Magical Mystical Myanmar

The songthaew crawls painfully up to the border. It’s 6pm, the national anthem begins to play in the streets, and my visa has just expired. I rush to the immigration counter and hand them my passport. The officer immediately hands it back without acknowledging it “The border is closed, come back in the morning”. “But my visa expires today,” I plead …he leafs through my passport and then ponders my situation. His colleague takes the passport from him and hands it back to me. “The border is closed, come back tommorow,”…”But my visa has expired,”… “Then you will have to pay a fine tommorow,” he smiles. Locals stream across the border behind me… “But look,” I gesture behind me, “the border is still open.” ”Yes, but the Burmese side closed at 5.30pm,” he sneers, hands me back my passport and slides closed the window, though not before I let off an obscenity.

For the past couple of hours, the chances of us making it to the border on time have hung in the balance - I’m not going to give it up that easily. Besides, The Burmese Military Junta is hardly going to let people stream across the border without checking their passports. The petty and transparent lies of the border guards are predictable - they rank somewhere between taxi drivers and politicians on my pillory scale. Why don’t they take up a noble profession like Cauliflower picking;-)
I’m knocked back by another border guard before a higher ranking croney approaches - and to cut a long story short, I lie my way across. Rough justice using a language he seems to understand. It feels liks a victory but it needn’t.Whatever happened to goodwill?

Tachilek is a scruffy, busy little border town. People wander around the market selling cartons of cigarettes and porn DVDs, offering to procure opium or young girls. Taxi drivers take people on hour-long tours around town to see the ‘highlights,’ which include a pagoda and some Long neck Karen, catering to tourists who pay $5 to cross for the day, in order to acquire another 30 day Thailand visa. You can also go and play a round of golf or visit the Casino in the 20 million dollar tourist complex, built to service the needs of Burma’s drug lords and politicians as they swap gems and opium for gold bars - hence the area’s name: The Golden Triangle.

Despite being on Burmese soil, we couldn’t simply travel into the interior and beyond. A government arranged jeep to the next major town was possible, but this was the end of the line. To reach Burma proper, we had to fly - three airlines covered the trip to our destination and all three charged the same ($63). Planning to get out of town as soon as possible; I spoke to a guy from Air Mandalay, who spent fifteen minutes telling me how unsafe and unreliable the other two airlines were. Then realising everything was sold out, he told me with an enthusiaistic smile I could fly the following day with one of the airlines he’d just been warning me against…cheers!
Now I felt like we were in quarantine; a dusty border town where the people spoke Thai and spent Thai Bhat - and though the differences were admittedly many, I had to ask myself; was this halfway house actually Burma?

Our flight to Heho was short, and flew over some of the most untouched areas in all of Asia; the thick, brown arteried forests contained some of the least exposed tribes in the world, as well as the opium poppies to be planted this month, supplying over 50% of the worlds heroin. And a reason why the government limits foreigner movement in the area. They wouldn’t want anyone turning up at a heroin processing plant with a digital camera, embarrassing The Burmese Military Junta and the US government’s ‘War on Drugs.’

Arriving by plane has the huge advantage of allowing you to cover large distances in a short time, leaving you feeling relatively fresh, and allowing you to soak up the impressions and scenery with a clear mind. Weaving down from the airport through the hills into the huge fertile basin that housed Inle Lake was magical. Mechanization has yet to fully replace animals as horses pulled carts and kids rode water buffaloes. The scenery and the people had a timeless African feel, yet the characters and culture were truly Asian.

We’d timed our visit to perfection. The festival of Phuang Paw U Kyaung was taking place on Inle lake, hyped as Burma’s premier natural attraction. Too often places are marketed and once you actually see them, you cannot help but be a little disappointed. The difference between reality and romance is often great. Well I’d never heard any hype about this place, and neither have you - so here it is: Imagine lake Ohrid in Macedonia, surrounded by the hills of Lake Malawi. Add the ambience of the Backwaters in Kerala and Dal Lake in Kashmir. 268 Buddhist Monastries and numerous hill tribe cultures. Let Rudyard Kipling craft it all together and let Tolkien create a festival of pomp to highlight its beauty and you’ll have something approaching the reality.
So now if you visit you’re bound to be dissapointed;-)

We awoke at dawn, climbed into our long tail boat and hurtled across the tranquil surface of Inle lake. At an altitude of 900m the morning air was cool until the sun announced its arrival over the misty mountains. After around half an hour we entered a town of stilted wooden houses. Passing through the streets in our boat amongst other long tails and kids on canoes, people hung out of glassless windows and waved us by. The flotilla of boats heading in our direction gradually increased as we passed towns through canals lined with lilies, lotus flowers, floating gardens, crumbling pagodas and temples. Small boats now lined the entire route, containing whole generations of families waiting amongst the reeds for the procession to arrive. We settled into our own little nook, out of harm’s way, ate pancakes, drank coffee and waited.

It was just after 7am when a distant drumming and chanting began. Then from afar the first boat appeared around a bend in the waterway, a hundred men standing on a long narrow canoe, paddling in unison with matching clothes and oars. Just behind them, connected to a rope was another boat; the rowers and musicians wearing different coloured costumes representing the tribe to which they belonged, and then another behind that. After over 20 boats had passed, four floating golden temples appeared, pulled by the combined force of the hundreds of rowers. People bowed and prayed to the barges as they passed, then followed behind the procession as it passed on its journey to the monastery where it unloaded its cargo of little Buddhas. We zipped back through the reeds to catch it passing at another spot, before heading off to the monastery ourselves, where people applied gold leaf donations to the Buddha statues creating deformed golden-blobby-snowman images. The place buzzed with festival spirit, different hill tribes mingled with the local Intha people of the lake. To add further spice, the festival had clashed with the Full moon festival of Thadingyut, when people turn up in their best clothes, and it is said a family can spend it’s yearly savings on this one day.

We were fortunate to share the boat with two local Intha sisters from our guest house; which allowed us to see a more genuine and down-to-earth side of the festival, as we travelled between monasteries and ate strange and delicious local food with monks.

That evening after eating homemade pasta, for which Inle Lake has developed a bit of a reputation, we stopped by at a flood-lit golden monastary which still buzzed with mystical fervour. Before making our way home amongst people letting off fireworks and firecrackers whilst others made small hot-air balloons, and released them into the night sky, dotted with glowing tributes to Buddha.

Our next stop was the former British hill station of Kalaw, at 1200 metres, to escape the heat and take a wander in the hills. The government limits the distance tourists can wander off into the hills - so the few villages it is possible to visit have been very well visited…our guide even suggested buying pencils to give to the kids, though when we arrived they seemed to have developed more of a craving for “BON BONS!”

I was surprised to see as many tourists as I did at Inle Lake, though their seemed to be more middle-aged couples rather than the 18-30 scene in neighbouring Thailand. Many travellers boycott Burma because they believe that money spent in the country keeps the Military Junta in power. I won’t bore you with Burmese politics…yet.
But should I even be here?

Burma opened to tourism in 1989 and ‘coincidentally’ that is when the world became aware of what was going on here. The hostel owner we stayed with in Kalaw said that from its peak in 1996 individual travellers’ (see: backpackers) numbers have been falling consistently every year, whereas those on organised tours have been increasing, now accounting for the vast majority of tourists in Myanmar - they, of course, spend much more money, go less off the beaten track, mix less with the local people and suit the government just fine.

Case closed?

Besides, does anyone know a government anywhere in the world I can justify supporting financially? I honestly wish I had the power to topple governments simply by boycotting them - I’m yet to visit the land of Bush… and I wait patiently;-)

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