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Published: December 2nd 2005
The She Monks
Alms collecting in AmarapuraUpon finally reaching the big city, I somehow feel tricked; for instead of springing into the modernity that metropolises often bring, it seems that I stepped back into a bygone decade. Bus videos censor through the “love scenes,” music videos depict a would-be suitor trying desperately to wrest his young love from her parents’ ever-watchful eye for an innocent handhold, the after-dusk city streets are empty save for the occasional ice cream parlor patrons making their way home. The movie theater is showcasing an American film featuring Angelina Jolie, who might find the plump, size 12 representation of herself on the hand-painted poster marquee somewhat less than flattering - but for the Burmese ideal of an attractive woman, she probably looked like heaven. Ladies of even the most modest means, in their ubiquitous ankle-length skirts and dressy blouses, contain an elegance and femininity that seems to be lost in the West these days with the arrival of unisex jeans and T-shirts. While a bicycle sails gracefully by - the passenger riding sidesaddle in the rear providing parasol shade to her pedaling companion, I am overcome by those warm feelings of innocence that 1950s movies always stir up in me.
The
streets are chaotic; without streetlights and stop signs, the traffic nevertheless seems to flow along smoothly. Pedestrians, sica bike trishaws, motorbikes, pickup taxis, and the occasional sedan compete for space on the broken roads, where driving on a particular side of the street takes secondary importance to driving around the largest potholes. But the largest migration of city dwellers during our rush hour arrival was the army of cyclists pedaling en masse with their now-empty round silver lunch tins perched on the racks of their rickety antique bicycles around the giant moat in the center of town. The moat surrounding the brick walls of the Royal Palace measures 14 city blocks by 14 city blocks…quite impressive in size, though not nearly as spectacular when one considers that forced labor was used to build it.
At Mandalay Hill, the dragon sentinels of the entrance gates measure about 10 meters high, acting as watchguards to the even larger scale Buddhas inside. After scaling the 700 odd stairs to watch the sun set over the city, we were met instead with disappointment. The view from the top is marred by a giant modern hotel, looking slightly out of place but doing its
Sunrise over Mandalay
Hard to see in the small pictures, but it created a beautiful smoky red haze that silhouetted the stupas on the skyline best to make a statement, sitting smack in the middle of the panorama. Near the temple grounds, whole families scurry in and out of their makeshift shelters under ruined temple roofs, partitioned off into individual family units with sheets. Bathing on the sidewalk with buckets of water from the moat, their faces nonetheless bear smiles and call out cheerful greetings to the two foreign faces rolling by on bicycle trishaw.
The only other major outing I succeeded in before succumbing to the drowsiness of Decolgen Forte cold medicine was an excursion to the ancient city of Amarapura on the outskirts of Mandalay. Through the southern part of town we strolled past all sorts of artisan workshops, with stone Buddhas and wooden temple decorations being worked into form by nimble hands. From their birth as sheer slabs of stone to the mature sophistication of minutely carved details on a nearly completed masterpiece, every stage of these works’ lives were on display to passersby.
Though the price of gasoline had recently skyrocketed, the linecar driver paused and idled at the end of every second city block for a few minutes, hoping to squeeze in one more passenger on the already
Temples, temples, temples
Stretching all the way to the mountains in the distance, Bagan archaeological area is truly enormous sweaty and crowded benches for an additional measly 17 cents (200 kyat). We had to marvel at this economic inconsistency to prevent ourselves from going crazy while the man on the back of the linecar shouted out to pedestrians on the sidewalk, his teeth stained red from chewing the betel nut concoction so popular around these parts. Upon reaching Amarapura, the village atmosphere was decidedly more relaxed. Beneath the twisted limbs of giant trees, men drew water from wells for a bath, chickens pecked the hard-packed earth, and women carried children with thanakha-painted faces towards the temple. Pink-robed women monks carrying flat paper parasols overhead giggled when they spotted our cameras aimed at their procession while they lined up to go alms collecting. The steady chink-chink-chink-chink of the weaving machines provided a continual background music of sorts for the town, as workers hung out seas of bleached cotton to dry in the sun. On one side of the crooked road, stupas rose up to tickle the treetops; on the other side lay the lake, where fishermen and -women stood waist deep in the water with one pole going in each hand. Parallel to the horizon, the rather ramshackle wooden U
Drying in the sun
Cotton weaving industry in Amarapura Bein bridge stretched two kilometers to some distant golden temples and was a busy thoroughfare for monks, marketgoers, and playing children. While the bridge was a necessity to cross the expanses of water at this time of year, the land dries out in the dry season, and farmers and herds of cattle take the place of fishermen and small boats.
The strange thing about Mandalay is that so many travelers seem to go through here, and yet you rarely see any outside of the hotel breakfast room. Although 3 guesthouses in the guidebooks we looked at were along the same block, it was anything but a travelers’ ghetto there. And the locals all seemed somewhat interested when they saw you, which usually seems to be less the case in cities that are major transport hubs for a country. The city is gritty yet orderly, quiet at night but chaotic by day, full of locals with lots of time on their hands wanting to practice their English with you, home to upscale restaurants and also to homeless (or maybe forcibly displaced?) persons trying to get a leg up in the big city. I think it had potential to grow on
me if I had been able to wander around and get lost in some neighborhoods to explore, but unfortunately illness kept me confined mostly to my bed.
Fortunately, the river boat down the Ayeyerwaddy River to Bagan was nearly as comfortable as my bed (wherever you have the option to travel by boat or bus in Myanmar, the boat option is definitely the way to go!) and provided a mini-sightseeing tour as we watched the golden globe awake from its slumber and paint the outlying Mandalay skyline and temples in a smoky red haze. Soon after we passed another ancient city, Sagaing, whose hillsides sprouted temples like mushrooms after a rain - all different sizes, colors, and styles placed seemingly at random on the other bank of the river. From there on out, the scenery became less impressive, which was just as well since the weather seemed to be conspiring against us, as clouds and drizzle reclaimed the sky and didn’t seem to leave again for the next week.
Tourists are all required to ride on the specially designated ‘tourist boat,’ or to pay the same amount for passage on the much more rustic local boats, for which
Wading fisherwoman
They don't mess around, efficiency means two poles going at a time! the $16 fee would be extremely excessive. This was the first place I had the strange feeling of being part of a herd corralled into specially designated, government-approved channels, particularly since the only Burmese citizens on the boat were the staff and the outer bathroom doors displayed a sign stating, “Foreigners Only.” A few hours into the journey, the boat pulled up to one of the riverbanks for a short stop. Food and craft vendors stormed the boat windows, while half the passengers emptied out of the cabin to storm the decks for a photo opp of “the locals.” Perhaps this should have been a portent of the tour group mentality in Bagan and the looming change of relations with the villagers.
In quite a sudden contrast with Mandalay, almost everyone in Nyaung U survives off of tourism, and, with Bagan being the premier tourist destination in Burma, every traveler seems to stop there. Huge tour buses drive around letting off groups to roam for a few hours among the ruins, and many of these very short stay tourists do actually hand out money or sweets to anyone they see and are keen to buy any souvenir shoved in
their faces. It seems to have the effect of making all the locals there think that foreigners are just walking money dispensers. Of course, no one can deny that many of the Burmese have suffered atrocities at the hands of their government and that most people are quite poor, but residents there seemed to be considerably better off than the citydwellers living on the side of the streets in Mandalay, where I actually only encountered one beggar. In Nyaung U, schoolchildren and working adults alike would become “selective beggars” as they would stop whatever it is they were doing or saying when a foreign face passed to stretch out their hands and simply say, “Money.” Jason relayed that one morning while he biked to see the sunrise, he was accosted 7 times by people who were on their way to work or school or whatever…and it was 5:30 in the morning! These were not people who were out sitting on the streets to beg, but rather people going about their daily business who seemed to see every tourist as an object from which they should demand money and therefore would stop whatever it is they were doing at the time
when one came close to collect their rightful payments. It is really quite disturbing, because one can easily see how the closed system they live in combined with mass tourism flooding their town has combined to create this surreal set of international relations.
It will not likely change, however, until the military junta falls and the economy opens up, because Bagan is surely not going to drop off the tourist destination map. Upon arrival at the boat docks, we opted for the less expensive transport option of a horse-drawn buggy to the center of Nyaung U, where most budget accommodations are located. Once again, the time warp feeling returned, riding along with the only transportation sounds being the clip-clop of horse hooves and the occasional splash of a bicyclist cutting through a rain puddle. The late afternoon sunlight emerged for the half-hour ride through the ancient wonderland park. Sandy paths branched off on both sides of the road to clusters of reddish-brown brick stupas and temples saturating the fields as far as the eye could see in every direction.
Exploring the area took a bit of patience, as the rains seemed to be getting in a good last
Good morning Sagaing
Just one of the many temple-studded hills of the ancient city of Sagaing showing before calling it quits for the season, and I never did get to experience one of those glorious sunsets over the otherwordly panorama of the Bagan temples. Each temple offered a slightly different view and varying architecture or Buddha sculptures inside, with the most elaborate temples, such as the Ananda temple, showcasing ceiling to floor golden Buddhas facing each cardinal direction. A rare insight into the ancient cultures, including pre-Buddhist religious tributes to the red and black ‘nan’ spirits, could be found in the mural paintings on the Ananda monastery grounds. Another interesting painting showed a pair of star-crossed lovers that shared a similar storyline as Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.
Most tourists seemed to congregate at the highest temple for sunrise and sunset, and it looked quite crowded and uninspiring from a distance, lined with an uneven row of black camera lenses pressed to the spectators’ eyes. The good news was that any little path one chose to explore generally led to at least one temple containing a stairway to climb up the stupa, so the choices for alternate views were endless. In the end, it was the quiet moments spent alone on top of these obscure and
Section of the U Bein bridge
With the traditional rowboats and a fisherman in the foreground isolated stupas that etched themselves into your mind, with eight hundred years of history to keep you company when the sheer incredulousness of the hundreds of temples stretching from the river to the mountains in the distance started to become dizzying. Bagan’s vastness caused you to feel tiny, yet climbing atop one of its towers, you felt like you owned the world; you were firmly planted in the awesome present of the moment, yet the feeling of being part of something larger than your life span was inevitable as you stared the past in the face. Seeing is believing, and though my shoddy pictures will never do it the slightest justice, Bagan truly is, in a word, inspirational.
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Cumberland Sausage
Kim Buckley and Richard Baxter
Some more great photos ...
... particularly sunrise over mandalay. All the more impressive if done with an S1 IS if I read you correctly.