The Road To Mandalay

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place such as Burma which is changing so rapidly is that everything I tell you about my adventures of the place will be outdated by what Burma can only be now.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.

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. 

The Mekong?

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.

A brief pause in the battle for life

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. 

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. 

English Practice

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.  

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. 

The Burmese Venice

  

A Fiery Dinner

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.

 

Ivan, Myself and our Spanish tour guides

Schwe Dagan Paya

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

The Future?