It is strange writing about something that
happened so long ago, usually I write straight after the event but I created
this enormous monster of a plan for my Burmese blog piece that became so good
and so big in my mind that it also became so daunting in the process that I
just didn’t get round to doing anything. The problem too with writing about a
place such as Burma which is changing so rapidly is that everything I tell you
about my adventures of the place will be outdated by what Burma can only be
now. I haven’t spoken to anyone recently who has been there but having spoken
to a few people who were there about six months before myself and realising how
much had changed in that short space of time; one can only imagine the changes that
have happened in what amounts to almost three periods of six months. I
therefore can’t tell you what modern liberated happy Burma is like, but can
tell you what slightly less modern liberated and by that logic ‘less’ happy
Burma circa November and December 2011 was like. Yes it has been that long.
Maybe I should also call it Myanmar as it is this name which will surely become
internationally recognised at some point soon, now that the military dictators
are wearing suits and not only ‘good people’ but people our leaders, who incidentally
only have ours and humanities best interests at heart, can now openly trade
arms with and buy gas from. Aren’t the people just lucky to be free.
I don’t want this just to become some angry
rant about the real issue’s in the world so will try to keep it fun and talk
about my adventures. I do feel one last issue needs sorting out though and that
is whether to call the place Burma or Myanmar; so I will tell you the origin of
each and let you make up your own mind. The Burmese were originally just one
ethnic group in a landmass which my own imperial ancestors decided to claim as
their own, rape and name Burma. This land mass was renamed Myanmar by another
group of people with strong military power backing them up, although this time
they actually looked like those they were killing. They chose the name Myanmar
as a nationalistic tool as it is supposed to relate to the unity and strength
of the people. Personally by that
reckoning I don’t feel comfortable with either of them but will honour my
ancestors and stick with Burma.
My first impression of Burma was that it is
a strange hybrid of India and Thailand. It is a shithole and everyone wears a
lunghi, India, but is Buddhist and friendly, therefore Thailand, or how I hear
it once was. The people too are a mixture of dark Indian with slightly more
south-east Asian features, and because of a lack of Hinduism you actually see
women on the streets; which is quite refreshing, although it lacks the insanity
of Hinduism, but then that may have just been the Indians themselves. My
resounding impression of the people having spent a month there though is that
they are no hybrid of anything, they are simply themselves in their own right,
and quite a right that is.
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| Political Prisoners |
While in Burma I changed from my usual
style of travelling and actually moved at a pace tourists might feel slightly
more comfortable with. As a result I spent only one night in Rangoon before
heading out to Chaunda beach with two guys who I at first took for gay lovers
but later discovered to be Canadians; and brothers. We decided not to
take a quick bus journey but instead got an overnight ferry half way there,
which felt slightly like I was going up the river with Marlow in Apocalypse
Now, although minus the arrows thankfully. It was a bitterly cold night but
with the help of my old friend whisky I managed to survive before arriving at
port to have my passport checked by a man I took to be none other than the Team
America version of the now deceased Kim Jong Il, aviator sunglasses and all, which
chuckled me immensely, but somehow only me. From here we squeezed onto a small
bus which despite selling every seat to people; it’s primary cargo was clearly
rice and having crawled over bags to my seat, discovered rice was also more
important than my leg room, so took
up some kind of foetal position for the next six hours. It may sound like an
awful journey but I actually really enjoyed that bus ride, and it still reminds
me of why I am travelling.
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The Mekong?
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| Getting Foetal |
I enjoyed the beach and reverted to my
usual style of travel, so spent a week sitting on my arse smiling at local
women, who incidentally found this tall blond dirty dreadlocked man of interest
and curiosity. My dirty people have still not arrived in Burma through fear of
high prices so I was certainly something new to them, and this continued
throughout my entire time in the country. The only incident of note was when I
was persuaded to go spear fishing with the Canadian lovers for what turned out
to be an exorbitant price and proceeded to spend the entire two hours in the
waves trying to keep the water out of my goggles and the breath in my lungs. My
only moment of glory was when I heroically swam down and wrestled with a sea
snail before making it my bitch, and sole contribution, to what I can only describe
as a massacre. I feel maybe I am being a little tough on the Canadian lovers
but for me they were the type of travellers who ruin places. They almost wanted
to pay over the odds because whichever poor person it was ‘had a family’ and
who tip constantly despite it not being part of the culture. Throwing money at
people doesn’t gain their respect or in the long term even help them, they
eventually see you as a walking dollar; who is clearly stupid for throwing away
money and evidently has so much they should be ripped off. My fear is that a
people who are at present so purely welcoming tourists for what I felt to be
human reasons; will eventually become Thailand.
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A brief pause in the battle for life
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I left the beach refreshed and proceeded to
spend the next twenty plus hours on two clean spacious and boring tourist buses
to Mandalay; a city I wasn’t going to visit but through circumstances found
myself in, and eventually in love with. It was here that the elitist traveller
in me came out and I decided the reason I liked the place and nobody else did
was because I wasn’t bothered by it’s lack of attractions; I was all about
being one with the people. It was here that I felt I really connected for the
first time with beautiful people in a way that wasn’t possible in the touristic
atmosphere of the beach. As if a taste
of things to come, during one of the stops on one of my boring bus journeys; I
dropped some money, and a random guy on the street called out to me and chased
after me with it. It wasn’t as if i had dropped a bank card or a camera but
cash, and it could easily have disappeared into his pocket, but it didn’t and
the honest Burmese character shone through at this moment.
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| Me |
On my last day in Mandalay I decided it
would be fun to walk up to the top of the big famous pagoda on the hill, the
name of which I forget, and while there found myself chatting with some young
monks practicing their English on the tourists. When they found out I had been
a teacher in a past life; they convinced me to come to their school and teach a
couple of lessons before I got the train to Bagan. The walk to the school
itself way nearly as memorable as the teaching; one guy couldn’t understand why
I was walking when I could just pay for
a taxi, so spent five minutes in vain trying to find a space for me on his old
bicycle, and then upon hearing where I was going, a taxi motorcycle driver
insisted on driving me there for free. The teaching itself consisted of a
little teaching squeezed in between me speaking into a microphone and answering
questions. I was very pleased to hear George Orwell was their favourite author,
probably as a result of ‘Burmese Days’ but interestingly they were well versed
in ‘1984’ too. I had an interesting chat after teaching with one of the head
monks; who was from the Shan state in the north, an area until recently
fighting a guerrilla war with the government. He was one of the monks whose
march against military rule a few years earlier had been brutally cracked down
by the government. After the protests the government imposed a curfew, and in
the early hours when they knew nobody would dare be on the streets to bare
witness; marched into the monasteries and doing the unthinkable; beat,
kidnapped and killed thousands of monks. As many of the lesser generals and
soldiers had refused this order to move against the monks, the military had to
go into the rural areas and hire what amounted to uneducated mercenaries to do
the work for them. After hearing this I was then invited to explain the current
state of Scottish independence; and felt quite ridiculous in doing so.
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English Practice
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| Mad Mini-Monks |
After all this monk talk I decided to play
Gandhi on the way to Bagan and travelled with the poor people; I saved a little
of my soul and six dollars in the process. The journey itself was
unsurprisingly enjoyable and I found much pleasure in finding myself with mice
crawling over my feet on what amounted to a hard park bench inside a bouncy
castle on noisy wheels. I had another Gandhi esc moment when I decided to share
half of my bench with one of the three guys squeezed onto the one next to me.
Of course upon arrival in Bagan, the lack of sleep my new found Gandhi ism had
led to; brought out a moment of madness. It was about four in the morning, I
had about thirty kilos of possession and had barely slept but decided to shun
the offer of a dollar taxi journey in the belief I could walk the four
kilometres to town. With the help of the taxi drivers; I set off in the right
direction and after an exhausting five kilometres uphill I discovered I was
going in the wrong fucking direction, bastards. Thankfully a truck picked me up
and I went straight past the ten dollar tourist entry check point and into
Bagan, it almost made the walk worthwhile. Bagan itself is spectacular. I spent
three days walking and hitching around a vast expanse of ancient stupas of
varying sizes and legend. On one particular day some young girls who had been
batting their eyelashes at me and tying to sell me postcards insisted on
cycling my back the three kilometres to my guest house, their just appears no
end to the Burmese sense of hospitality.
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| The Trekkers |
I finally got a chance to really see the
countryside when; for the first time, along with three guys I met on the bus, I
paid for a guide to take me on a three day trekking expedition. We trekked from Kalaw to Inle Lake through an
area which felt like a combination of dry olive grove southern Europe, red
earthed Africa and patchwork England. I was very surprised by the Burmese
countryside, continually stopping to gawp at the intense colours and vast red
fields of chillies, our timing coinciding with their harvest. Inle Lake is as
yet too undeveloped but I believe in time will be, and at present it is an
enormous lake surrounded by mountains, with people living in huts on and around
the lake; everyone moves around by boat and I got the distinct feeling it is
the Venice of Burma. From here me and one of the guys, Ivan, went south to Bago
where we explored monasteries, Pagodas and a local market which I can’t help
but feel never see’s tourists. We saw a big fat snake which you could make
offerings to, played with crazy little mini-monks and were fed by a woman who
took a liking to Ivan.
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The Burmese Venice
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| A Fiery Dinner |
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| Patchwork Burma |
Finally back in Rangoon where it had all
begun and as we had as of yet not been to one of Burma’s main attractions; the
Schwe Dagan Paya, we thought it only fair we sneak in to avoid the entrance fee
and have ourselves a little look. While inside we found ourselves befriended by
some young Burmese tour guides wanting to practice their Spanish on myself and
Ivan, and while discussing Buddhism and Karma; discovered you can theoretically
‘buy good karma’. The idea is that if you ‘do good’ with your money you will
get good karma for it, but for me it just raises more questions than answers.
Can you do bad things your whole life and amass a vast fortune in the process
before spending your last few years honouring Buddha by building golden
pagodas, as apparently that brings you good karma. What is good, as you’re then
descending into arguments of relativity and ones own notion of a good deed,
along with a religions too. Does that mean the people with less money are at a
disadvantage to those with the money, and if so does that mean if you’re born
with more money you’re also at an advantage in the karma scales? It is simply
an idea that doesn’t sit comfortably with me. Money can buy so many material
things, but somehow it can save your soul and can therefore buy things in the
spiritual world too. Maybe it is the thought that counts and being attached to
the money, or is it all just going straight over my head and I’m somehow
missing the point? Either way it was an interesting conversation, and the
following day to gain a bit more experience they took us on a tour across the
river and around some small villages and farms on the outskirts of the city,
along with a trip to see a rather effeminate looking lying Buddha statue. That
evening a friend of Ivans took us to see a fashion show which turned out to be
a brothel where the women would line up and you would pick the one you wanted.
Like the rest of the country; I found myself being very popular but these women
didn’t have the decorum of the rest of the populace and I was nearly raped as I
entered the door, the Mama San even offering to sleep with me for free. I left
on my own, with my life and my balls still attached and found it an all
together quite an amusing last evening in this friendly amazing land.
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Ivan, Myself and our Spanish tour guides
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| Schwe Dagan Paya |
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| A Pretty Buddha |
This has been a long piece and I thank you for your patience in getting this far; so
what is there left to say. Please visit this amazing land as you won’t be
disappointed and equally don’t as you will probably fuck it up, but then was my
presence not doing just the same thing. It is really hard to find a balance
with tourism as it can bring so many benefits but can be equally detrimental, more
so in many cases. I read recently that the Greek word Xeno means ‘guest’, so
surely the word xenophobe should mean ‘fear of guests’; and while everyone is
an individual, I feel comfortable in grouping the Burmese as beautiful people,
people who still honour their guests in a way that is rare in this global world
we have become accustomed to. Burma has a great deal of problems, despite what
our governments and their media now want us to believe, and I often find it
hard to read a piece about the place and not become annoyed at what they are
either omitting or downright ignoring. But life is about constant change, so
the same must be said for Burma too. It is what it is now, and that will be
different to how it was when I went there, and will be different again were I
to return in the future. Let us all hope, for the sake of such a wonderful
people, that the change they both want and expect comes about peacefully and
with as little hurt as possible. Let us also hope that our own leaders,
alongside the Burmese dictators in suits, don’t have other ideas and finally let
a people decide their own future, their own way
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The Future?
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