a side-trip for Thamin

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Before coming into Burma I had discovered a place called the Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary which was home to a large wild population of Eld's deer as well as other ungulates. Eld's deer used to be widespread across most of the southeast Asian mainland, from India across Burma and Thailand to southern China,but now it is extinct almost everywhere. The Indian subspecies was reduced to 14 animals in 1975 and with protection has built up to almost 200 today. The natural Thailand, Chinese and Vietnamese deer are probably completely gone (there are some introduced populations) and in Laos there are only one or two surviving groups. Cambodia still has some good numbers and Burma is the last stronghold. The Burmese subspecies is called the thamin or “golden deer”. I couldn't find out much about Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary because most internet sites were travel or tour sites which simply copied the same thing from one another. I knew some of the animals found there (Eld's deer, sambar, muntjac, hog deer and gaur) and basically how to get there (Yangon to Magway to Minbu to Shwesettaw)...and that was about it. I didn't think I'd have time to try and get there because I only had 22 days total (you can only get a maximum 28 day tourist visa) and I had more reliably-reachable places to visit, so I put it on the “maybe” list. When I got into Burma though I decided I didn't want to just follow the flock, I wanted to (just one time) take my own path and see where it led.

Although all the websites I'd found previously had Yangon as the starting point, Magway is much nearer to Bagan than it is to Yangon so I thought it made sense to go from there. “Closer” in this respect meant four hours by bus. I had asked at the Bagan bus station about getting to Magway and been told there is just one pick-up truck which goes there from Bagan and it leaves at 6.30am. The next morning I got to the station at 5.45am to be sure of getting a seat, and was told that the departure time was 7am and was pointed towards a mini-van. At the mini-van I was told they don't go to Magway, but that bus on the other side of the street does and it leaves at 7.30am. At the bus I was told they leave at 9am, then someone else came up and said the bus actually leaves at 9.30am. This was getting a little annoying. Then someone else hailed me from back across at the station and I eventually ended up at a pick-up truck to Magway which would be leaving at 6.30am, just as told originally!

It took somewhat over four hours to reach Magway. The landscape got even more arid than previously and the eucalypts became more common. It started looking very like the outback of Australia. At the Magway bus station I was told there are no buses to Minbu which didn't seem likely (it is literally just across the river) and certainly no buses or trucks from Minbu to Shwesettaw. It would take two hours to cover the whole distance and would cost me 12,000 kyat by motorbike or a ridiculous 60,000 by truck. They didn't seem fazed by my argument that if it was really 60,000 per person then nobody would ever be able to pay it. I knew there must be trucks or pick-ups going there but the taxi people had banded together so I couldn't find anything else out. I ended up taking a motorbike for 10,000. When I got to Shwesettaw I found out that 10,000 actually is the correct price, but that there are also numerous mini-vans and pick-ups for about 2500 kyat going between Magway and a village eight miles from the wildlife sanctuary. I also found out (too late for me) that there is a direct bus from Yangon which goes right past the entrance and it only costs about 10,000 kyat. Something else important I discovered on arrival was that I was supposed to have a permit from the head office in Naypyidaw which was several hundred kilometres away! In China that would have been the end of the story, but in Burma people are much more helpful and it was sorted out in a couple of minutes over the phone. At the bus station in Magway I had asked if there was anywhere to stay at Shwesettaw and been told there was nowhere, but I could sleep at the monastery no problem. It turned out though that the visitor centre for the sanctuary has loads of accommodation. There's no electricity except between 6pm and 8pm when they run the generator, and it isn't particularly cheap but it isn't particularly expensive either, US$20 per night plus the same again for three meals (or 5000 kyat per meal if you want to break it up). Then you need to pay for a motorbike to take you round the sanctuary because it is too far to cover on foot, and that is 10,000 per day plus 5000 for a guide fee. I argued that I didn't understand paying the guide fee for the same person who was driving the motorbike – I was basically paying him twice for the same thing – and they waived the 5000 fee. I stayed three nights and it cost me US$121 all up, so quite a lot more than if I'd been in Bagan but I saw Eld's deer so it was worth it.

Shwesettaw isn't just the arid sparsely-treed savannah sort of habitat as found at Bagan, it also has some nice proper forest there as well. I didn't spend much time looking for birds in the forest because going through it in the mornings we were heading to where the deer were and on the way back it was the middle of the day and very hot (much hotter than at Bagan – it must have been in the mid-30s when I was there). On my first afternoon when I arrived a took a short wander along the road and saw a couple of blossom-headed parakeets in the top of a tree and a party of grey-breasted prinias, but that was about all. The prinias confused me because I could plainly see they were some sort of prinia but they were working their way through the undergrowth like a flock of babblers and I had never seen prinias doing that before. It wasn't till I got back to Bagan and suddenly saw loads of them (and got longer views of them) that I figured out what they were. I asked about other mammals and was told there are 14 species in the sanctuary, which suggests nobody has done any work there on bats or rodents. I already knew there were Eld's deer, sambar, muntjac, hog deer, gaur and maybe goral. At the sanctuary I was told there are also wild pig, rhesus macaque, slow loris, common palm civet, dhole and golden jackal. I don't know what the other species are to make 14. Of all of those I only saw the Eld's deer, plus Irrawaddy squirrels.

The best time to see the Eld's deer, I was told, was between 6am and 9am when they came out to feed, so after breakfast at 6am the motorbike driver would take me out at 6.30am (which is dawn in Burma). I would see many many deer, no problem. Of course I trusted them to know best. The next morning the driver was a bit late so we didn't leave until 6.45 and it turned out that the place where the deer are found is not close to the headquarters – it took two and a half hours to get there (longer than the ride from Magway to Shwesettaw)! We made a stop along the way when a bird with a long trailing tail flew across the road. Against the sky I thought it was a black drongo and I wasn't even going to bother with it because I'd been seeing dozens of them every day. Something made me want to stop though, and when I casually put my binoculars on it as it perched on top of a dead tree I saw it wasn't a drongo at all, it was a hooded treepie, one of the endemics I hadn't seen at Bagan! The last hour was over a dirt road thick with the fine powdery dust common in Asia's dry country. Everything within about 50 metres of the road is grey and as the road also had a lot of other motorbike and truck traffic keeping the dust in suspension in the air, we also ended up grey. After each ride my beard and hair felt like grimy straw. The dust even gets inside bags; I had to give my cameras and binoculars a good cleaning every night to get rid of it all. It was well after 9am when we got to the deer area, which was cotton fields mixed amongst patches of forest and long grasses. It was already pretty hot and I had a feeling the deer would have finished feeding and gone off into the shade of the trees, but we rode around and around dirt tracks between fields until midday without success. On the way out we had to keep stopping because bits kept falling off the motorbike. At one of these stops (when the kick-stand had fallen off) I had a look in the wide mostly-dry canal along the roadside and saw a snake swimming across it. That and some geckoes in the headquarters at night are the only reptiles I have seen in Burma so far. We stopped for lunch at a roadside restaurant where a girl in there of about ten tears old had never seen a beard before – this is not a part of Burma that sees a lot of foreigners apparently! Back at the headquarters at the end of the day there were olive-backed pipits everywhere! The next day there were none.

I wasn't especially happy that we had got to the deer area so late, so the next morning we left the headquarters at 4am. While it is hot during the day here, it gets very cold at night. On a motorbike the wind chill makes it even colder. At least there wasn't any other traffic on the dirt road though. When we got to the deer area just after dawn we weren't roaming for long before the driver spotted a small group dashing off across the fields. There were only between five and ten of them, all females. I managed to get a couple of distant shots of their heads above the grass. Apparently this isn't the best time to see the deer because the grass is still too high; around April they gather in huge herds and are a much better bet – but that is also when the temperature would be getting towards its highest, so weigh up the pros and cons I guess. The second group of deer we found was also a small one but contained a full-antlered male. The alternative name for Eld's deer is brow-antlered deer because at the base of the antlers is a very long prong which curves forwards above the head. It is most impressive. The third and last group we found was the largest, maybe twenty deer out grazing. A couple even stood up on their hind legs and started boxing. I told the driver to wait where he was so the motorbike wouldn't scare them away while I tried to get closer for some photos. The deer were engrossed in their own activities and I snuck towards them through the grass, taking photos along the way because I didn't know how close I was going to be able to get. Just as I was getting into a good distance range, the driver suddenly came roaring up the track on the bike and started revving the engine. Naturally the deer all bolted. I have no idea what he thought he was doing, but I was not at all impressed!

While driving around looking for deer there were also loads of birds everywhere. There were some interesting comparisons with Bagan. For a start there appeared to be a lot more small passerines flushing from the grass – cisticolas, long-billed pipits, pied bushchats, and all sorts of others I didn't get to see properly. I'm not sure if this was because the habitat is better there or just because I was covering more ground faster (on a motorbike as opposed to a bicycle) so there only seemed to be more, but even when walking across the fields there were birds exploding out of the grass in every direction. I saw male white-tailed stonechats twice. Burmese bushlarks were common but I only saw white-throated babblers once whereas at Bagan you are practically kicking them out of the way. Same with hoopoes, I only saw one at Shwesettaw but they are by the bushel-load at Bagan. Loads of ashy woodswallows, Burmese shrikes, Indian rollers, green bee-eaters, etc. Pied harriers were extremely abundant; the males look like flying pandas. I also saw a short-toed snake-eagle on both days (probably the same one twice rather than two separate birds).

The forest on the road between the headquarters and the deer area also had good birds. There are different types of forest here, with the evergreen broadleaf being the best obviously. I only got to stop here during the heat of the day so at each stop there was usually only one or two birds (or none at all) but there were a couple of good bird waves as well. I think walking along here at the start of the day would pay off really well. There were the usual common birds like ashy drongos, red-throated flycatchers, small minivets, white-browed fantails and common ioras, but better birds included golden-fronted leafbird, common woodshrike, purple sunbird, Hainan blue flycatcher and a fantastic rufous treepie. On both days I saw a chicken crossing the road which looked like female red junglefowl but there are also heaps of domestic chickens all over the place as well so maybe not.

I took a motorbike back to Magway on the third morning for 10,000 kyat. I could have taken the bike to the nearby village for 3000 and then got a mini-van for 2500 but there's not much of a difference except in time, so I went with the bike the whole way. The most common sort of motorbike helmet worn in Burma are the ones which look like WW2 German helmets. Going to Magway the driver's helmet had an SS eagle on the front; mine had a swastika on the side. I don't know if wearing helmets is a legal requirement in Burma but they are very common, unlike in Thailand and similar countries. There are certain unofficial rules to wearing the motorbike helmets though: first, you only wear them in the cities or on very busy roads; second, you shouldn't wear them at night because I guess that is just plain uncool; and third, under absolutely no circumstances, unless you are a pansy-waisted tourist, should you ever do up the chin-strap – instead everyone just pops the helmet on top of their head like a cap, which is about as much use as just carrying your vial of smallpox vaccine around in your pocket. The drivers are mostly very competent though, again unlike in Thailand or Indonesia where they are maniacs. The motorbike driver I used frequently in Mandalay explained it to me that if something happens to a tourist on a motorbike or in any similar situation where the tourist in the care of a local, then the local goes to jail. I doubt a Burmese jail is somewhere anybody would want to end up!

I arrived in Magway at 9am, right on time to catch a bus to Bagan which only cost 2500, less than half what the pick-up truck cost going the opposite way from Bagan to Magway. There was a guy doing a live infomercial up the front, peddling his multi-purpose paring tool which could peel cucumbers, slice carrots in a fancy twirly way, remove the eyes from potatoes, and much else. It was a little surreal. The ride took five hours (compared to the pick-up truck's four hours) and was one of those Vomitorium Express buses. Not that the ride was windy or bumpy or anything, it is just that southeast Asians are renowned for getting motion sickness. The buses always have little black plastic bags supplied and as each new person pukes into a bag the lovely smell of fresh vomit will set someone else off. It is a vicious circle. A circle of vomit. I bet you never thought you'd be reading those words here. I tend to spend bus rides wondering if the person next to me is going to throw up over me or my bag. It's happened before.

Back in Bagan I had one late afternoon and one full day before leaving again for my next stop, Mandalay. I just went for a walk the first afternoon rather than hiring a bicycle and saw most of the common birds again, including about eight hoopoes. Walking through longer grass I flushed several rain quail (even though it wasn't raining).

The next morning I took off on a bicycle for Lawkananda Park. I was spending too much time looking up into the roadside trees as I cycled (still looking for Jerdon's minivets) so completely missed the turn and ended up going for twice the distance I needed to before I realised how much time had passed. Going back I found the turn with a little weeny sign for the Lawkananda Pagoda which is next to the park, but I'm not sure I found the park itself. I assume it is the treed area enclosed within a wall but all the gates were locked up tight so I never got in. I did see a coppersmith barbet and a black-naped monarch in the trees above the wall though. During the rest of the day I finally caught up with a flock of yellow-eyed babblers which I thought I wasn't going to find, and also found a grey-backed shrike on a powerline. I never did see Jerdon's minivets unfortunately.

Because I have heard that all the accommodations everywhere are full due to the over-abundance of Europeans, I did what I don't usually do and booked ahead for Mandalay. I am taking the boat upriver from Bagan to Mandalay and I was told it arrives there at about 6pm (around dusk). I figured better to have something organised even though it goes against everything I stand for. Some people who had come to Bagan from Mandalay said they had arrived there without a booking and had to walk around for four or five hours before they could find somewhere with a room. The Winner Guesthouse had a Lonely Planet they let me leaf through to find hotels. This is actually the first time I've even opened a Lonely Planet for Burma. I liked the Winner Guesthouse because the name was eminently suitable for a person such as myself (i.e. a winner), and so of the cheap selections in the guide-book I chose the ET Hotel because sometimes I feel like an alien wandering around amongst strange cultures. I rang them up and they had a room for two nights for US$25 per night, a bit more than I wanted (and several times more than the price in Lonely Planet) but never mind.

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