From Burma to Myanmar Read online

  16 City of dreamers

  Now it was time for lunch and my guardian took me to a simple restaurant, open on all sides but roofed and well supplied with plastic chairs. The bamboo shoots and chicken I ate was very good and cost two dollars with a fruit juice. I could never get over my surprise at the cost of food in Burma. Hotels and guesthouses might be going up in cost by the hour, but food remains the bargain of the century.

  Continuing on, the taxi left me at a riverside landing so I could take the ferry across to the other side to visit Inwa. The driver said he would wait there for my return. Inwa, formerly known as Ava, had been a Burmese capital city for four hundred years.

  The ferry was a small wooden boat with an outboard. That is the other great bargain in Burma—transport. The return journey cost eighty cents. On the opposite landing I had to hire a horse cart to go around the sites. I shared one with Emily, a pleasant young American I had just met, and we bounced and shook over little dirt tracks for the two hours that this expedition took.

  We visited a couple of stupas and then a large teak temple, accompanied all the way by would-be sellers of trinkets who smiled and laughed and said, ‘Later’ when we said, ‘No thank you’. Perhaps they were familiar with the wearing down capacity of sheer persistence. This time, however, I was strong and managed to resist.

  Bagaya Kyaung, the teak monastery, was constructed entirely of teak wood. Wonderful carved panels and huge columns up to sixty feet high decorate its interior, which is dim and dark except for a golden idol shining in its innermost recesses.

  Waiting for the return boat, Emily and I sat at a table under big flame trees by the landing and drank fresh mango juice. Emily, although of a different generation from the older American couple I had met in Mandalay, without any prompting said exactly the same about the folks at home—that most were uninterested or ignorant about the rest of the world or travelling, especially to Asia.

  Back in my taxi, the driver took me to an Ocean Super­market to restock on cheese before releasing me to rest. At six I resurfaced to walk to Marie Min for another tomato salad and lassi. It was still very hot. Marie Min confirmed that SIM cards for phones had been super expensive just a year ago. I had found it hard to believe that they could have been one thousand US dollars, but she said it was true. I suppose it had been the government’s way of restricting access.

  I would have loved to take the scenic railway to Pyin U Lwin, formerly Maymyo, where I intended to move to next, but it left at the ridiculous hour of three in the morning, so I opted for a share taxi instead. It collected me the next morning and I was put in the front seat. We weren’t far into the journey before I was fumbling frantically for the seat belt. Surprisingly it was functional; mostly they aren’t. In the back seat were two Burmese ladies and a child. All we could do was smile at each other after I had exhausted my Burmese conversational skills with ‘Mingala ba’.

  After travelling through the town, heavy with pollution, bikes, motorbikes and cars, we were soon on small roads overhung with trees so it felt as though we were going through green tunnels. Now and then, lines of dirt-coloured shacks or a row of bamboo, woven rattan and thatch stalls edged the road. We stopped for petrol and were each given a bottle of free water, a general practice at service stations in Burma. But what about all the waste bottles that were thrown into rivers and onto the land? Beside the petrol pumps stood a utility with a double-decker load of bamboo crates holding a cargo of pigs. I was pleased to see the driver giving them a long hosing down. Pigs don’t handle being overheated well.

  Then the road began to climb into the mountains. It was a relief to see that the old, narrow winding road I remembered from before had been supplemented by another road travelling in the opposite direction, making it two-way. There were not many villages on our path and only one town, which was good as our driver did not slow down in the least for any of them.

  We reached Pyin U Lwin in one and a half hours. I had booked a room at the Royal Park Hotel, out of the town a little in the gardens area. Here I received the usual enthusiastic welcome. My room was not ready so I sat on their comfortable veranda to wait. Surrounded by flower gardens with orchids hanging from large trees, birds chirruping and frogs croaking, it was blissfully cool and green.

  Maymyo, now Pyin U Lwin, was a British hill station established on the site of a small village in 1896 as a place for the colonial government administration to escape the heat of the plains. After the railway from Mandalay was completed it became the British summer capital until the end of British rule in 1948. It is a delightful little town, famous for its colonial houses, great fruit and vegetables, jams and juices and the National Kandawgyi Gardens. Established in 1915, the gardens cover 176 hectares and have 480 species of plants.

  That evening I dined in solitary splendour in the hotel restaurant. Seeing rum sour on the drinks menu at one dollar fifty, I asked to try it. This caused an excited twenty minutes of flurried to-ing and fro-ing between the kitchen and the desk before it arrived, in a very fancy cocktail glass, although without the standard paper umbrella that came with ordinary fruit juice.

  That night I had a wonderful sleep. It was so very quiet here. During the night it rained heavily and in the morning I went walking to the town in the cool, fresh air. It was a fair distance but the road sloped gently downhill and was shaded by a canopy of big trees. Undergrowth and greenery lined the edge of the road I ambled along, admiring the trees and flowers. Then a motorbike went past and the rider yelled a word twice and pointed to the road in front of me. There, slithering sinuously with evil intent across the road directly before my feet, was a snake about seven feet long. It was thin and shiny-black, so I know it was not a python. It was probably one of Burma’s numerous deadly lot that I had read about. I waited for it to disappear into the undergrowth and from then on paid serious attention to where I was putting my bare, sandal-clad toes. Tomorrow I will wear boots, I vowed.

  When I reached the town it seemed much bigger than I remembered. It even had a stop light now. I walked along the main street, the centre of which is dominated by a clock tower that was a present from Queen Victoria. I found a bank with a decent exchange rate for the US dollar. I was served by two charming boys and checked out the price of gold in the goldsmith workshops. I visited the market that sprawls over a large area close to the main street where stalls were piled high with local specialties—fruit, jams and organic coffee from the Shan hills. Several old people asked me for money, some of whom seemed to be Shan. I bought a small light. The Royal Park Hotel was great but the lights were up, fourteen feet away, in the ceiling.

  At the Tourist Information Office, I found a woman who was most obliging, contrary to reports that say these places are most often useless. She took me next door to a bus office and helped me buy a ticket on something that previously I had been told by several people didn’t exist—a daytime bus to Nay Pyi Taw. I wanted to go there next but had been offered the options only of a night bus or of going back to Mandalay and starting from there. The moral of this is—you need to ask many people to find the correct answer.

  Nay Pyi Taw, which means royal capital, is Myanmar’s new capital city that the government in its wisdom (or otherwise) decided to create in 2005, supposedly on the advice of their official fortune teller.

  I rode back to the hotel in a buggy straight out of Cobb and Co, an old wooden mini stage coach. These are the usual method of transport in Pyin U Lwin unless you want to ride pillion on a motorbike.

  At dusk I sat on the hotel balcony. The mosquitoes were very bad then and a waiter lit a repellent coil under my feet, which, combined with catnip drops behind the ears, helped to fend them off. Horse carts arrived at the hotel, delivering tourists back from day trips. The horses generally looked in good condition and well cared for, but I watched one poor little animal panting, recovering from the effort of drawing two great lumps of German womanhood up the hill slope.

  The local fruit here is made into terrific juices so I orde
red papaya juice with a shot of the ubiquitous Mandalay rum as a variation on the rum sour, and received a giggling response from the waiter.

  Next day I walked to Candacraig, where I had stayed on my first visit to Burma. Now closed, it had been privately run and was then taken over by the government who reputedly made a hash of managing it. It was now about to be resurrected by a local company. It was not far, and I made my way there along undulating forest-shaded roads. Every now and then I passed a big old European-style house that appeared quite out of place in Burma.

  The exterior of Candacraig looked old and sad. Pine needles lay thick on the shingled roof and head-high weeds flourished where the once-lovely gardens had been. But flowers still ­struggled to push their blooms up among the weeds and inside the marvellous polished wooden floors still gleamed. A caretaker, on her knees busily shining them, smiled up at me. I walked slowly around the carriage drive, which years ago pony carts had trotted smoothly along; now it was rough and pitted with potholes.

  Down the road a little I found a horse cart to take me to the town. Riding in one of these relics was rather like being in a rustic, rattly old hearse—from the corpse’s point of view—in the coffin. You can’t see out unless you lie down. The cart was covered overhead and all around except for glass-less windows low on the sides. And, surprisingly, instead of an aperture through which to see the driver ahead, there was a mirror. So you sat there with your travel-worn, frazzled face staring back at you. Not a morale booster.

  In the town I met a girl I had spoken to in passing the day before—a poet from Luxembourg. I stopped and had some local coffee with her while she read me the poem that she had just written in the botanical gardens.

  Another horse cart took me back to the hotel, this time by a different route that I think was not so steep for the horse. On the way we passed a Hindu temple, a large Christian church, a pagoda and a Chinese Buddhist temple. A mosque occupies a dominant position in the main street. Pyin U Lwin’s Hindu and Muslim populations are descendants of the Indian workers brought here to work on the construction of the town and the railway.

  That night the rum got lost in translation and I ended up with straight papaya juice. Or was it that they were trying to keep me wholesome?

  The bus to Nay Pyi Taw left at 10.30 in the morning and I was the only foreigner on it. At first it was cold as we came down through the mountains, which were green but not forested. I wondered if all the trees were in the temples I had seen. The mountainsides were covered in low scrub, creepers and bushes. I saw that horses were still used as transport in the villages and towns we passed through down as far as Mandalay.

  We didn’t go into Mandalay but veered off on a side road. The bus stopped after a couple of hours and I bought a packet of chips and ate the banana sandwich I had made in the hotel from the breakfast provisions. After we came down onto the plain and the sun was on my window it began to get warmer.

  I didn’t know that this bus did not terminate at Nay Pyi Taw and goodness knows where I would have ended up if I had not suspected that we had arrived. Hanging out of the window, I asked, ‘Nay Pyi taw?’ It was. I took a proffered taxi whose driver quoted me a price that I thought excessive until I saw how far we had to travel to the hotel I had phoned ahead for a room. I was stunned by the distance between places in the town. Even though I had read about this, the reality was a shock. And what ran continually through my mind as we drove endlessly through empty spaces was—why? What reason could there have been to build a city like this? They could have taken notice of Colonel William Light’s great plan of the city of Adelaide, still lovely and functional after one hundred and seventy seven years. Built on a square mile grid with a mile of public parkland all around it, it is a very sensible city.

  The taxi took me a long way, several miles at least, along a six-lane highway absolutely devoid of traffic. On both sides was green, empty bush edged with newly planted trees and centred by a median strip filled with flowering bushes and shrubs. When the trees are avenues they will be lovely. But why all the open country of bush between everything? After twenty minutes of fast driving I saw the first building, a massive hotel, then there were more half-finished three or more storeyed buildings. More open space followed, as all the while we travelled along these great wide highways, intersected now and then by big, high roundabouts topped by a gigantic rose, in one place red, another yellow.

  Finally we came to the hotel zone, one of the several separate zones into which the city is divided. All foreigners have to stay in the hotel zone and some zones, like the one for government buildings and the generals’ houses, are off limits. There are some colossal hotels in the hotel zone, each surrounded by large grounds, trees and neon lights. The Tungapura, the almost-new hotel I had booked, was great. Superficially. Flaws appeared on closer inspection. The marble wash basin was cracked, some lights didn’t work, and the elaborate fancy curtains wouldn’t draw without considerable assistance.

  For the first time in Burma the hotel asked to be paid in kyats, telling me that if I paid in dollars it would be converted at an abysmal rate. I had just enough kyats for one night, but the next day was Saturday and the bank was closed. ‘Oh, well,’ as Scarlett O’Hara said on the last line of Gone with the Wind, ‘tomorrow is another day’.

  My room on the first floor had terrific lights, even with some not working, and wide French windows that opened onto a ledge that looked as though it had been designed as a small balcony. But its edge was only four inches high. No cattle prod on earth would have got me out there. The hotel foyer was marvellous and there were real plants here and there; even in my bathroom there was a pot of devil’s ivy. The bathroom was big and had a washing line that could be pulled across it. Now that really is encouraging washing. I complied and soaped up a storm.

  Later, as the sole diner in an empty expanse of restaurant, I provided entertainment for the two lonely waitresses. Then I slept well despite being lost in a king-sized bed.

  The next morning, after a substantial buffet breakfast, I asked at reception about transport. There was no public transport or trishaws, only taxis at fifteen dollars an hour. This was dear by Burmese standards but there was no option here. I had to use a taxi. The driver spent an hour trying to find a money changer for me. First he took me to the supermarket, a huge shopping centre in the shopping zone and a fifteen minute drive from the hotel section, again through open country on massive freeways. At the money changer there the staff didn’t have the key to the money box! I waited, but when the person who should have had the key was located, she couldn’t find it.

  The taxi driver took me elsewhere. This involved another long drive to where the town zone is located, a further ten minutes away on a freeway also lined with trees and with open green bush-covered land in between. The town wasn’t much, only a few shops, some empty, a collection of new-looking houses and a small market. The money changer was located in a private house and we did the deal in the street, which reminded me of the old days of my black market career in Burma.

  There were not many attractions on my Need to Visit list for Nay Pyi Taw. I had come here mainly to see what a new town built on the recommendation of a sooth-sayer looked like. I had heard it was weird. It was.

  So I went to the museum, the waterfall park and the stupa—at all of which the government did its utmost to extract as much money as possible from me. At the waterfall park I had to pay a fee just to get in the gate. It covers a large area and has many trees but it was really nothing special. The stupa looked the same as they all do except this one was new and much decorated. It was also extremely high, but this time, fortunately, I found the lift. Before I was allowed to go up in it I had to pay two thousand kyats for the use of a longii over the trousers that I was wearing. I had forgotten I would be visiting a holy place. This longii, which they thought I might not be able to resist taking home with me if I was not charged a deposit fee, was a dreadful old rag. I should have charged them to put it on me!

  And
my handbag was searched! This is not a job for the unwary. I wondered what they thought I was hiding in there. Did they expect terrorists in a quiet paya in this isolated part of Burma?

  Up on the forecourt of the stupa, many people walked, circling it, but it was very windy so I hastened inside. The interior was magnificent, with large expanses of glittering floor tiles and shining gold statues abounded.

  Continuing on in the taxi, another long drive brought me to the City Hall. More a series of extended palaces, I could only admire it from a distance as it is forbidden to foreigners, as are many other areas of the city. I wasn’t even supposed to photograph it, but I did.

  Nay Pyi Taw was not an easy place to visit as a tourist. Unless you brought your own transport or were prepared to pay large amounts for taxis, it was impossible to get about. The only other visitors I saw were Chinese or Indian groups on business tours.

  I paid off the taxi at the supermarket and spent an hour and a half in there. I bought a bus ticket to Inle Lake, in central Shan province, my next port of call, and obtained some more money from the girl at the money changers who by now had organised the cash box. I had realised quickly that I needed more money in this expensive place.

  I ate cold pizza and drank a watery milkshake sitting at a table in the supermarket cafe, accompanied by a young man who practised his English on me. He worked at one of the hotels. I assumed that all the people in the city would have been brought here to work. I saw no people on the streets like in other towns.