the Irrawaddy: a river for dolphins

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There are several choices of boats heading up the Irrawaddy River from Bagan to Mandalay but they are all the same price (US$35). Interestingly enough, the boat coming the other way, from Mandalay to Bagan, costs US$40 because more tourists do it in that direction so they can charge more for it! One of the boats is the “slow boat” which takes two days but only does the trip two days a week, and then there are three “fast boats” which take one day. Two of them include breakfast and leave Bagan at 6am, one includes breakfast and lunch and leaves at 5.30am. I took the last one. Breakfast turned out to be a croissant, an egg and a banana: what am I, a field-mouse?! I sort of expected more with the cost of the ticket. Taking the boat to Mandalay is better than the bus because there are lots of birds to see along the river; it just means that you can't use the phrase “road to Mandalay” when describing the trip. The boat is a long narrow affair with wicker seating in the lower deck, and comfy chairs inside on the upper deck. Outside on the upper deck are more wicker chairs and it is here that I stationed myself for the voyage. The first hour was in chilly darkness, but after the sun came up there were swarms of swallows and swifts hawking for insects everywhere over the river's surface. Most of them were barn swallows and red-rumped swallows but also a lot of Asian palm swifts and some grey-throated sand martins. Once a flock of small pratincoles joined in with the swallows and they were the only ones I saw the whole trip upriver. Ruddy shelducks and spot-billed ducks were very common, there was one common shelduck flew past (a vagrant to Burma according to the field guide), and I saw a big flock of pintails too. I'd only seen pintails for the first time in China and they were individuals scattered amongst other waterfowl; I'd never seen a whole flock solely of pintails before and they look fantastic. There were quite a few little cormorants, lots of little egrets, a few great and intermediate egrets, a whole lot of grey herons all in one spot, a couple of flocks of openbill storks, a few gulls that were either black-headed or brown-headed gulls (probably the latter), and twice I saw little groups of what looked like cranes on the sandbanks but too far away to say for certain.

The boat got to Mandalay earlier than I'd been told, at about 4.30pm (eleven hours), and I took a motorbike from the docks to the ET Hotel. In Burma the taxis charge according to the number of people in the car, so two people in a taxi would cost 5000 kyat, for me alone 3000 kyat. One of the pick-up trucks taking a whole group of people would cost 2500 kyat per person. The motorbike cost 2000 kyat, so that was the cheapest option. The ET Hotel turned out to be nicer than I expected, so I would give it as my recommendation to stay there.

The next morning I took a motorbike to the Yadanabon Zoo. This is a fairly new zoo, opened in 1989 after a hasty 41 day construction period (!). The government obviously wanted a zoo here pretty badly: the construction committee was formed on 9 January 1989, construction started on 18 February and finished on 31 March, and the zoo opened to the public just a week later on 8 April. Sadly, while there are a couple of bright spots (a huge waterbird aviary for example), most of the zoo is built in the early twentieth century manner of the Yangon Zoo, which probably isn't too surprising since that was probably the only zoo they had for reference. So the bears and tigers are in little concrete cells, and the monkeys are in similar small cages. The hooved stock gets by alright in yards that aren't too small. The aviaries are alright. There are breeding enclosures for various chelonians (Burmese star tortoises, yellow tortoises, Burmese brown tortoises and Burmese roofed turtles) funded by the Turtle Survival Alliance, British Chelonian Group and Wildlife Conservation Society. The reptiles are housed far better than in many zoos (in Asia and the west). There are of course very few exotics here (two zebras, three hippos, two Arabian camels, two cassowaries, lots of rabbits and guinea pigs, and some black swans and Barbary doves I think about covers it) so most of the animals are native Burmese species. There was one aviary jammed full of ruddy shelducks which were obviously recently caught because they kept flying up and hitting the netting roof; in with them were (presumably similarly recently caught) spot-billed ducks, garganeys, lesser whistling ducks, a mallard, a northern shoveller, a common shelduck, some purple gallinules, black-winged stilts, coots, black-crowned night herons, a couple of glossy ibis, a grey-headed lapwing and a Eurasian curlew. Wild in the zoo grounds were lots of Irrawaddy squirrels and white-throated babblers.

I think most tourists go to Mandalay because of the exotic name alone, but it is no gleaming city of gold and riches, it is just the same old dusty city as anywhere in the rest of southeast Asia. My original reason for coming to Mandalay was simply to visit the zoo (done) but just before leaving for Burma I had been told about a village on the river somewhere near Mandalay called Myay-Zun where the local fishermen have a partnership with the little freshwater Irrawaddy dolphins. The dolphins herd the fish into the nets and the fishermen give them a share of the catch. This wasn't some tourist attraction, it was just how the fishermen did their fishing, so if I could get there it sounded like a sure thing. You know, like seeing Baikal seals...... I had done some hasty google searches and found out that such a place does exist and you can take organised tours upriver to visit the village and see the dolphin-fishing in action, but that was all I could find. I figured that when I got to Bagan and Mandalay I would be able to find out the necessary information to get there. Unfortunately, I found out instead that nobody had even heard of Myay-Zun! They would listen to me say the name, then look at it written down, and then say “oh yes, I know this place, but it is spelt wrong. It is Mingun...” or something like that. It is like if you were in London and wanted to get to Whipsnade, and everyone said “oh yes, you mean Windsor castle!” So after I had been to the zoo I went down to the jetty (the Mingun Jetty as it happens) and with the help of the motorbike driver from the hotel found a boat that could take me to Myay-Zun and back as a day-trip (I was told it is two hours from Mandalay). The only sticking point was the usual one for a solo traveller: the price – as a charter it would cost 200,000 kyat, which is roughly NZ$245. I got the price down to 120,000 (about NZ$150) but decided I would try to find some more tourists to join in and bring the cost-per-person down. The problem there was that most tourists don't want to do “unknown” things, especially if they cost a bit, they just want to do what is safe and in Lonely Planet. Also there is a standard “river cruise” which takes in some sights in the near vicinity of Mandalay which is naturally much cheaper and that's all people want. Nevertheless there should always be some intrepid people around, so in the afternoon I went to tourist hotspot Mandalay Hill where the hordes gather to watch the sunset from the pagoda at the summit. I'm not very comfortable just wandering up to random people and talking to them but that is what I spent a couple of hours doing. I happened to be carrying around a large stick insect on my hand which helped break the ice. The standard stereotypes didn't make it easy though, with the snooty French and the boorish English and the neutral Swiss and the friendly Canadians – wait, that last one isn't a bad one. However the answers were always the same: it is their last day in Mandalay today; they are already booked for or have plans to do tours of temples tomorrow; or the dismissive “we already did the river cruise”. Apart for one enthusiastic Australian couple (who unfortunately had already booked a bus for that evening) nobody even seemed interested – seriously, how can you not be intrigued by wild freshwater dolphins working together with fishermen to catch fish? I ended up walking in circles round the pagoda going “French... German.... English.... Swiss.... Dutch..... Italian.....” because I had asked everybody and knew where everybody there came from! I had even met a Brazilian couple and an Israeli couple. I finally met a small success with two German women who were sort of interested but didn't want to pay a third of the price each and they already had set plans for tomorrow. I agreed we could go the day after that, and I would pay the larger share of the cost (so they would pay 20,000 kyat each because that was their highest price, and I would pay the remaining 80,000, which is roughly NZ$100). You can always count on the Germans to save the day.

On the day of the boat trip we met at the jetty at 6.45am. I had booked a night bus to Kalaw for that evening at 8pm on the strength of the boat man telling me we would be back at Mandalay by 5 or 5.30pm. I figured that so long as there wasn't some sort of boat breakdown then I would be fine. Oh, hey, on a related note, guess what happened?

I had been told that Myay-Zun was two hours upriver but it ended up being three hours because the river was quite low so the boat had to go pretty slow. One guy was frequently up the front with his bamboo measuring pole checking the depth of the channel. It got down to less than two feet deep at one point. To start with there was quite a bit of boat traffic, including a lot of public transports (sort of the boat equivalent of buses for people in villages upriver), and I was thinking it should have been possible to get a much cheaper boat than the one I was on, but then there was a fork in the river and up the fork we took there weren't any more than a few other boats. The skipper had come up to me en route and said he had been on the phone to the fishermen at Myay-Zun and that when we got there we would have to pay them as well to go out in the fishing boats to find the dolphins. I was sort of expecting this but really I hadn't had a clue how the fishing actually took place, whether the dolphins come to the village or if the fishermen go out to the dolphins, and when they are out if they have to search for the dolphins or if the dolphins come to the boats, if it was timed by the tides or the sun or just by the presence or absence of dolphins....it was all a bit of a turn-up-and-see sort of thing. Anyway, we would need two boats – one for us as spectators and one for the fishermen – and they would cost 7000 each (14,000 total). The boats were small narrow ones, pointed ends at front and back (you can probably imagine what they look like), with an outboard motor on the back. We transferred from the big boat to the fishing boats and kept on heading upriver – apparently the technique was to go looking for the dolphins rather than vice versa. There hadn't been a lot of birds seen from the big boat apart for ruddy shelducks (not even any spot-billed ducks which had been common from the Bagan-to-Mandalay boat) but from the little boats I saw a flock of about a hundred small pratincoles roosting on a sand-bar and more scattered elsewhere as we went (probably between two and three hundred altogether), great cormorants (I had only seen little cormorants on the river before that), flocks of openbill storks, and some little ringed plovers.

After almost an hour the engine on our boat died. The guy had a fiddle with it, put another bottle of fuel in, and off we went. Half an hour later the engine died again and this time it wouldn't re-start, despite him practically taking the whole thing apart. I was imagining him muttering under his breath “this happens every time I go out – I don't know why I don't just get it fixed!”. After a while the other boat (which had been travelling along the opposite side of the river) came back downriver to see where we were. I ad-libbed them saying “the dolphins are right over there ….. oh, you've broken down. Never mind then”. That boat positioned itself next to our boat, the fishermen lashed the two together, and we continued on upriver on one motor. After three hours in the fishing boats we turned around and headed back the way we had come. We had probably reached the border with China or something by that time. I had resigned myself to not seeing dolphins, but I felt bad for the ladies who had come on what they had termed “an adventure” and had got no results for their money. I know how wildlife-watching goes with its ups and downs, but I didn't know if they would understand that. It only took one and a half hours to get back to our big boat (going downstream with the current). Our skipper was having a wash in the river and when he heard we hadn't found any dolphins he looked a bit concerned and started pointing downriver while talking to the fishermen. Was he saying “But, like a hundred of them just went past here, not ten minutes ago!”? Then he came over to me and said that the dolphins were down at Mingun, which was on our way back to Mandalay (I think someone had given him a phone call about them). We hadn't seen the fishing part but maybe we would at least see the dolphins, I thought, fingers tightly crossed but brain not convinced. Then, looking a bit embarrassed, the skipper said we would need to pay the fishermen and they wanted 20,000. “Uh, how about no!” I said, “They told you on the phone 7000 per boat, 14,000 total. Plus, the boat broke down!” I believe in being fair. I don't cheat people and I don't want people cheating me. In Asia, once a price is settled on then you don't change the price. You can try to make a new deal with the persons involved but you can't just say the price is different now. It is very bad form. The skipper disappeared onto his boat for a minute then returned and gave the fishermen 5000 kyat of his own money and said now I could pay 14,000. I was not happy about that at all because that was his money and plainly not fair on him, but he insisted and the fishermen weren't budging. I was not at all impressed by the situation. Bad karma for them!

Back on our boat again, we made our way towards Mandalay, every so often stopping completely to scan the river for dolphins. The thing with Irrawaddy dolphins is that they don't do a lot of jumping like dusky or spinner dolphins, they just pop up for air and disappear again, so they are difficult to spot. Two more hours gone and no dolphins seen; we were almost back at Mandalay. That was pretty much it then. The skipper had tried really hard to find us some but to no avail, so it was just a lot of money spent and no dolphins. At least I was still going to be back in time to catch my bus to Kalaw. The ladies said they felt like they didn't need to take the boat the next day to Bagan as intended because they had just spent the entire day on the river.

Then.....the skipper spotted some dolphins! Immediately we all came alive. There were (according to the skipper) seven or eight of them which seemed right, although the most I saw at once was four. They are funny things, with a bulbous beakless head distinctly separate from the body rather than the streamlined form of the oceanic dolphins. When surfacing the head comes up like a black ball, there's a loud gasp of breath (I love the sound of dolphins coming up for air!), then the back curves up with its little pointy dorsal fin, and then it looked like most of the time they turned the tail on its side as they descended because one long fluke would usually come up out of the water like a shark fin. And then they would be gone, just a couple of seconds. They were hunting, mostly in shallow water near the shoreline, and slowly circling the boat as they did so, sometimes quite close but mostly not very. We were probably able to watch them for forty minutes or so, but it turns out that Irrawaddy dolphins are incredibly hard to photograph!! The river is brown, you can't see anything more than half a millimetre below the surface, so there is literally no way of telling where a dolphin is going to come up for air. It is a painful sort of guessing game! When a dolphin did come up, by the time you'd swept your camera to the spot it would be gone again. I got about a hundred photos of nothing but water and about a hundred more that were simply black blobs. I found the two best results for photos (and by “best” I mean “not quite bad enough to delete”) were obtained by getting the camera to where a dolphin had just been, because sometimes a second dolphin would come up right afterwards, and by tracking forwards of where a dolphin had gone under to try and intercept it as it came back up. Neither technique was terribly effective but it was better than waiting for one to surface randomly and trying to get the camera to it in time, and I managed to get a few photos that were all right. It was a totally brilliant experience. I was happy, the ladies were extremely happy. Irrawaddy dolphins have a fairly wide distribution in Asia and there is a well-known spot on the Mekong River in Cambodia where tourists can go see them, but I think the Irrawaddy River itself must surely be the best place to see them for the first time.

And I still got to the bus station in time for my bus.

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