asked, ‘Now home?’

  But Bo Bo said, ‘Three minutes’. A little rest for his Madonna first.

  I had a wash and then dinner. Despite repeating my order of a small fried rice three times, I got a big plate of chip potatoes. When the small rice finally came it was enormous. I’d hate to see the large one. I had a great fruit salad and they made eighty cent fruit shakes that were all fruit, no ice, no sugar. When I paid I added an extra 1000 for the potato chips that I had refused, afraid the little waitress might be fined for making the mistake.

  The wifi packed up the next day and the Al Jezira TV station had a signal that said ‘scrambl
ed’, which made me wonder if something was happening out there in the real world that I was not allowed to know about.

  The next day at lunchtime I found Madonna standing under the trees outside the hotel still unemployed, so I hired her to take me to the Green Elephant Restaurant I had read about, situated on the river a little way from New Bagan. We trotted through the town, along dirt roads and down lanes shaded by trees to the river. This restaurant was very posh. At the entrance to it I climbed down and was met, handed a wash towel and escorted inside. The tables were on a deck overlooking the river from where a cooling breeze comes up. The food was expensive by local standards but still only totalled eight thousand kyat. The chicken curry was good and for once it was not huge.

  Trotting back, Bo Bo told me that he has one child, a little girl in primary school. He has to pay for this—all schooling costs money in Burma. He also told me that Madonna was ten years old. She had started working at the age of two and her work life expectancy was eighteen. She has had one foal, but work fell off and Bo Bo couldn’t afford to keep two horses, so he had to sell it.

  14 On the road to Mandalay

  The next night I was talked into visiting more temples. I really would have rather not, but I felt I should support the local economy, i.e. Madonna. I went out at five thirty and there she stood, patiently waiting. We set off and this time Bo Bo took me in another direction to where he said there would be no other tourists. It was dark inside the first temple we came to and empty except for a huge golden Buddha glowing in the gloom. On one side of it stone steps led up an inside spiral staircase to the top of the pagoda.

  Bo Bo had pulled out a wooden drawer from under the seat of the cart and extracted a torch for me to see my way up the stairs. Unfortunately it didn’t work. He said he used it as the cart’s lights when he was on the road at night. Not this night though, I thought. The small emergency torch in my bag also took this time to run out of puff. There was no way I was going up those high, steep and winding steps in the pitch dark, so we moved on down the road, through Myinkaba village to the Mingalazedi Paya.

  I was delighted to see that this, the ‘Blessing Stupa’ was deserted—no hawkers, no tourists. Built in 1284 of reddish brick, it had several terraces that could be reached by steps, but I could only climb up two levels as padlocked iron gates barred the rest of the way. Still, that was quite high enough for me. I was glad of the excuse to pander to my fear of heights and sit quietly alone for an hour in a cool breeze while the sun declined and an incredible sunset bloomed. The clouds first flushed pink then the surrounding temples and pagodas were back-lit with a marvellous vermilion that then spread over the entire sky. The pagodas darkened until only their black outlines were visible against the flaming red sky. We trotted home in the dusk, sans lights.

  Early next morning I was collected by the Mandalay bus. This was a very good deal considering it cost only seven dollars fifty per ticket. For the first time I was travelling with a few other tourists, young backpackers from European countries. It took six hours to reach Mandalay but some of the time was spent collecting or dropping off passengers. The local woman across the aisle was travel sick. She had eaten a big bag of food when she got on the bus. Then she heaved it all up. The woman in front of her did the same.

  After two hours there was a halt and some men got off, looking purposeful. When a woman went too, I followed. Behind the roadhouse where we had stopped I stood in the toilet line admiring the establishment’s pig, a fine fat sow grubbing happily in the dirt outside her low palm-thatched little sty. I’ll bet she did well there on leftovers.

  We had a refreshment stop after three hours and I bought a packet of intriguing round yellowish balls. They were terrible, consisting of sugar, possibly flour, and not much else.

  In the beginning the country we travelled through looked much the same as that around Bagan. There were goats and cattle and the dirt paths of the villages beside the road were swept clean but any common land was covered with rubbish, mostly plastic. Then there was a stretch of country that was like the area north of Port Augusta in South Australia, with low bushes and scrub and spindly trees. A patch of greener country with large fields of corn or rice followed and after that came some real desert country with reddish dirt and little vegetation.

  Finally we were in Mandalay. Founded in 1857 by the penultimate Burmese king, Mindon, it is not an ancient city. It became the capital in 1861 when King Mindon moved his palace there from Amarapura. In 1885 Mandalay was taken by the British and the last King, Thibaw, was exiled. The fall of Mandalay was said to have been caused by the death of King Thibaw’s white elephant. Moral—take good care of your elephant.

  I taxied from Mandalay’s hot and dusty bus station to the Royal City Hotel that I had booked by phone. I was warmly welcomed with, ‘You are very beautiful!’ The hotel was five-storeys high and a tiny two rooms wide, with a terrific breezy panoramic rooftop terrace. I loved my corner room with its three wide windows through which the sun shone cheerily. The views included the royal city, so for once the hotel’s name was not merely an allusion. Even so, the room had its little faults. An enamel spittoon detracted somewhat from the ambience, and you needed muscular thumbs to turn on the lights. Also, the air-con made a fiendish racket and there was no cold water. This amazed the staff when I told them. It was usually the other way around, with travellers always searching for the elusive hot water. Here I had to speed through the shower before I got scalded.

  At the hotel reception desk I had been heartened to find that for the first time in this country I wasn’t asked for payment up front. This euphoria didn’t last long. It was deflated as soon as I got to my room and read the notice on the back of the door. It said that I would be charged for anything that went missing and a long list of the entire contents of the room followed. And I had thought they trusted me! Was I likely to trundle out with the bar fridge in my bag or a bed or two under my skirt?

  I checked out the view of the town from the rooftop. Apart from the royal city walls and the golden dome of a mosque, it was uninspiring, mostly motley-sized worn and weary white concrete block buildings in various stages of decay.

  I talked to a German woman up there for a while, and then I went looking for food. None was available at the hotel apart from breakfast, so I walked to a nearby cafe the reception staff recommended, only to be told that it had now closed for a month. Ramadan had just started so I wondered if the owners were Muslim.

  But almost next door to the Royal City I found a Korean restaurant where I got fed—all alone. I ate ‘Rice Wrapped’, which turned out to be like sushi and was very good. By this time anything would have been. It was a big meal and what I couldn’t eat was packaged for me. ‘Would you like bar stool?’ I thought the waitress said, but it was really ‘parcel’.

  I had breakfast with the German woman and her family on the roof. They were travelling with a teenager, a boy of sixteen. I don’t like their chances, I thought. When the boy left the table they said quietly, ‘Never again’.

  I walked a long way to a travel agency that I was told changed money. Here I learned the situation with river boating or lack thereof. I had already had no luck with internet enquiries so I gave up on the idea of river travel from here. I tried to find a taxi to return to the hotel but discovered that only motorbikes can pick up passengers in the street; taxis have to operate from hotels. Instead I found a trishaw rider who pedalled me back to the hotel for a dollar.

  On the way we passed a Hindu temple, a Chinese temple and a Seventh Day Adventist church. Not far away was St Mary’s church, presumably Catholic, and the mosque I could see from my window was close to a pagoda. I was impressed with the seemingly multi-faith acceptance on display in this city.

  At four I set off for the night market, following directions from the receptionist. She told me, ‘Down the street round to the right’. Well, there was only the wall of the palace there so I walked some more. I got more directions from people in a shop, and I had to cross a
four-lane highway with traffic veering all over it. Dodging cars and motorbikes, hoping they would miss me, I made it to the other side. Returning to the hotel, I told the girl I had gotten lost. She looked at me as if I was daft and said, ‘Didn’t you know to go towards the clock tower?’ What clock tower? No one mentioned a clock tower!

  I found a trishaw who said he knew where I wanted to go—the night market. He took me a long way to the day market. Naturally, this being now night time, it was closed. I walked about the streets but did find some stalls where I bought a wonderful torch for one dollar fifty, the first asking price, but I was not arguing with that. I wished I’d had this torch when I was in the dark temple with the stairs I would have loved to climb.

  Another trishaw approached me and I got him to understand that I wanted food. He took me to a Shan restaurant. The food was in open wash-up type bowls arranged along a large table. There were no prices or menu. I pointed to several of the bowls and was dished up a pile of stuff on a plate. An assortment of side dishes and spicy sauces was put on my table and I set to. I ate chicken, snow peas, cucumbers, greens and the tasty but unfamiliar goodies in the side dishes. There was a basin big enough to bathe the baby full of boiled rice to help myself to. It was delicious and all of it plus a litre of water cost two dollars fifty.

  The trishaw man had been waiting for me and he pedalled me back to the hotel where we arranged a jaunt around the town for the next day for a fee of ten dollars.

  I met him at nine and we set off, me with my umbrella aloft. We passed the police barracks, which was surrounded by a large, old, mouldy white-stone wall on which someone had graffitied in Burmese and English their displeasure with this establishment. There were two English words, one was ‘Police’, and the other started with an ‘F’. Beneath it was a drawing of the Moustache Brother’s logo. No wonder the ‘Moustache Brothers’, a local satire show, have been closed down. I read that going to one of their performances would have got you an all-expenses-paid holiday at a government institution. The brothers have had this experience themselves but continue to perform in clandestinely. Their show casts aspersions at and is a forum for criticism of those in power. It’s a wonder they are still alive.