Myanmar

I have been sucking at this lately, so my Year of the Rat resolution is as follows: be a better blogger. If it means anything to you, I am constantly chastising myself for not posting more and am often afflicted with a vague sense of dread and self-loathing for shirking my responsibility. It’s like a steady low-grade fever, which I believe is also a symptom of malaria.

Anyway–doings a-transpirin’. I’m using the free wifi in Singapore’s futuristical Changi Airport right now as I wait to catch a flight to Melbourne. I’m going to meet with my editor there before heading to New Zealand to write for this guidebook. I’ll be covering the entire North Island, which includes, among other things: the cities of Auckland and Wellington; geothermal oddities like geysers, exploding mud pools, and volcanic lakes; and an attraction called Sheepworld.

I left Vietnam ten days ago and have been in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and even Indonesia (for a half day) since. It’s been a fantastic, if wallet-destroying, time & I will write about it all in the next post.

Just one other thing to mention for now: it almost passed without my noticing it, but in the midst of all the Tet/Lunar New Year festivities, February 9th marked my own new year–one year since I left New York and started traveling. It’s not even a trip anymore; I don’t know what exactly to call it, but it’s been real interesting.

Suvarnabhumi Airport, Bangkok, 2007

Shortly after the protests in Burma started, I emailed a couple of friends I made there, but I hadn’t heard anything back until now. I just got this message:

Hello Tom,

I am so glad to get ur mail. In Burma, gov don’t allow to use
Internet. If so i am very hard to communicate with all of my friends.
I remember you. Yes. Not good condition in Burma. REALLY BAD. I am so
appreciate to remember me and send an email to me. U have been really
kind to me. I have no words to express how am happy to get ur mail.
They killer and they killed even Monks. I think they are evils. I am
fine and safe. But I have lost my ambition to go to [another country].

I feel small. I like to die in these days. I try to encourage myself. I hope
i am getting recover now. Thanks for sending me and remembrance. I
hope we can get in touch by email. . .

Burma breaks my heart. More to say on everything. Today is the 12th anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi’s detention, by the way. Rallies have been/are being held in cities around the world. Not in Vietnam, of course.

Yangon, May 04, 2007.

When I’m not walking or riding on my friends’ scooters, I get around Saigon by means of the xe om, the omnipresent and omniannoying-until-you-need-to-use-one scooter-taxis. “Xe,” I am told, means “vehicle” and “om” means “hug”, which is an adorable if entirely misleading depiction of the experience. I’ll be buying a cheap used scooter in the next couple of weeks, so not many more vehicle hugs for me. In the meantime, I took a moment to consider the many means of transport I have used over the last six months (I’m sure I’m forgetting something):

Car; bus; ferry; canoe; rowboat; longboat; slowboat; raft; cable car; bicycle; trishaw; tuk-tuk; sangthiew; cyclo; pick-up; minibus; truck; plane; horsecart; horseback; stagecoach; ox cart; locomotive; elevated train; monorail; subway; motorcycle; scooter; elephant.

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.

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In a town called Monywa, I went to a movie at the Moonlight Cinema. From the outside, it looked like a charmingly past-its-prime old movie hall. Inside, it had more of an apocalyptic ambience. It honestly looked it hadn’t been touched in decades and had just been left to rot. Huge panels on the ceiling were either missing or water-damaged and hanging perilously. The dust was so thick I could taste it in the back of my throat. And there were bats. Bats swooping around my head.

At first I had the theater to myself, though only the balcony was open; the entire orchestra level, composed of long wooden pews, was closed, probably for safety reasons. A teen boy & girl came in right before the movie started. I heard her popping gum for a while, then it stopped, but I didn’t turn around to see if they were making out.

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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.

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Via actual categories from the Mandalay Yellow Pages:

• Astrology/Palmists
• Betel Nuts
• Bullock Carts
• Fish Gravy, Fish Paste, and Others
• Gold Leaf Gilding Services
• Longyi
• Pickled Tea Leaves and Assortments
• Prayer/Chanters
• Slipper Shops
• Thanakha
• Thingans and Monk’s Utensils

I stopped by the Moustache Brothers’ house one afternoon to drop off an article I had seen in the New York Times which mentions them. Lu Maw corralled me inside and I was served tea by his cousin, the former political prisoner Lu Zaw. Lu Maw quickly put me to work helping him out with some of the English-language expressions he wanted to use in his show (words/phrases he was working on: “groupies”; “bun in the oven”; “energy boost” (which he got off of a bottle of moisturizer); “cheapskate/miser/Scrooge/tightwad”; “straight shooter/shoot from the hip.”)

Here’s a joke Lu Maw tried out on me:

A Burmese man wakes up one morning with a toothache. He gets on a bus and travels all day and all night to the Thai border. He sneaks across, and goes to see a dentist there. The dentist asks him, “Why did you come all this way? Don’t you have dentists in Burma?” “Yes,” replies the man, “but in Burma no one’s allowed to open his mouth.”

In Myanmar, this kind of stuff gets you nearly six years in prison.

To anyone planning on visiting Mandalay: Lu Maw asks for English-language news magazines. He also wants to get his hands on an Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (Dictionary)

The debate about whether tourists should come to Myanmar is resolved for at least one person. “Tourists keep us alive,” says Lu Maw, one-third of The Moustache Brothers, Myanmar’s most famous comedy/satire/folk opera troupe. He’s not being dramatic. In 1996, Lu Maw’s brother Par Par Lay and his cousin Lu Zaw were performing at a birthday party for Aung San Suu Kyi. Apparently, the regime didn’t find their political satire that night very amusing; when the two returned home to Mandalay they were promptly arrested. They were finally released in 2001, but the Moustache Brothers were blacklisted, banned from performing at any outside events. The brothers began putting on shows at their Mandalay home, and despite pressure and warnings from the government (or KGB, as Lu Maw calls them), they continue to do shows nightly for small crowds of travelers–the only audience for whom they can now perform.

Their show is a mixture of slapstick, cornball humor (including plenty of wife jokes), traditional dance, and political satire. The wiry Lu Maw crouches low over the microphone, delivering commentary loaded with rapid-fire idioms he picks up from dictionaries: his brother was “sent up the river,” he teases, “put in the clink,” “thrown in the Big House.”

It’s amazing to sit in a small room and see what amounts to as public a form of dissent against the government as you’re likely to see in this country, performed by people who were true political prisoners (Amnesty International campaigned for their release.) Lu Maw proudly points out that Aung San Suu Kyi herself sat in this very room as well; she came to see them perform upon their release from prison. As for fears of reprisals, or a return to prison, Lu Maw feels shielded by the attention he gets from tourists: “You are our eyes and ears.”