More on Myanmar.

Lots to come about Cambodia, but I wanted to finish some thoughts about Myanmar first.

During a blackout a few nights ago in Siam Reap, I got into a conversation in a restaurant with a French-Canadian guy (who travels the world as a teacher with Cirque du Soleil!) I told him I had been traveling in Southeast Asia for the last four months. He asked if I had been to Myanmar. When I said yes, he said instantly that he loved it, that it was one of his two favorite countries, Brazil being the other, and asked what I’d thought of it.

I couldn’t, and still can’t, come up with a short answer. I loved it, yes, but I felt a lot of other things too: pity, despair, anger. My conversation in the restaurant was not the first time I’d heard or read someone say that Myanmar was one of his favorite places, and it’s not impossible to see why. Some of it is as beautiful as anywhere I’ve ever been, the people are awesome, and it is simply so different. Refreshing, as long as you don’t think of the brutality and suffering that make it that way.

I don’t know, I think to some extent you find what you’re looking for when you’re traveling, and I know I was partly drawn to Myanmar because it was a “bad” place. I wasn’t disappointed on that front, but then the whole experience turned out to be so much more than that: wonderful, eye-opening, heartbreaking, perspective-changing.

Anyway, notes from the last week or so I spent in Myanmar:

Monywa

After Hsipaw, I went back to Mandalay and then northwest to Monywa, a trading center on the Chindwin River. Not many tourists go there, which is exactly why I wanted to; it turned out, as these places generally do, to be a fun and unpredictable excursion. Highlights included seeing the movie I wrote about below; hanging out with a Catholic priest and some young seminarians; and drinking toasts with a group of drunken men in a Chinese restaurant.

A great site I visited near Monywa was Thanaboddhay Paya, one of my favorite temples so far. It didn’t look like anything I’d seen before: the outside is all Easter egg yellows, pinks, and blues; the inside has over half a million Buddha figures; and the top is a stupa surrounded by small spires that the guidebooks compare to Borobudur in Indonesia. Being among all the Buddhas was like standing between two mirrors reflecting each other into infinity. I remember thinking: if Michel Gondry designed a Buddhist temple it would look like this.

From there I went to Po Khaung Hills, where an enormous reclining Buddha and an even bigger standing Buddha dominate the landscape. The standing Buddha, still under construction, will be the second largest in the world when it’s finished, at 167 meters high (Statue of Liberty: 47 meters). There is of course something more than perverse about a country this poor building a monument like this. The entire surface was covered in bamboo scaffolding, one of the strangest and most photographable of sights up close.

As I was shooting away, a wiry foreman waved me over (with the Asian “come here” hand gesture that looks like you’re being shooed away), and took me on a tour of the inside of the statue. Yes–I have been in the Buddha. It was so informal; in the US I would probably have had to sign a series of waivers before being admitted to an active construction site but here I found myself swimming in vertigo on a concrete ledge hundreds of feet in the air, or walking through unfinished rooms with half-painted murals and semi-built Buddha statues as workers welded and sawed away, sparks flying.

Monywa to Bagan

I set out for Bagan next. Bagan is the other great religious site in Southeast Asia, along with Angkor Wat. To get there I rode a bus to a town called Pakokku and then had to catch a boat a couple of hours down the Ayeyarwaddy River.

The transfer from bus to boat turned out to be more troublesome than expected: A trip to the wrong pier, a mad switch from trishaw to horse cart, and a race through narrow streets to catch the last boat of the day.

At the waterfront, a woman who spoke relatively good English helped me find the boat. (Which turned out to be a government boat–the only time other than the train that I took a government-run form of transport). We had a few minutes to kill so she sat down with me at a teashop.

Suddenly, the sell. She and a couple of other women started showing me blankets with stripes and elephant patterns. No thanks, I said. They asked about t-shirts and perfume and I said no,no. We drank some tea. I ate a deep-fried pastry. They asked again: t-shirts? And then I got it–they weren’t selling shirts, they wanted to know if I would give them any. Feeling slightly indebted, I gave the woman who helped me catch the boat my oldest (but beloved) t-shirt. She didn’t seem thrilled with it but took it anyway.

I got on the boat, and a woman carrying her small son came up to me and said shampoo, shampoo. I tried to ignore her. I took a couple of pictures of boats on the water—people were using bedsheets as sails. It suddenly seemed like the poorest country in the world to me. I looked up and two of the women from the tea shop had followed me on board. They showed me the blankets again and asked: face cream, perfume?

One of the women looked so sad, on the verge of crying. She must have been in her forties. I finally took out a plastic bag of the few cosmetics I had, all cheap and half-empty and bought in Thailand or Myanmar. As soon as the plastic bottles hit the light, the rest of the women on the boat swarmed around me, hands out, clutching and grabbing and jostling each other. I had so little to give away, and most of it was worthless: Shampoo, body wash, deodorant. I found a few pens, some batteries, a cheap flashlight. It was gone in a flash and everyone went back to what they were doing without a word.

I closed up my bag, not making eye contact with anyone, feeling odd, almost humiliated by the experience. I was terribly sad, but as the boat ride went on, my sadness started to mutate into anger. I started to wonder if my whole adventure of almost missing the boat in Pakokku was some elaborate scam. Almost immediately, I thought, yes, you idiot–a scam involving a dozen people, and a ride on a trishaw and a horsecart, all to get my bottle of shampoo. Like Ocean’s Eleven!

Still, I was mad, and I started to wonder why. Because these people want something from me? Because I am made to feel some sense of responsibility? Why can’t they be more stoic about their poverty? Why can’t their misery be more ennobling? Why is it so . . . miserable?

. . .

“What is to be done?” asked Linda Hunt in The Year of Living Dangerously, quoting Lenin, and it’s almost become the cliche way of phrasing the question about poverty. The problem is so massive, so intractable, that how to approach it easily slides into the rhetorical rather than the practical. The very syntax of “What is to be done?” defies any kind of agency–there is no actor in this formulation; the question is passive, hypothetical.

What can you do? In a practical sense, I thought, you can do nothing, or you can do something. Then as, the boat chugged down the Ayerawaddy, I realized, you can also do next to nothing: a half-bottle of shampoo, a handful of change; that third, twilight category that I–how many of us–exist in: helping but not really helping, trying to feel better but not really, doing just enough until you get someplace where the question is not so urgent.

Bagan

Bagan (also called Pagan) is amazing, an ancient city of temples, more than 2000 buildings spread over 25 square miles. It was the capital of the First Burmese Empire, from the 11th through the end of the 13th century, when the Mongols (they got around!) took over.

This is a place I just didn’t give enough time to; I was planning to overstay my visa to get a couple more days here but then decided against it–wisely, I think. I spent two days in Bagan, and both were interrupted by heavy rain. The rain did account for one of my favorite experiences in Myanmar, at least, as I got caught for a couple of hours all alone in a building with a giant reclining Buddha. I sat in a window opening and watched and listened to the rain. I looked out at Shwesandaw Pagoda. I walked the length of the Buddha and examined it at extreme leisure and in extreme detail. I wondered if there were snakes. It’s the kind of thing you can do in Bagan but probably not Angkor; despite tour groups and some expensive local resorts, Bagan gets a fraction of the visitors of Angkor.

Still, my experience of Bagan felt rushed and incomplete. One other story: at the Mahabodhi temple, which is a copy of one in India, two adorable kids started following me around as I took pictures. I was being friendly, showing them the images on the LCD screen, but inside I was waiting for them to start selling or just stick their hands out and ask for money. Instead, their mother called out to them; she was some sort of groundskeeper at the temple. They ran off to her, but then, a moment later, came running back, each with a tiny flower that they had picked for me. It was almost unbearably touching.

Bagan to Yangon

From Bagan, it was a marathon ride back to Yangon, where I had to catch a flight back to Bangkok. Before I got on the bus, I ran into a used book store with a very small selection of English books to grab something for the trip. Among a few John Grisham/Tom Clancy kinds of things, I found, strangely enough, the short novel Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, which I picked up.

On the title page was an ex libris inkstamp. The book had previously belonged to:

Aung Myint Thein

B. Sc., (Physics)

Ex-Instructor (T.H.S.)

No. 4, Kachinsu, Myitkyina

I tried, for a moment, to imagine what Aung Myint Thein possibly could make of Saul Bellow and a story set on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s. Then I thought, maybe about the same as I could make out of No. 4, Kachinsu, Myitkyina. On the one hand, more than you might imagine; on the other, almost nothing. Traveling has made the world seem smaller and simpler and also infinitely more complex than I ever knew, like somehow looking through both ends of a telescope at the same time.

I had thought about this often on the trip, and while reading the book (which is really great), a few passages seemed to perfectly express what was on my mind. It almost felt like fate or magic that put this book in my hands at this particular moment in this particular place. But then I thought; it isn’t magic, it’s just literature. That’s what books do. In every great, or even really good, book you will find something; it will always resonate with you. There are always just so many unresolved things about being alive; it is never exhausted, never figured out, never not interesting. And so, on a bus ride in Myanmar, among all the excitement of traveling, I’m reminded that reading a book is one of the absolute greatest pleasures in life.

. . .

Around midnight I was half-asleep, head against the window, sleeping and waking every few minutes, having small dreams. Suddenly, the bus started shaking violently. Cries of alarm, the sound and sensation of branches crashing against the windows. I snapped awake and realized we were skidding off the road. I had no idea where we were. I instantly and fully recognized that we might very well be on the side of a hill somewhere next to a large drop, and that I might be about to die. Seriously, this thought registered. I considered how to brace myself, imagining that the bus might roll over. I had run through these scenarios in my head so many times on so many bus trips and it all seemed about to come true. We continued to skid for a few seconds, I still couldn’t see a thing, and then we came to a sharp stop.

Everyone looked around; nervous laughter, a few exclamations of relief, but mostly people just gathered their things and made their way off of the bus. We happened to be in a tiny village, next to a small shop. The owner lit some candles and we waited around on the side of the road. No one had a cell phone. No police ever showed up. A message was given to another bus on its way past.

After a couple of hours an empty bus arrived to pick us up, and we made it to Yangon without (much) further excitement, some 19 hours after we left. I still don’t know why the bus lost control. I think the driver had fallen asleep.

Yangon

I had one last day in Yangon and spent it mostly taking pictures. It struck me only at the last moment that this was the most photographable place I’ve even been. I suddenly thought that I could easily spend the 28 days of a tourist visa here just taking photographs. All the street life, all the buildings falling apart, everything. Yangon, I let you down. Maybe someday.

Some final thoughts

My feeling about the US/European embargo is that it’s not working at all. Myanmar is not South Africa, which became a pariah to almost everyone in the world. Myanmar has plenty of resources–natural gas, gems, teak, drugs–even if the people have nothing, and it has plenty of huge trading partners in its neighborhood. China, of course. India too; Singapore; Malaysia; Japan. The government is building a hydroelectric plant to supply cheap electricity to Thailand right now, and flooding villages and killing villagers in the process of doing it. I’m struck by the ways in which the balance of power continues to shift in the world.

Aung San Suu Kyi is still under house arrest in Yangon, and apart from small and quickly-squashed protests, there doesn’t seem to be the spirit of a mounting resistance coming any time soon. At least as far as I can tell. (For all I know, there may be a revolution tomorrow. All I can say is that no one mentioned anything to me about it.)

I went to Myanmar and the government got some of my money: roughly $25 for a visa (810 baht). A $7 train ride, a $2 boat ride. $10 to visit Bagan. $5 to visit Shwedagon. A $10 departure fee. And whatever taxes they get from my guesthouses and purchases.

Personally, I don’t regret going at all, although this is easy enough for me to say. Still, it was one of the most fascinating months of my life, and I don’t think my involvement with the Burmese ends here. In fact, I was all set to volunteer with Burmese refugees in Thailand this summer, but another project has come up–I’m still waiting for confirmation but it looks like I’m going to Eastern Europe next. More on this as details are finalized, probably in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I implore anyone reading this to keep Myanmar on your radar. If you’re more politically capable or inclined than I am, or if you’re looking for a worthy cause to get behind, this is a good one. The people there deserve so much better than what they’ve got, from Aung San Suu Kyi to Saul Bellow reader Aung Myint Thein, to the amazing people I met who shared their time and their stories with me and whom I will never forget.