From Burma to Myanmar Read online

  Further on I watched with some distaste a woman using a long-handled plastic dipper to ladle water from the sewer drain through a break in its cover and sluice it around her food hawker’s cart to damp down the dust.

  The first place I visited was the Royal Palace Fortress in the centre of Mandalay. Built as a one mile square-walled city, this was where the last two Burmese kings had lived. The buildings inside the walls are now replicas; the original ones were destroyed during WWII battles with Japanese invaders. We pedalled along the twenty-six foot high palace wall that is surrounded by a wide moat the size of a river. The wall has four grandly ornate gates, one in each side. Three are forbidden to foreigners, but I was allowed to walk in the fourth after I paid a ten dollar government fee. The palace is now a military compound and outside the gate a huge red sign in English and Burmese said, ‘Strike down all who oppose our union’, which I found chilling. I would not like to be on the wrong side of this lot.

  A heavy presence of uniformed soldiers armed with rifles guarded the tourist gate. Were they expecting an assault by the likes of me? A takeover by a posse of tourists maybe?

  Inside the grounds I was confronted by a long driveway. No vehicles are allowed in except the motorbikes for hire that belong there. After a struggle I gave in and let one rider cram a helmet on my head and off we went. There was no traffic so it wasn’t too bad.

  The palace buildings are stupendous and the grounds are park-like and full of trees. The military compound buildings and King Mindon’s tomb are off-limits, but I wandered through a long series of wonderful gold and crimson teakwood halls and pavilions. I saw the ‘Glass Palace’ where the kings lived and King Thibaw’s glass bed. I thought about all the massive teak trees that had been cut down to build this; there were literally hundreds of columns made from tree trunks.

  The motorbike rider collected me again, drove me slowly around the grounds, then dropped me back at the gate where my trishaw was waiting.

  I did not go to the top of Mandalay Hill, an obligatory tourist experience, even though now there is a lift. I did that last time, the proper way. I think the karma I gained from panting up all those hundreds of steps should still be active. Instead I went to the nearby Shwenandaw Kyaung, a wooden monastery covered in beautifully carved panels. It survived the destruction inflicted on the other buildings of the Royal City because it had been dismantled and moved some time beforehand by King Thibaw after King Mindon died in it.

  Next I went to Kyauktawgyi Paya and stood before its massive Buddha, sculpted from one solid block of marble in 1865—a twenty-six foot, nine hundred tonne goliath for which I bought a string of fragrant jasmine flowers from a small girl peddler.

  Then, being my very favourite things, I couldn’t miss seeing the world’s biggest book. It is at the Kuthodaw Paya and consists of the entire fifteen volumes of the tripitaka Buddhist holy text inscribed on 729 marble slabs, each one housed in its own small white stone stupa. The work on this colossal project began in 1857. A paper edition of this text is available—thirty-eight volumes of around four hundred pages each which is estimated would take one person eight hours a day for 450 days to read. The stupas are lined in neat rows in pleasant tree-dotted grounds that lead to a pagoda. There I met a crippled woman who spoke fluent English. She said she had been a teacher but now lived on the kindness of others as she had no family or income. As I am an ‘other’, I offered some ‘kindness’.

  At twelve o’clock the trishaw and I were trundling our way back to the centre when I became worried for the rider—it was so hot and he had done much work. I saw a restaurant and called a halt for lunch, mainly to give him a rest. Lunch over, he took me to Mandalay’s central Zeige Market (near that pesky clock tower) but, unusually for me, I didn’t like it. It was big, crowded, dingy-dark and very dirty underfoot, with rubbish, string and plastic all trying to trip me up. Upstairs was better but boring; the goods were largely all the same.

  We pedalled back to the hotel. I was done for the day. Time for a lie down.

  15 Where the flying fishes play

  At dinnertime I walked down the street a little way, and, sent on my way twice by kind passersby, found the Marie Min vegetarian restaurant. Vegetarianism is something I have studiously avoided since a bad experience with it left me scarred for life. Some years ago I went to the home of a vegetarian man who was trying to impress me by cooking a meal. It consisted of something that was beige and lumpy and smelled like chook food pellets. It tasted worse. It was accompanied by other dishes all similarly revolting, tasteless and foul, one was boiled wheat—did I mention chook food? As if having to eat this awful food wasn’t bad enough, it put me in hospital! In the middle of the night I awoke in severe pain from an intestinal obstruction caused by all the gas this fowl food had produced.

  Needless to say I never saw that fellow again and the mere mention of vegetarian food still made me shudder. So Marie Min was a revelation. I went there only because the Korean option was closed, but I loved it. Climbing polished teak stairs to a balcony that overhung a tiny lane, I had a divine tomato salad. It was crunchy with onion, nuts and many other tastes and textures, and a big plate of it cost a ridiculous one dollar fifty. It was accompanied by a perfectly acceptable tofu curry and a delicious paw paw lassi.

  Across the narrow lane was a Thai restaurant, also on a balcony, so close I could have reached out and almost touched the people sitting there. At this height I was level with the electricity supply of the houses. Wires and connections that looked to be merely extension cords swung in a haphazard tangle in all directions from a central pole. No wonder the electricity was uncertain.

  Afterwards I walked back to the hotel alone in the dark street, but I did not feel unsafe. There was still no cold water in my room. The tap that wouldn’t turn had been fixed but no water came out of it. The girl from reception grabbed a screw driver, came to my room, applied the screwdriver vigorously, and it was done.

  Next morning I set out to find the boat that crossed the river to Mingun, seven miles upstream. Finally I was going to take a ride on the Irrawaddy (now called the Ayeyarwady.) But I vowed afterwards that it would be the last time I went anywhere as tourist infested as Mingun.

  My trishaw rider was waiting outside the hotel and he pedalled me to the riverboat landing through the early morning traffic. At the dock I had to produce my passport to buy a ticket—just to cross a river! I was told to wait for at least five more passengers before the boat could leave. It was a fair sized riverboat and we managed to muster up ten takers, all tourists.

  The gangplank out to the boat was not for the tangle-footed, consisting of a wobbly plank and a hand rail that was a bamboo pole held between two men standing up to their waists in the water. A helping hand at the other end hauled us on board.

  Reclining in an ingenious but roughly made bamboo lounge chair, I watched the wide river flow past, alone in the covered part of the boat where I had a fine view of the toilet whose door had been left open to proudly display the fact that it had a pedestal. The rest of the tourists chose to sit in the sun on the roof.

  The level of the river was low and patches of grass showed on the sand bars. On one narrow spit of land in the middle of the river was a rice crop with people and oxen moving about.

  Getting off the boat at Mingun was easier than wobbling on had been. We tied up to the base of a temple with white stone steps leading up to the road. Then it was on! We were mobbed by hordes of sellers of postcards, fans, paintings, drinks and dyed quartz pretending to be jade. I dodged around a side path to avoid the mob on the main drag, but was detected by two small girls who pursued me relentlessly until they wore me down. In the end I paid fifty cents for a fan to get rid of them.

  The main attraction at Mingun is Mingun Paya, the huge cracked brick base of an unfinished pagoda that would have been five hundred feet tall and the world’s biggest if the king building it, Bodawpaya, had not died in 1819 before its completion. Now it is the world’s biggest pile of bricks
. But crumbling and cracked or not, it was a stupendous sight. In 1838 an earthquake caused a great split in one corner of the stupa and the rubble of bricks that had flowed down from it still sat in a heap at its base. More severe damage occurred last year when a major shock toppled some of the top structure, which also now lies in a mess of rubble at the base. It is said that tourists would have been killed in this fall if the earthquake had not happened early in the morning. The flat top of the stupa used to be a popular spot for viewing the river and surrounding countryside, but now it is forbidden to climb up there. Oh, what a shame, my grateful legs said to me.

  I trudged on. Guarding the riverbank are two gigantic stone chinthe, half lion, half dragon mythical animal figures. Ten people are said to have lived at times in the cracks in their mouths that were caused by earthquakes.

  Following the dusty path that led to the other sites for which Mingun is famous, I walked, dogged all the way by a young boy and girl who said they were in high school. Not today apparently, even though this was a school day. They did not let me escape without relieving me of some of my cash. They had cut me off from the herd the way wolves separate a straggler and wear it down. I try never to buy tourist junk, but I was defeated here and left Mingun with two watercolours of monks and nuns, a swag of postcards, a fan, a bundle of incense sticks and a donation to something—I have no idea what.

  I stood inside the Mingun Bell, a gigantic bronze bell cast in 1808 for King Bodawpaya to put in his ill-fated stupa. Instead the bell now hangs from supports in an open-sided pavilion. It weighs ninety tonnes, is sixteen feet across its lip and is the largest intact bronze bell in the world; Moscow has a larger bell but it is cracked.

  Two more obligatory payas later and I was gasping for a drink. I had a cup of tea at the stall of a woman who only bothered me a little to buy something, then I went in search of food. At a restaurant overlooking the river I ate a chicken omelette that was a surprise package. It had everything—tomato, onion, eggs, chicken and goodness knows what else, and it cost two dollars.

  The boat was supposed to return at one pm but I couldn’t find it. The steps we had arrived at were below sight from the shore and I didn’t recognise the spot. I tried the main boat landing, but was sent elsewhere. Then I saw two foreigners I deduced must be heading for the boat too, and followed them. I am getting cunning in my old age. Not smart, just cunning. At the landing I met a nice couple, a Chilean man and his American wife. We sat together on the boat and arranged to have dinner later.

  Back at Mandalay I saw my trishaw rider waiting for me on the river bank and I gratefully returned with him to the Royal City for a shower and a rest. Boy was I dirty after all the dust and heat of Mingun! I used the ‘bottom squirter’ to scrub my feet. These hoses on the wall beside toilets are found everywhere in Burma. They are used in lieu of toilet paper. I have never been able to work out quite how, but they do come in handy sometimes.

  Later I met Carlos and Beverley, who took me to eat at their hotel. It was in the next street over from the Royal and called The Smart Hotel, which, from what I saw of it, it was. Up on its rooftop bar the happy hour was in progress and I was obliged to drink two free cocktails after which I helped empty several large bottles of beer and dispose of a little food. The view from up there was great. The most impressive building I could see, lit up in technicolour, was the railway station.

  My friends insisted on walking me back to my room despite my saying that I felt perfectly safe in this country. Coming out from the air-conditioning of the hotel into the heat of the street was like opening the door of an oven. It had not cooled down from the one hundred plus temperature of the day.

  At breakfast I talked to a Danish man who said he was working on something to do with the environment in Thailand. I mentioned the pollution here, but he said that the problem in Burma was not pollution but rubbish. He said that the mentality of the people needed to change but that it would take a long time. In the past it would not have been a problem if the locals threw refuse on the soil because it would have been biodegradable. Now they had to be made aware that you can’t do this with plastic.

  That day I had made arrangements to hire a taxi driver, a cheerful wizened gnome who lurked outside the hotel on a seemingly permanent basis. I wanted to visit the three former capital cities that are close to Mandalay but too far afield for a trishaw. As it turned out, the driver took me wherever he thought I should go. He was forever smiling and flashing his large gleaming metal front tooth and gold-rimmed glasses at me, and each time he turned his metallic charms on I was dazzled into obeying.

  We set off in comfort in his air-conned car and I looked forward to a nice quiet drive in the country. I was soon disabused of that idea. We hadn’t gone far before we came to a temple that I was expected to visit. I was put out to walk.

  The Mahamuni Paya is a vast complex just south of Mandalay. It has a plethora of entrances, passages, courtyards, pagodas, buildings and shrines—all connected by tiled walkways lined with stalls. It thronged with worshippers, many kneeling before a much-venerated Buddha image—a mammoth, ancient golden statue cast in bronze around the first century AD. The thirteen-foot high statue had been plastered with gold leaves for so long that it was now completely covered in gold to a depth of six inches. Only by men though. No women are allowed to touch it.

  In a nearby courtyard one small pagoda housed six bronze Khmer figures that had been brought (stolen) from Angkor Wat. Everywhere I went there were crowds of people. I reflected that you wouldn’t find this amount of devotees at nine am on a Monday in any Western cathedral.

  Now and then men sat at tables collecting one thousand kyats as a camera fee. I did not use my camera; instead I gave my one thousand to a young man with a withered leg who hobbled about on a crutch.

  Then I tried to find my way back to where my shoes and taxi waited. I went down several of the long walkways, streaming sweat in the humid airlessness, but none of them ended in the sight of my shoes. After a while I began to get desperate, thinking that I could be in there all day. I grabbed a man in a dark-green uniform, possibly a soldier, and although he didn’t have any English he led me to someone who did, one of the fee collectors. This man took me in tow and trundled me around looking for places I might remember. But it all looked the same to me. He exhibited me to people, and seemed to be asking if they had seen me before. Finally we came to a table of fee collectors who said that they had—how could they forget me, the weird foreigner?—and pointed in the direction I had come from. Just then, my driver appeared. He had been searching for me, realising I had been missing for too long. I shook my guide’s hand fervently in gratitude for my deliverance. I really wanted to kiss him, but I controlled myself. He was probably saying, ‘Silly senile old bat’.

  Back on our tour the cheerful gnome asked if I wanted to see the monkeys fed. I said yes, I loved monkeys. But this was another misinterpretation. It was not monkeys I was taken to see being fed, but monks.

  At a gigantic monastery for novices, thousands of monks had their one meal of the day at this time. Poor things. I imagined how I would feel with only one meal a day. Having tourists gawk at me as I ate this meal would have made me feel even worse. Busloads of tourists are brought here to witness this treat.

  Along the shaded pathway of the monastery, two very long rows of monks were lined up waiting to go into the refectory. The tourists stormed in, cameras ready to photograph them while they ate. How disgusting. I would have none of this. I left. Would they like a busload of Japanese tourists descending on their homes at tucker time and photographing them like animals in the zoo?

  We visited more temples and monasteries, where I was pushed out of the cool sanctuary of the taxi to trudge about in the heat barefoot. Where was this drive in the countryside I had set out on?

  We arrived at Sagaing, an ancient capital of a Shan kingdom that had arisen around 1315 after the fall of Bagan. It is now a major religious site with five hundred stupas and six thousand monks and
nuns. We drove, thankfully, up Sagaing Hill on a high, winding, narrow road lined both sides with low white stone walls. Where the road ended the steps began. I climbed up many, many steps to look down on to a wide vista of green hills, their slopes dotted with a multitude of gold or white pagodas and stupas. I climbed slowly, stopping often at the seats provided to absorb the restful atmosphere the close growing gardens and overhanging trees afforded. Not to mention to absorb more oxygen into my complaining lungs.

  Near the top of the hill, forty-five colourful Buddhas sat in a peaceful crescent-shaped colonnade looking down to the distant river. Further up was the ninety-seven foot high Soon Uponya Shin Paya that was built in 1312. I liked its donation receptacles—waist-high bronze frogs that I couldn’t resist stroking.

  At Amarapura, City of Immortality, the royal city before Mandalay, not much could be seen of its former prominence. Most of the palace buildings had been dismantled and moved to Mandalay when it replaced Amarapura as capital. The main attraction here now is the wonderfully picturesque U Bein’s bridge. The longest teak bridge in the world, constructed of sixteen hundred sturdy teak posts, for two hundred years it has provided a way across the wide, shallow Lake Taungthaman to the village on the other side.

  I needed restoration again so I sat in a bamboo chair at a nearby outdoor tea house to admire the bridge, which stood high above the water of the lake with villagers and monks walking along it. As soon as I stopped I attracted a hawker, a young girl who softly and gently harassed me to buy her pseudo jade jewellery. Suddenly she leaned in, stared and pointed to my hand. I wasn’t going to try to tell her about it, but then she showed me her hand. She had a long scar very similar and on exactly the same place. (No one in Australia ever asks me about my scar. Don’t they see it, perhaps they just don’t care.) Examining her little hand, I saw that it was useless, all twisted into a claw. She said, ‘Operation’. She had few English words but this one she knew only too well. Then she showed me her leg. It was also deformed and scarred. I could not diagnose what had caused this, but I know that anyone disabled in this country is unlucky. I bought her jade lookalike at an exorbitant price.