1984

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Some of the details of some of the local characters in this blog and the next two blogs may or may not have been changed to protect their identity.

As you'd know, I'm back in Melbourne now, finished travelling. I couldn't keep up my blog because my computer broke down in Myanmar, and then after I got it fixed it broke again in Lombok. Most of this was written during those few days where it was working. I'm going to try to write another three or four but I'm not sure I can remember what actually happened during that time! Most of this blog was written a month ago, but refers to the period January 25 - 31.

So we arrived in Myanmar. If you’re very old or not very knowledgeable you might still know this country as “Burma”. The government changed the name because the word “Burma” comes from “Barma”, the name of the ethnic majority, and to throw off the remaining legacies of colonialism. Some people try to argue that “Burma” is the English name for Myanmar, much as we refer to “Germany” by its English name rather than “Deutschland”, but English-speaking Myanmar people refer to the country as “Myanmar” so I think we should get used to it. The US government doesn’t recognise the new name because it doesn’t recognise the government.

Anyway, getting through customs was disappointingly easy, I was kind of expecting them to search our bags for pro-democracy material or something, but they don't seem to mind what foreigners do, they're just strict on their own citizens. Of course Myanmar is known for its military junta government, and it's a kind of moral dilemma about whether or not one should travel there. I hadn't had any plans to do so but when Adam suggested it, it fitted in well with my itinerary so it seemed like a fine idea. I didn't have any particular feelings about the military junta; and besides no-one suggests that one shouldn't visit China or most other countries with unelected governments. If you're planning to go there you have to make up your own mind, but it is indeed true that it's impossible, even (or particularly?) as a backpacker, to avoid a fair percentage of your expenditure ending up in the coffers of the government. But unless you're a very sensitive person, the pleasure of visiting Myanmar will compensate you for any nagging guilt you might have about giving a few dollars to a government which reportedly persecutes minority groups in areas you won't get to go anywhere near.

I was supposed to be there for two weeks, but I ended up changing my flights to give me an extra few days. During that time I basically did the tourist circuit … Yangon up to Kyaiktiyo, back via Bago, up to Inley Lake and on to Mandalay, then back down via Bagan. Because I didn't have enough time for the more remote places I then did a short trip east, to Mawlamyaine and Hpa-an. This blog is about the first week, there should be one or two other blogs after this one, although as I write this my computer is just limping along so it may not be possible.

The first challenge was to change our money. Apparently it's illegal for normal Myanmar people to hold foreign currency. Hotels have a license, so they all want to be paid in US dollars, and also the prices for foreigners using government services (including entry fees for many temples) are definitely in US dollars, but for food and most other small things one needs Kyat, the local currency (pronounced, more or less, as “Chat” - I don't know who decided that the Myanmar hard “Ch” sound would be rendered in the Latin alphabet as “Ky”!) There are shady characters hanging around the street who will do this, but we had information about a reliable place, which turned out to be a fancy hotel. We were ushered into a very nice back room which according to the signs gave tourist information, did flight bookings and suchlike. There was no sign about money changing. We both changed $200, I think, and in turn were given just over two hundred 1000-kyat notes. Apparently that's the biggest notes available, although I did hear that there's a five thousand kyat note. So that was the black market. A bit disappointing, it wasn't as dingy as I thought it would be.

The big problem with money of course, which I'll talk about in the third Myanmar blog, unless I forget, is that because of the US trade embargoes, there's no ATMs in Myanmar. Apparently there's one or two but they don't connect to any foreign interchanges. Apparently there's one or two really expensive hotels in Yangon or Mandalay that can do a dodgy credit card cash advance by connecting through Singapore somehow, but they charge up to 30% commission.

Some people seem to think that Myanmar will be like a war zone or something, but certainly the parts of the country where tourists are allowed to go are nothing like that. The rural people are poor of course as in most parts of the world, but they seem well enough. I guess everyone's going to want to tell me about the Karen or Mon, but I'm just telling what I saw, and I didn't get to meet any of them. The only ethnic minority people I met were Shan and they seemed happy enough!

It is obvious though that while the ordinary people are excited to meet foreigners, they're wary of their government. Apparently it’s illegal for locals to talk about politics with foreigners, but they all seem very keen to do so. We arrange to meet up with a local, through one of the travel websites, who volunteered to show us around. We walked around the downtown area, and got a bus out to Shwedagon pagoda, a massive pagoda which seems to be symbolic of Yangon (which again if you’re old you might know as “Rangoon”). The compound apparently has 83 buildings in total, almost all of which are golden coloured or sparkling with semi-precious stones and mirrors. It’s a very peaceful and impressive place. The only thing that looks kitsch is the practice of putting plastic “halos” with flashing LEDs behind the heads of many of the Buddhas. These do a little bit make it look like the Buddha is part of a casino. They seem to do this all over Myanmar, but it’s not all that annoying.

The pagoda was a good place to see a wide cross-section of the Yangon population. Entry to the pagoda is free for locals but of course they charge foreigners ($US 10, from memory). The local man who showed us around was very friendly and helpful. At one point after walking around for hours we sat down in one of the empty spots in a pagoda, where there was a small table. He spent about half an hour explaining to us the downtown Yangon street grid, as if Yangon was the only place with traffic lights or one-way streets. Apparently a local talking to two foreigners is cause for alarm. After some time, he said something like “I better watch what I say” and nodded behind me. A few metres away, two well-dressed solid men about 40-ish were sitting, a couple of metres apart; in an almost empty space they were too far apart to be friends and too close to be strangers. In a country where almost no-one has a mobile phone, they were both fiddling around on what looked, at a brief glance, like iPhones. They were the gentlemen for whom the Australian expression “sticks out like dogs’ balls” was invented.

It was strange since we hadn’t been talking about anything political or whatever, but I guess they were just checking. We moved on, walking through the complex, in general working our way around the gilded central paya. According to Lonely Planet, this is rumoured to be covered in a total of more than 53 tonnes of gold, after so many different kings and queens tried to show off by adding gold to it. The top apparently also is encrusted in diamonds and precious stones. Inside, there are supposedly Buddhist relics.

One of the cool things about Myanmar is the way people dress. About half the men still wear the lungi. Many people use the sap of a the local thanaka tree as a moisturizer and sunscreen. While the men and some of the women just smear it on their face and sometimes forearms, many of the women use it as makeup, with white circles or sometimes even patterns on their cheeks. Yangon isn't too large, so it has a fairly nice vibe. There's obviously people from many ethnic minorities, as well as of course the Chinese and the odd Indian. In Yangon there's a number of churches, most apparently built during the colonial period, and some big mosques. We even visited a synagogue, although the information there seemed to suggest that there weren't many Jews left in Yangon, and its main purpose now seemed to be to sell over-priced Hanuka cards to tourists. There's plenty of street vendors in the evening for all sorts of street food, a rather seedy nightclub area, and of course lots of Buddhist temples, and no backpacker ghetto at all. During the day, the wharf area bustles with ferries heading to or from the delta.

After meeting our over-helpful new friend who showed us around the pagoda and explained one-way streets to us, we met up with another local who wouldn't shut up about the government. I better not write too much about him just in case but I got the impression that he was mainly still annoyed at losing his job back in 1988 thanks to the regime. Looking around furtively he wrote Aung San Suu Kyi's name on a bit of paper and asked if we recognised it. Of course we did. He then told us he knew her well. He seemed of the impression that the elections would indeed happen this year. Everyone who mentioned them later also seems to believe this, I don't know why, but he seemed less confident that it would be any different than 1989 (when the government simply ignored the results). He also didn't seem to believe it would be free and fair. I asked him why the city seemed to be running OK if the government was so bad and he said that Myanmar people are peaceful and content with anything. A common theme I kept finding was that because the government makes it so hard to travel internationally (and in any case most people are too poor), and they have little connection with the outside world, they have this rosy picture of other countries and seem to think that Myanmar is a real basket case compared to other countries, which isn't really true.

The next day we were walking around the city, admiring the old colonial buildings which give Yangon much of its nice feel but do seem to be in a bit of a state of disrepair (it struck me that perhaps Yangon looks quite nice today because it might have looked really nice in the 1980s and hasn't really changed much), when a monk approached us and began chatting. He told us he was learning English at a school and asked if we wanted to come back with him and chat to the students. In India this is usually a scam so I was reluctant at first, but of course Myanmar is still getting the hang of scamming tourists so we agreed and had the most enjoyable time chatting to a heap of young people mainly in their mid twenties through to their mid thirties, including a number of monks. Including the long bus ride there and back, this took us all morning and early afternoon, and later the same monk who seemed to now be our new best friend took us out to the large reclining Buddha. Strangely, he seemed to know less than me about the significance of the Buddha images, and the conversations went something like this;
“So what does it signify when the Buddha holds his fingers that way? Is that the 'circle of life' thing? I thought it was slightly different?”
“Umm, I don't know”
“Oh ok, But this huge statue that you took us to, the reclining position indicates him reaching enlightenment, doesn't it?”
“I don't know I think it's just him having a rest”

The next day we took the bus up to Kyaiktiyo to the famous Golden Rock, where there's a boulder balanced on top of another rock. If you haven't seen two rocks on top of each other before you might find this impressive. In fact, even Lonely Planet buys into the hype, descrbing it as “gravity-defying”, “one of the most enigmatic and intriguing sights among many in Myanmar”, and “a miracle”. Perhaps if they actually went there they'd see it's really just a rock. But the site, on top of a mountain, is a good place to see some of the landscape and also people-watch. We arrived at the 'base camp' after something like five hours' bus ride and raced straight to the pick-up trucks to take us further up the mountain. They were, we thought, incredibly full, so we squeezed up but unfortunately they ended up waiting another half an hour until they were completely full. The back of the trucks were filled with tiny benches obviously designed for Asians as there was no way most of us could fit in - the distance between the seats was physically less than my upper leg, and there were a fair few western tourists. People were jabbing each other with knees and elbows all over the place. I ended up with one knee pushing hard into the side of the truck which meant that for a few hours after the bus ride my knee hurt like hell. After about half an hour on a windy road on the back of this truck we got to the bottom of the mountain and had another hour or so walk to the top. Rich locals were paying guys to carry them up in sedans, four locals usually well-matched for height marching quickly in lock-step up the hill. At the top was the rock, and various temples, monuments and look-outs. All sorts of Myanmar were there, presumably from some distance away, as well as locals from a small village there on the mountain-top, praying, playing hacky-sack, admiring the view, chatting, or generally hanging out like Southeast Asians everywhere.

Anyway, the rock remained in place, so that was boring, so the next day we headed back early in the morning for the small town of Bago, back in the direction we'd come, not too far from Yangon. This is a large, ancient, site (known to archaeologists as “Pegu”) with enough temples, pagodas, and whatnot to keep you busy for a while. The main attraction is probably Shwemawdaw pagoda, which towers over the town, symmetrical and golden, pointing heavenward. At the bus station we found a couple of locals who offered us a tour of the city for $10. It took me a while to get my head around this since I knew that entry to Shwemawdaw was supposed to be $10 by itself, but it turned out that the guy had friends at the gate and could get us in for free. So we got driven around for about four or five hours visiting the pagoda and other smaller temples and pagodas, There's also the Shwethalyaung reclining Buddha, which despite being a bit cracked looks pretty impressive because unlike the one at Yangon or many other places is all outdoors so it looks impressive, like an effeminate, gold-coloured, mountain with perfect toe-prints. Half-way through I got a delicious lunch of local Myanmar food for about the equivalent of $AUS 2, including a soft drink.

While waiting back at the bus station with a few other travellers I got into a conversation with a Myanmar Buddhist fundamentalist who insisted that the reason for cyclone Nargis in 2008 was the bad karma generated by all the fishermen and meat-eaters in the area. He told me that he didn't believe the 2012 prophesies because the Buddha's prophesies had said that the world would go on for another 5000 years after his death, although when pressed where I could verify that claim, he had to admit he didn't know.

From there we took the bus overnight, stopping a few times for food and toilet breaks, in small crowded eateries serving typical Myanmar food. The last break was about 04:00 and it was freezing cold, a shock for tourists who had thought all of SE Asia was always warm (northern Myanmar actually is north of the tropic of cancer), although there were only a couple of other foreigners on the bus. This took us up to Inley Lake at about 04:00, where we were bundled into a taxi to take us the 4 km or so from the highway into town. After a bit of a sleep we found a town that's nice enough but fairly touristy. The main thing to do here is do a boat tour on the lake itself, which we did on the second day. All that I remember of it is in the photos - the shallow parts of the lake with villages built over it on stilts; people wading through the water to grow some vegetables I don't recognise, in the lake; fishermen; sunset; a cigar factory; a cloth shop with ladies weaving silk and some local material on old looms; a big touristy market where locals hassle you just like back in Thailand, with various pagodas and stupa in various stages of disrepair, meaning, as I overheard one tourist comment, that you could see "the anatomy of a stupa". Some people on the other tours got to see some more colourfully-dressed local ethnic groups but I guess we ended up with the cheap tour.

On the day before that, we walked around the countryside for a while, trying to find a local hotspring. It turned out to be approximately two hours' walk one way and the springs were disappointing, but the good thing is there was some local fair there, with people of all types from far and wide milling around generally having a good time. It was fun to see.

My recollection's getting fuzzy but I think this takes me to the end of the first week. Most of this was written a while ago, so if I ever get around to writing the next two weeks in Myanmar they might be even less interesting.

Oh, I just realised I didn't explain the title. As you might know, "Burma" was famous for, among other things, George Orwell, who was stationed there for five years. According to Lonely Planet, there's a joke going around amongst the locals (I didn't hear it) that Orwell wrote not one ("Burmese Days") novel about Myanmar, but three ("Burmese Days", "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four"). Also the current junta took control from the Ne Win junta in 1988 which is fairly close, and in my opinion the country feels a bit like it's stuck in the 1980s except without the village people.

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Photos

Yangon - ?? pagoda
actually I forget which pagoda (paya) this is

Yangon - downtown
not quite sure why she's selling birds, I guess it's that buddhist thing about selling them so that we can do good by releasing them. you can sort of see some of the tree sap on her face.

Yangon - rich
we're rich, we have a pile of cash each. I think mine is $US 100. At most $200. Each note is worth $US 1

Yangon - chinese
chinese preparing to burn paper symbols of wealth to send to their deceased ancestors

Yangon- downtown
typical colonial street in the central part of Yangon

Yangon - dock
in the centre of Yangon

Yangon - downtown
all the cities in Myanmar have these bicycle taxis all over the place. Usually they carry one or two people, not just groceries!