Pain and loathing express

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September 19

The guesthouse guys are supposed to put my breakfast in a bag and wake me at 3am for the 4am bus to Lake Inle. At 3.15 my own alarm goes off, then the GH guys are yelling at the door saying the bus is here, and luckily I am organized because I think I am ready in ten minutes (including shower).
I haven’t slept well because the electricity went off and that meant no fan. My breakfast in a bag is four bits of bread and a banana.
Board bus and wedge myself into tiny space. Two obnoxious Russians get on and have tantrums until they get the best seat by the door. He spends most of the journey sticking his horrible deformed feet out the window. Two New Zealanders on the bus hate the Russians too. I’m sure everyone hates them - they are wearing pretentious baggy traveler clothes and the male has shaved his head but let his beard grow. Considering what a bumpy skull and unpleasant expression he has it’s a bad move. His bunions are enormous and I resent having to look at them when I can’t even sit straight.
A nice polite Japanese man is turfed out of his seat and approaches me. ‘May I sit here?’ he asks. Compared with the loud, domineering Russian dickhead, he is a delight. I don’t really want anyone to sit next to me, but I could do a lot worse. Actually by the end of the journey I am rather fond of him. He offers to share his breakfast his me (he got toast and a fried egg) and gives me a samosa when we stop at daybreak. I show him the flashlight in my mobile phone, his has a TV. Naturally it doesn’t work in Burma.
Later he tells me that when he first sat down he thought I was a student. He’s either really sweet or a bit blind. His English is a bit limited, but I’ve become patient in Myanmar and I extract information from him. He plans tunnels in Osaka and gets one week off a year. He uses that one week to travel, albeit at a punishing pace. When he was student he cycled through Italy and France.
We eat lunch together and then he falls asleep and leans on my shoulder and I don’t mind. Normally I poke people who lean on me.
I am so cramped as the bus falls out of one pot hole into another that I keep sliding into my new Japanese friend. I am not that tall, but one knee is jammed under the seat with a bolt sticking into it.
When I finally get off I am so excited to sit in a normal car with a comfortable seat and no metal things sticking into me. Who'd have thought an ancient Corolla could feel like Paradise?
Four of us share a taxi to Nyaungshwe and three of us babble in english about the ecstasy of being off that bus. In town the Japanese man takes a room near mine and then we get bikes and cycle out to the lake. I realize then he is leaving at noon the next day so that’s why he’s not messing around.
When I ask him what he wants to do on his only night in Nyaungshwe, he says nothing, except he wants to talk to me. It turns out he builds sea kayaks and climbs mountains. Once he built a computer, which took a day to shop for but only two hours to put together. He’s not the kind of person I normally hang out with, but there is something about him that I like. He tells me his name but I can’t pronounce it.
The next morning I sleep late but the Japanese man finds me and then I find Heidi who is about to leave Inle and she takes us to where the nice boatmen are and we do the turbo version of the Inle Lake tour. Heidi and my Japanese friend have decided to share a taxi to the bus stop and there is a hurried goodbye in the street. I feel sad as the two of them drive away.
The lake itself is a swampy body of water full of villages and people making (and selling handicrafts) and tomatoes growing in canoes. The setting is beautiful - the lake is in a valley between mountains - but you can easily see from one side to the other.
Later on when it’s cooler I walk back out near the lake again and go to the winery. Having seen the sign for wine tasting I’m determined to have some. I get there hours after tasting finishes, but that doesn’t seem to matter. The tasting area is fantastic, with views of the mountains and the lake and the setting sun.
Some of the wines are better than others - the sauvignon blanc and the shiraz are not bad, but the sweet wines are fairly dire.
The next day I attempt to find the hot springs and get lost and fall off the bicycle when I take a hand off the handle bars to adjust my hat. It was a bumpy road. Luckily an old man in some kind of ancient truck and a young guy on a moto are passing by. They pick me up and the young guy gets me bandaids and puts the bike in the old man’s prehistoric vehicle. He turns around to drive back the way he just came (mostly in second gear). I seem fine, except for a hole in my left leg.
Back at the bike hire shop the men fuss over me. (Who knows what the women are doing - you never see them.) Chatty Moe Moe offers to take me to the hospital. I’d just assumed my leg would be fine, but blood is trickling over my foot.
I am dubious, but Moe Moe more or less insists so we go to the hospital, which is deserted except for a few bored staff who all crowd around to see what the foreigner has done to herself.
The hospital is a bit ramshackle, but it’s not incredibly filthy or anything. The nurse looks at my leg and says: ‘Two stitches.’ I guess it’s just as well I came. Three of them fuss about with iodine and sterilizing solutions and the wound is cleaned and then I suggest maybe some local anaesthetic - I’m not really sure I really need to go through being stitched up without it.
They take my suggestion on board and find a syringe of something and inject it around the wound site. Then it’s stitched and dressed and the staff have a bit of a confab and eventually they give me three kinds of tablets to take and I can go. My fear is that I’ve caught something worse than what I had in the hospital, but it was fine. I get a little booklet to take away and am charged 2,800 kyats.
Moe Moe takes me back to the shop where my huge dressing is a beacon attracting attention from every passer by. The blokes have gathered for the lunchtime discussion.
All through Burma when I say I’m from Australia, they usually say kangaroo. When I say England, they say: ‘Nice football.’
After thorough evaluation of my accident and many expressions of sympathy, the talk turns to English football. This strikes me as bizarre, but Myanmar is obsessed. I don’t care about football at all, but I can tell them that that is not a picture of Cheryl Cole (Cherry to them) on the back page. I can give them a bit of Cherry context though, along with some background on Wayne Rooney’s misbehavior and his dalliances with the ‘old slapper’. The concept of the old slapper entertains them enormously. It’s a good topic to take your mind off limb injuries.
That afternoon I rest and read A Thousand Shining Suns, feeling suitably outraged by what women under the Taliban had to endure. That evening I wander all of 20m back to the shop and chat with Moe Moe and his friends. They give me snacks and beer and refuse to take any money from me. These are not wealthy people but they are truly generous.
The New Zealanders who were on the bumpy bus trip wander by and we chat about how much we hated the Russian with the deformed feet. They are staying at the guesthouse he is in, and he complains about everything in an obnoxious way. And they thought his clothes were stupid too.
Things were not looking good when I picked myself out of the dust with blood running down my calf, but I’ve managed to enjoy most of my day. Apart from acquiring a hole in the leg. Although hospital wasn’t part of the programme, I’ve spent the day with really good people. Really, you just have to make the best of things. Now as long as the wound doesn’t get infected and gangrene doesn’t set in, then everything should be fine.

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