Moulmein, Bilu Island and Bago

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We set off to visit Bilu Island. The Rough Guide (2015 edition) tells us that Bilu Island is cut off from the mainland and only accessible by long tail ferry boat, and is peopled by a rustic people who clip clop about in oxcarts or ride bicycles down rutted dirt tracks and indulge in farming and cottage industries. Not so! It has seemingly been connected to the mainland by a bridge since 2008 (courtesy of the junta), all the roads are metalled, as are the roads in the villages. There aren’t any lorries or tourist coaches we saw, but a lot of the craftsmen have gone off to seek work in the towns. So we drove around, saw some farmers at work, visited a couple of “workshops” where men made little blackboards and smoking pipes, looked in a few craft shops selling the same stuff, and decided we had seen everything and went back to Moulmein. A bit of a letdown to say the least.

We drove around the market in town, it being too damned hot by now to get out of the car (37C and blazing sun). We found a very sorry looking Baptist church which was very bare inside (predictably), which outside had the solitary grave of a 13 month old English baby who died in 1845 and a memorial stone to the Jews who died in the Holocaust (we couldn’t figure why that was there either).

We were offered a viewing of the Mon people's national museum, which was in darkness, and the attendants were asleep when we arrived. We laughed and passed up that tempting offer, the guidebook said it was crap anyway.

Driving around this sleepy little town, past the occasional godown or old rundown colonial mansion, it is hard to imagine this was once the third city of Burma, an important part of lower Burma when ruled by the British in the nineteenth century onwards, and the home of three generations of George Orwell's mother's family. It was apparently a favourite retirement spot of the British governing class who had served in Burma. We tried to imagine croquet on the lawns and tea parties and balls, but our imagination really couldn’t conjure it up.

In the evening we went up to the Kyaikthanlan Pagoda on the hill overlooking the town. The view was obscured by haze as the sun went down, but the Pagoda itself was quite spectacular, taller than Schwedagon in Rangoon and beautifully gilded with gold leaf. It was visited by Rudyard Kipling in 1889 when he spent three days in Burma. He was impressed apparently. What was probably not there when he visited was a hilarious life size model of a temple guardian that holds an offering basket and is then winched up to the top of the Pagoda but five young lads who enthusiastically turn a drum that winches the dolly and the basket to the top and then brings it down again. All this to the background of some chap who yells out exhortations to the devotees to donate towards the new gilding allegedly needed for the zedi (the zedi is the stupa in the centre of the pagoda, pagoda meaning temple). All against the thumping sound of a much amplified band pounding out drum and bass style music with singing. Weird. Although we are now quite used to hearing this extraordinary racket pounding out all over Burma. Whenever you see a parade on the way to give donations to the local monastery you hear this dreadful pounding noise. It seems de rigueur to have so much bass that it makes your chest vibrate. You expect religious music to sort of ethereral and uplifting, with a hint of the spiritual, perhaps with monks chanting. That is not the Burmese way!

If you don’t want to entrust your donation to the temple guardian, you can always engage in a choice of fairground game in which heads you donate or tails you also donate but with less good karma. Most of the big pagodas we’ve been too have had a selection of sidestalls in which devotees throw money with the hope of it landing in donation pots that variously bob up and down on the waves of the sea, or are carried by assorted moving creatures. If your money lands in the bowl, it’s good luck. If not, the pagoda pockets the donation anyway, which helps contribute to the never ending cost of replacing the gold leaf covering the stupas every four years or so.

On Sunday we have a 8am start for a long drive back to Yangon. We leave over another bridge, the guide pointing out the piles in the river alongside this bridge that used to carry the old bridge (“Japanese bom-bed old bridge in war” he tells us. On the other side is Shampoo Island, so called because the King of Burma apparently washed his hair once a year in water brought 800 miles from here to his court at Ava. A very religious spring apparently!

We settle in for hour upon hour of driving, mercifully on good roads (the junta ensured that all main roads are well built and well maintained, doubtless so they could move troops quickly anywhere that trouble might spring up and need to be crushed). David tries in vain to photograph old buildings out of the car. Eventually after 5 hours and a quick lunch in a swelteringly hot restaurant we visit the remains of the ancient capital of Bago, a thriving and important city in the Middle Ages, some two hours east of Yangon. Sadly there is nothing left of this once massive fortified city, save for a reconstructed palace of limited extent, and some pagodas and more Buddhas. There a bunch of teak pillars that were excavated from the original palace, but that is it for archaeological remains. The Burmese are not much into preserving their past it seems. Only the new and shiny is important. And Pagodas and zedis and Buddhas........we had to visit Bago, having read so much about its history, or we would have wondered what it was like, but if we had taken a day excursion from Yangon just to go there we would have considered it a waste of a day. It’s a ten hour day, 8 hours of which are spent driving.



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