A Month in Myanmar

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OK, we know it’s been a while now and we are very behind with the blog, so in answer to the people who suggested it should be our new year’s resolution to update it more often we have decided, new year, new start (well, almost)!

Here is our Myanmar missive and we will be going back and adding the missing bits (Tibet, Nepal and India) as and when we get the opportunity to do so.

So, to Burma (or the Union of Myanmar to give it its current name) - a place we discussed visiting long and hard. Do our tourist dollars support an illegal and corrupt government? Should we listen to the leader of the opposition party, Aung San Suu Kyi, who is currently under house arrest (illegally, apparently) after winning the last ‘free’ election with an 85% majority, when she asked tourists in ‘96 to ‘visit us later’? Or the British Government website which says it is dangerous and you should not go? Or should we listen to the people we have met who have been there and tell us that the Burmese people themselves are desperate for us to go and need all the help they can get?

Personally, we decided, if we were careful with how and where we spend our money the total amount of dollars the government get from us (and people like us) can be minimized and that although some of our dollars will inevitably have ended up in the hands of what really is an illegal and completely corrupt government who are undoubtedly subjugating (and massacring) their own people, the money received from us is negligible compared with the amount they are receiving from the trade in teak, rubies and pretty much any other natural resource with China, India, and wherever else. It became pretty apparent with a ten minute trawl of the internet that many of the people who staunchly support Aung San Suu Kyi disagree with her on the tourist policy and the level of danger for tourists is pretty low as all the places that you are likely to see trouble are in the areas that tourists are not allowed to go to.

We only add this to go part of the way to explaining why we decided to visit as there are many people out there who strongly believe in the sanctioning and boycotting of Myanmar. We believe we have made an informed and reasonable decision based on the information available to us (we did a lot more research than ten minutes on the internet) and that a visit to Myanmar, if managed properly, can have benefit for both the local people and us.

Anyhoo, disclaimer over….

Arrival in Yangon from Bangkok was relatively painless although the Air Asia flight was
far too early in the morning for our liking! The taxi ride to downtown took us past majestic pagodas covered in gold, small temples, decaying colonial buildings, bustling
street food stalls and tea shops, with the driver ‘kindly’ pointing out places we could go to change money illegally on the black market! After checking into a guesthouse we set off to explore the city, stopping first to sample some Burmese tea (lap-eh-yeh) which is regular tea made with a huge dollop of condensed milk - a taste we soon became addicted to! Before doing anything else we had to get some local currency (kyat), so we visited the central market to find a black market money changer which is where the best deals can be found and after doing a nice illegal deal in full view of everybody in the middle of the market (it’s the Burmese way, apparently) we came away with a three inch high stack of notes (which we also had to count on full view in the middle of the market). Our initial worries about carrying large wodges of cash around soon faded as we realized that guys don’t have wallets in Yangon they have to use shoulder bags instead as the Kyat only comes in small denominations!

We spent our first day just wandering the backstreets, which were full of a real mix of old colonial buildings, churches, mosques, pagodas and plenty of (relatively) newly built concrete places. The pavements on the main roads all around the city are full of makeshift stalls selling everything from DVDs to bakelite light switches, bras with zipped money pockets, Chinese watches, calendars to fresh Durian and samosas and the junctions with the sidestreets are full of small ‘restaurant’ stalls with tiny plastic stools and low tables - you are never far away from a plate of curry and rice in Yangon!

It was fascinating wandering through the crowded streets watching the people, pretty much all the men in Longyi (it didn’t take long for Dan to adopt the Longyi instead of trousers, you’ll be surprised to hear) and the ladies in Thanaka make-up. We soon realised that we were being watched as much as we were watching and wherever possible someone would make eye contact and say hello or ask ‘where are you going?’ (the traditional greeting in Myanmar - nobody really says hello) Stopping for lunch got us the first of many Burmese lessons as the local children stood watching us eat and naming everything on the table.

Over the next couple of days we slowly took in the main sights and tried to absorb the atmosphere and adjust to the relaxed pace of life. Nothing happens particularly fast here which was pretty refreshing post India. We spent a lot of time just sitting at Shwedagon Pagoda, the largest in Yangon and one of the main Buddhist sites in the whole of Myanmar, chatting with monks, watching devotees either praying or sweeping the temple. Temples are not just a place of worship here, people turn up with their lunch or a book or a couple of friends and just hang out. It seems to be more of a place for reflection and contemplation than purely for worship. It is also an absolutely beautiful structure, at almost a hundred metres tall and completely covered in real gold, just incredible at sunset. However, it was mainly covered in scaffold (like just about everywhere else we have been on our journey) but it was a pretty impressive bamboo scaffold structure so we did not mind too much!

From Yangon we moved reluctantly on to Bago. After a small mix up with the buses (wrong info from the hostel, honest!) we found ourselves in the wrong part of town but managed to find a pick-up to take us instead of the bus. The back was full so we had to pay the extra to sit up front and fortunately arrived before the bus we were planning to get! Hooray!

Bago is one busy, dirty main road (they were actually reconstructing it whilst we were there so it’s probably not as bad now) with sidestreets of timber houses that became bamboo the further you got away from the main road. Our late lunch arrival time meant we were very hungry and sought out the best Burmese restaurant in town where we met a couple of local guides who offered to take us around the sights on the back of their motorbikes for the next couple of days. Post India we had some trust issues but thought we would give it a go and it proved to be the best decision we could have made. Kyee Maung and Tun Tun were fantastic guys, they took us everywhere - to all the places we wanted to see and all the places we didn’t know we wanted to see as well. Massive reclining buddhas, ancient teak monasteries, Nat Pwes (local animist festivals, a riot of colour, ladyboys dancing with fish, incredibly loud chaotic music and much money giving and emotion), ‘factories’ making cheroots, longyi, noodles, jaggery and local palm toddy (alcoholic palm juice, very nice!) and views across the coutryside with dozens of glittering gold payas dotted through the verdant green landscape. Although not the most organised chaps (we ran out of petrol more than once!) we had a lot of laughs and learnt a great deal from them about a whole range of Myanmar related subjects and we left Bago far sooner than we wanted to. A few days there just drinking tea and chatting with the guys would have been awesome.

Onwards to one of the iconic monuments of Myanmar - Golden Rock (Kyaiktiyo). A large rock balancing on a precipitous ledge that has had a small paya added to the top which entombs a Buddha hair. It is (as the name suggests) covered completely in gold leaf which is added to daily. It’s a massive pilgrimage site which is probably why it was the first place we found here to be completely ruined by tourism. Dirty, expensive and covered in concrete, the ride up to the rock itself, wedged into the back of a massive truck sitting on wooden plans with less room than cattle and nothing to hold on to was possibly the worst journey of our lives and having to pay a (relatively) extortionate amount for the privilege added insult to (real) injury. The final walk to the top (its incredibly steep) was lined with souvenir stalls before having to pay an entrance fee (to the government - unfortunately no way around this one, there are ways around pretty much all the others though) before walking past yet more souvenir stalls and expensive hotels before reaching the rock itself. It is still quite impressive but it has been almost dwarfed by the amount of tiled concrete pathways that take you around it and the new concrete temples built alongside it. It is impossible to see sunrise or sunset (the best times apparently) if you are not local or are not staying at the 60 dollar a night government owned hotels at the top, so it was the cattle truck back down to the town at the base (Kinpun) for more overpriced tourist fare and an early exit the following day, to say we were disappointed is an understatement.

A four hour pick up ride on a road that had not been maintained since the British left through farmland, rubber and sugar plantations on another wooden bench seat soon had us forgetting the Kyaiktiyo experience. It was with relieved bottoms (backs and just about everything else) that we arrived in Hpa’an. A small town out towards the Thai border, most of the sights lay a little out of town so, after hiring bicycles, we took on the pot-holed and bumpy roads passing endless rice paddy in the shadow of massive rocky outcrops in search of Buddhist caves and fairytale style monasteries. We found them as well as more happy smiling faces than we had seen in some time. Cycling through small villages we were followed by groups of children, stopping for tea meant conversation with retired teachers and pretty much anyone who spoke English stopped us to welcome us to their country and give us directions (whether we needed them of not!) or to ask where we were going and explain what we were doing. The sights themselves were pretty amazing too and the cycle back through the rice paddy at sunset was just beautiful.

Motorised transport, with marginally more comfy seats took us out to some further flung villages the following day along with more monasteries and our local tuk-tuk driver/guide explained a lot of the local history and more about the relationship between Buddhism and Nat (spirit) worship. As well as an impromptu visit to some rubber plantation so that Dan could play with the raw rubber, we managed to see a Buddha Park where hundreds of identical 8’ buddhas are set out in a grid over a massive area and very overgrown with vegetation - quite spooky. We only missed one Buddhist cave which was locked, why? Because the local adolescents use it for secret trysts allegedly, so the monks have to lock it!

Our main reason to go to Hpa’an, however, was the boat trip down the Salween river to Moulmein. A pre-dawn departure time for the boat saw us waking up the ferry crew to cross the gangplank (it was quite literally just one plank) in the dark. Seated on the wooden deck of the ancient rusting hulk of a craft we set sail and watched the sunrise over the river and the boat fill up with locals from various small bamboo villages on the way with goods for market. The six hours just flew by and we did not want the journey to end, just beautiful.

Moulmein itself is a small almost seaside like market town where George Orwell was stationed as a policeman for a few years. This was another gem of a place where we had just too little time. There is a big market, a museum, plenty of Paya, as well as many Christian churches (we met a guy there who was researching the lives (and deaths) of some of the British colonialists using the local church registers, sounds dull but actually made pretty interesting reading, very Burmese Days). A great place just to hang around and meet the ever friendly, warm and open locals.

Christmas was, however, just around the corner so we hot footed (well, 10 hours on an overnight bus, with some interesting police checkpoint stops) back to Yangon for some reliable internet access, Christmas dinner and an Iron Cross gig. Iron Cross are the biggest band in Myanmar and as well as producing some fairly nondescript south east asian pop also do cover versions of all the best rock music the west has produced in the last 30 years but translated into Burmese and with anything political taken out. Three and a half hours of everything from the Chilli Peppers, to AC/DC, to Metallica with a dash of Coldplay for good measure all sounding just like the real thing but in a different language - a most memorable Christmas Eve! Unfortunately, we found neither the internet access or a Christmas dinner, and although it was nice to be back in Yangon with a tea shop on every corner, it was a disappointing Christmas so we took the 12 hour bus journey to Inle Lake early.
As is usual for busses in this part of the world there was plenty of loud karaoke dvds played for most of the journey so sleep was not really an option, we did however get a Burmese versions of Sonia’s 90s hit ‘you’ll never stop me from loving you’, which was nice. We also met the head of the Burmese Gospel church who was on his way to a football match and Dan spent an entertaining few hours educating him on football teams that are not the big four. (Apparently West Ham coming from East London is very funny to the people of Burma)

They love the English Premier League here, really, obsessively, even more so than in England, nobody misses a game. Every café, restaurant and bar has the latest results written up on the walls, there are several different weekly magazines devoted to English football which are sold on every street corner. People bring their televisions onto the street in Yangon and all the neighbours bring their own chairs and watch the game together. Most are Man U fans, then Liverpool, then Arsenal, then Chelsea, apparently people don’t support Arsenal because they are unpredictable and people lose too much money gambling on them. We met some monks who spoke no English at all but pulled out a football magazine and they could name every single player and manager featured in each and every picture! Enough of football (says Claire!) this is a travel blog after all.

We were deposited at a dusty junction where we jumped in a pick-up to take us the short distance to Nyuangshwe, a small town just north of Inle Lake, which ‘kindly’ stopped at the Tourist Check Point so we could buy an entrance ticket. We found a place to stay right next to the canal which was bustling with long boats full of people and their produce for the local market. There were huge bamboo baskets full of tomatoes, stacks of rice crackers the size of dinner plates, lots of different vegetables and an incredible range of dried fish. After a tasty bowl of mohinga (a fishy noodle soup that is the staple Myanmar breakfast) we took a wander around town and visited the pagoda where we met a lovely old local man who spoke perfect English and it turns out that in the 50s he was sent by the Burmese military to Weston-Super-Mare for a course on radar! (thought you’d be interested in that one, Mick!)

The following day we rose early to get a boat to the lake where we passed lots of fishermen net fishing and leg rowing. A curious oar technique that leaves the hands free for using the nets. It’s impossible to describe so just ask for a demo when we get back and we’ll attempt to show you without falling over.

This unfortunately turned out to be ‘ruined by tourism spot number two’ with the boat driver stopping at various ‘local factories’ where you could buy goods at vastly inflated prices and groups of Karen tribe long Necked ladies ‘authentically’ weaving in shops full of tourist tat t-shirts and baseball caps. The scenery, however, was beautiful. Houses on stilts over the water, floating gardens full of crops, dozens of long boats ferrying people backwards and forwards to market…..

Our final stop was the so-called ‘jumping cat monastery’, which (you guessed it) had some jumping cats! Apparently the monks there were a bit bored (as if learning Pali, Sanskrit, meditation, scripture and collecting alms was not enough distraction) so they trained cats to jump through hoops (obviously) and it has now become a tourist attraction. To be fair, it was pretty funny (even Dan liked it), but there were also some absolutely beautiful ancient Buddha statues that the majority of other tourists ignored as they were too busy staring at cats! We saw the sun set beyond the Shan hills over the water as we chugged back to Nyuangshwe. Our final day at Inle was spent cycling atrocious roads through fields of sugar cane, watching locals in coolie hats tend their crops and passing ox and carts along the dusty roads, with plenty of phrase book based conversations with locals on the way. The day was rounded off with a few beers and a tasty meal with some other travellers we met along the way, great company.

Continuing north we traveled to Kalaw in a severely overloaded pickup. Kalaw is a former British hill station now home to many retired Gurkhas, with a distinctly British feel (a lot of the houses were unmistakably English country cottage). After the Christmas disaster we decided to give a traditional New Years Eve party a miss and run for the hills, which is exactly what we did. Kalaw is a popular base for trekking in the Shan Hills and so trekking is what we did. After an unexpectedly freezing cold night in a draughty guesthouse we hastily visited the local market and picked up some cheap fleeces and woolly hats before departing on our 3 day trek into the countryside.

We very soon left the modern life behind as our young guide John took us through rice paddies and across rolling hills where the main mode of transport was the water buffalo pulling ploughs through the fields, people working the land and not an engine to be seen or heard for miles. We stayed with a family in a tiny village of bamboo huts that night and ate delicious local red rice before toasting the new year with a bottle of Mandalay Rum. I say the New Year, but it was nowhere near midnight as we were too tired to stay awake after a long day of walking!!

We were woken at dawn by noisy cockerels and after breakfast with the family set off into the countryside. Rolling hills, villages where every house is owned by a blood relative of the other houses in the village and a complete lack of anything we take for granted, electricity, plumbing, roads, pollution. I know, it sounds like North Wales but it was really something else. We stayed with a friend of our guide who studies chemistry of all things, his wife was away at market, he did not know how long she would be gone because if she missed the cart home it could be 2 or 3 days before the next one! ‘Just off to the shops darling, see you next week!’ A way of life we still can’t really get to grips with. Not’ working to live’ or ‘living to work’, just work as living and living as work. Hmmmm….

Hard paced trekking on the way back to town left us there early enough for a shower, a bite to eat and a last sunset over the hills before the night bus to Mandalay. We lucked out on this one and got Burmese variety shows instead of Karaoke. Very loud, not funny.

Mandalay, possibly the most relaxed place we have been to so far, nothing happens at any kind of pace, traffic, service, the Ayeyarwady river, time, nothing. Everyone just wants to sit around, drink tea and chat all day. Wonderful! We met many rickshaw drivers who did not want to take us anywhere other than to a café to practice their English.

A trip out to Mingun, one of the ancient capitals near Mandalay to see possibly the largest square pile of bricks in the world, was pretty cool. Along with the nearby ‘Viennetta’ Paya (that’s our name for it, not the official one) it was a great trip and well worth doing. Followed by an afternoon backstreet wander through the bamboo hut suburbs that surround central Mandalay where we ended up giving more impromptu English lessons to monks, rickshaw drivers and many others and drinking endless cups of tea.

Cycling casually around the sights for the next couple of days took us through many back doors and to some amazing temples and monasteries and some first hand experience of people carving new marble buddhas and creating Chintha guardians at newly reconstructed temples. There are so many new temples, reclining buddhas, stupas, payas and shrines being erected just about everywhere all over the country. Quite amazing considering everyone appears to be pretty poor, it seems that what little they do have goes to the monasteries and alms for monks. Many of which seem to be able to smoke, eat meat and have mobile phones (that’s the monks not the monasteries). A subject we could discuss at length but won’t here!

We had heard that you either love of hate Mandalay, we can see no reason at all why you would hate it. Just to sit and be and meet locals and travellers alike, a good base for getting out to see other places and some beautiful sights means it was another place we could have spent a lot more time than we did.

Another boat journey next. The fifteen hour ‘slow boat’ from Mandalay to Bagan. Watching the beautiful scenery drift gently past with no karaoke, no hard bench seats, no dust - perfect. Perfect that is apart from sand bars, two sand bars to be precise that we beached on and as the boat had no radio, all communication with the shore and boats to help get us off the sandbars meant that negotiations took rather a long time! Time passed and passed some more and we ended up doing most of the journey over night until it was unsafe (there were no lights on the boat either so the driver could not see once the moon was gone) and a very cold ‘sleep’ on the deck for a couple of hours saw us arrive fifteen hours late, having seen no scenery at all other than the bay just outside Mandalay!

Bagan itself, built at the same time as Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Champasak in Laos, is a complex of originally over 10,000 small temples which over time has whittled down to a mere 4,000 spread over an area 42 square kilometers. We managed to fit in visits to around 20 of the main ones. Amazing frescoes, massively impressive architecture for its time, combined with its setting on the river makes an amazing end to a trip to Myanmar. The sunsets were incredible, the buildings amazing and the whole place just quite magical.

We were lucky enough to coincide our visit with the January full moon festival at one of the main temples, Ananda Pahto. January is the most important full moon festival at this site, 1500 monks arrive from the surrounding area to receive the alms that the thousands of pilgrims had arrived to donate.

Almsgiving being a distinctly sunrise event, an early start (again) got us to the temple in time to see rows and rows of saffron-robed monks and novices queuing to each receive an alms bowl from a 40ft long 8ft wide table heaving with alms bowls full of food, money, robes, exercise books, soap, washing powder, and anything else a monk might need. There was a real fervor around the whole event, obviously a deeply religious thing, which was only slightly marred by half a dozen particularly insensitive tourists shoving their oversized cameras in everybody’s face. Why do you need to get that close if you have a massive great lens? Huh? Grrr….

One last day in Yangon to prepare for our exit and visit Shwedagon (again, it’s just an incredible place)before our flight back to Bangkok.

We don’t really know how to sum up Myanmar, obviously we have left massive amounts out of this blog (e.g. the Moustache Brothers, don’t bother, not funny and now very rich men indeed, your 8 dollars will help other people a lot more) including all the politics and other government related stories we experienced and picked up along the way. We are happy to respond to those questions privately.

There is some really serious stuff going on there and a visit is not to be taken lightly or without good knowledge of the history and current situation. However, we would, and have been asked to by everybody we met there, recommend you visit, sensitively and independently (no package tours) and experience this amazing place to make up your own mind.

We will definitely be back, to visit the friends we have made there and see other parts of the country that we just did not have time to see.

Perhaps if enough of us go and talk to our governments on our return then perhaps we can help the people with more than just a few tourist dollars.

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Photos

Shwedagon
Its all gold and scaffold

If you see these men...
...hire them immediately. Tun Tun on the left and Kyee Maung on the right.

Cigar rolling
A bit like cheroot rolling except a bit bigger

Golden Rock
It's Golden, its a rock its..... tourist central

Buddha Park
or should it be Buddha Farm

Om... om....
erm... whats the next line?

Hpa'an countryside
Pretty huh?

Sunrise at Moulmein
Think it was worth the early start?

Inle boatman
No leg rowing here, I'll have to show you later.

Inle Stilt Houses
The future of Thames Valley housing?

Kalaw trekking
A trip through the rice paddy

Chinthe Construction
Now how did we make the one behind......

(Incredibly) Slow boat to Bagan
It would be packed to the gunwals, if it had them!

Monks at Ananda
nobody know what to do when the conga music finished

Ananda Donations
Party bags for all the monks attending the festival

Sunset over Bagan
Temple upon temple upon temple......