Into the hills. A word on paranoia.

From Mandalay I headed 44 miles east and 35oo feet up to the town of Pyin U Lwin. Pyin U Lwin was once a British hill station known as Maymyo, and it retains more of its colonial past than anywhere else I saw in Myanmar–there are horse-drawn stagecoaches, leafy estates, a clock tower in the center of town that was a gift from Queen Victoria.

Thanks to the altitude it was at least 20 degrees F. cooler than Mandalay, and my mood improved immeasurably. I had left Mandalay under the cloud of an argument with a trishaw driver, who was trying to take me for an unnecessary ride by lying about where to catch the bus. (”Just tell me the truth!” I finally yelled/pleaded, not just to him but to all the trishaw/tuk-tuk/taxi drivers of SE Asia.)

When I got to cool and drizzly Pyin U Lwin, I could feel my pulse rate slow and my shoulders drop. I checked into the awesomely-named but dumpy Dahlia Motel, and ran into V., a girl from Montreal I had seen earlier in Mandalay. It’s been such a common occurrence that it hardly seems worth mentioning now, but it really has been a remarkable phenomenon of traveling in SE Asia–the frequency with which you run into people you met weeks, cities, countries earlier. I can go a year without bumping into an ex-girlfriend in New York, but here I’ll meet someone for an hour in a bar in Laos and two months later we’ll recognize each other on a dirt lane in Myanmar. Of course, it makes you realize you’re all pretty much following the same paths. It’s not exactly like two arctic explorers running into each other in the middle of a snowstorm, but still.

In Pyin U Lwin, V. and I visited the National Kandawgyi Gardens, a gorgeous botanical garden with 600 species of trees, over 270 types of orchids, an aviary, rock garden, pine forest, bamboo forest, and 12-story viewing tower. This was the most modern site I visited in all of Myanmar: beautifully-maintained, scientifically and culturally relevant. Looking around, I thought, “I could be in . . . Switzerland right now,” the one and only time I had this thought in Myanmar, I promise you.

V. and I biked around Pyin U Lwin, which grows most of the flowers for Myanmar, and visited a nursery that makes wine from a plum-like fruit called the damson. Better, I think, than the romberry wine I had in Sangkhlaburi. (Funny–do a google search for “romberry wine”) We also looked at a hotel in one of the old British mansions—the nicest rooms were $72: a king’s ransom in Myanmar, but what would $72 get you back in New York? A urine-soaked mattress and a night stabbing, most likely.

After Pyin U Lwin, I continued eastward and trekked high into the mountains, staying overnight in a Palaung village. I set out wearing flipflops, like an idiot, and ended up taking them off for most of the trek. Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done; after walking about 25 km up and down mountain trails, I was limping badly for the next few days. Still, I have an incredibly vivid sense memory of the trek now. I can remember what all the different surfaces felt like on my bare feet—packed dirt; wet grass; rocky trails; hard baked clay. In fact, my dominant recollection of the entire trek is not so much the spectacular views, but the feel of the earth and the sensation of walking with dead-tired legs, taking step after step after step. A physical memory, not a visual or verbal one, and so an interesting experience.

Eating with the Palaung was excellent: we had soup made with herbs picked in the forest, fish curry, omelets, tea grown right outside the village, various chilies and pastes, and of course rice with every single meal. The Palaung are said to be descended from the Mongols, and looking at some of their faces in the firelight, especially the toothless old grannies, it wasn’t hard to imagine we were in a yurt on the steppes of Central Asia.

I am being purposefully vague about people I met and the stories they told me. Some of the most interesting things I saw and heard could be traceable back to individuals, if anyone in power really cared to. Accountability is something you start to take seriously in Myanmar, even on a blog like this. Simply taking photos and talking to people has the potential to put them in danger–I don’t overestimate my audience here, but a sick realization seeps in while you’re traveling in Myanmar that anything could happen. Not to you, but to them. You hear enough stories about people getting thrown in jail on almost any pretext, and you think twice about what you say, what you write.

It seems utterly ludicrous to me now but I even spent a few nervous moments lying in bed at night after reading or writing something unflattering about the regime in a public Internet cafe. Would I get some weird note slipped under my door? Would they hassle me at the airport, check my bags, ask me questions? Completely improbable, I know, but when you’re actually inside such a place, inside their borders, it can get under your skin. I was originally planning on overstaying my visa for a few days but I ultimately didn’t want to do anything that would put me at a legal disadvantage in that country.

(An aside: I visited a cave near Saigang Hill which was closed because a French film crew was inside taking photographs of murals inside for the Burmese government. I asked if I could look around anyway, and their very nervous Burmese handler had me write down my name and passport number on a piece of paper before he would let me. The first fake name that popped into my head was Elvis Presley but that seemed too obvious so I wrote down “Elvis Stojko” instead.)

This said, there is one story I want to tell in greater detail in another post–it’s about the biodiesel plants (the Jatropha curcas) I’ve seen growing around the country. This is, from many accounts, a forced agriculture project–farmers and landowners are being made to grow the plants, sometimes using land from their food or cash crops without compensation. Bad enough; but I met two men from a village that wasn’t able to grow enough of the crop and the local police were demanding payment for the value of the missing plants, an astronomical figure that these poor villagers didn’t have. More to come.

And just to underscore my point about paranoia: A few days after Pyin U Lwin, I met back up with V. in a Shan village called Hsipaw, a small center for backpacking/mountain trekking. I spent a couple of days here just recuperating from my hike. One day, V. went to see the old Shan Palace in Hsipaw, but found it closed. A man named Mr. Donald, the nephew of the last Shan prince, was known for showing visitors around the palace and talking politics, relaying the tragic history of the Shan people in Burma. Well, it turns out that this outspokenness finally got him a 13-year prison sentence; the official charges were acting as unlicensed tour guide and defaming the state.

PS: I’m writing this from Bangkok, where I met a German artist who told me about this documentary his friend made about the last Shan prince (Mr. Donald’s uncle). Looks fascinating; if anyone gets their hands on it, let me know how it is.

PPS: I literally just got an email from the Inter-American Development Bank asking permission to use the photo of the Jatropha curcas plant above, which they found on my flickr account, in one of their publications.