Myanmar

It still doesn’t sound like a real place to me. For a long time I think I vaguely conflated Mandalay with Xanadu–ancient, splendorous, in a famous poem. Mandalay is the name of the house in Rebecca, while Xanadu was of course Charles Foster Kane’s estate ( “cost: no man can say.”) Can you blame me for thinking them similar? It’s still such a sonorous name to me, with its echoes of mandala, the way the sound falls and then seems to float away on that last long vowel.

After two passes through Mandalay, I will be the first to admit that I was completely wrong. Is it possible to be more wrong about a place?

Splendorous? “Cleaner, greener land?” Couldn’t Kipling come up with a rhyme for “hot, dusty shithole”?

What’s funny is that Mandalay’s not ancient. It’s not even old; it was founded only 150 years ago by King Mindon, who was trying to fulfill a prophecy that a great Buddhist city would one day exist on that spot. There is a large statue of Buddha on Mandalay Hill pointing the way.

Mandalay spent a short time as the last royal capital of Burma and then, in 1885, the British annexed it after the Third (and last) Anglo-Burmese War and turned it into their headquarters for Upper Burma.

As far as sights go: In the middle of the city, there’s a Royal Palace surrounded by a moat; it was recently restored using forced labor, and part of it is a military base. Mandalay Hill is the only high point on an other completely flat plain. A walk to the top is interesting enough, as you pass through several temples, although it had a listless aura to it when I went: no tourists, a few pilgrims, many hawkers of souvenirs lying motionless in the heat of day.

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A man approached me with the typical “Hello! Where you come from?” line, which in Mandalay is usually the opening come-on to an annoying sales plea of some sort, from trishaw or taxi rides to money changing. Warily, I told him “America.” He said he had a niece in New York. He asked if I was a student and I said no. He told me that he was a journalist. He still hadn’t let go of my hand from our initial handshake. I asked him who he wrote for, and he told me. I asked him what he wrote. “Not the truth,” he said. “I don’t write with freedom. If I tell the truth…” and he let go of my hand and extended his own two, wrists together, in the universal symbol for handcuffs. “You understand?” Then he walked off.

Myanmar has instituted a ban on remote-control toy cars, apparently afraid that they could be used to carry out terrorist attacks. Motorcycles, by the way, are already banned in Yangon for the same reason (and because a general was nearly hit by one a few years ago on a visit to to the city.)

On a much more serious tip, read this story.

After Yangon I headed for Inle Lake, which came as a welcome change. Inle is very pretty, surrounded by hills and home to several villages right on the water, raised up on stilts and cut through by canals. You know, like Venice, but made of wood. Mainly Intha people live here, fishing and growing crops on marshy floating fields. The Intha are famous for their leg-rowing technique; they stand up and pilot their boats among the paddies and tangles of water hyacinths with one leg wrapped around the oar; this has already become something of a tourist-attraction cliche. In the surrounding hills and villages, Shan, Pa-O, and smaller tribes live, along with the ethnic Burmese, or Bamar.

The town I stayed in, Nyaungshwe, is kind of a backpacker oasis, with all the comforts: cheap but nice guesthouses, fruit shakes and lassis, pizzas. Not what I’m always looking for, but sometimes taste is a relative thing, and Yangon had me feeling wrung out, tired from the heat and all the people and the sense of squalor and alienness and ready for something familiar.

I deeply enjoyed biking around the villages in the cool rainy weather and taking a boat ride on the lake and a canoe ride through the canals, where I visited a spooky nat shrine in the forest; the Burmese still strongly believe in nats, or spirits, and have fully integrated them into the Buddhist cosmology. There’s just something about moving slowly on the water and looking out at the natural world; for moments on the lake, I would feel an almost overwhelming urge to reach out and touch the clouds or the peaks of the mountains or the tops of the trees, to literally brush my fingers across the landscape. It’s like reverting to a infantile state of body consciousness, losing sense of where you end and the world around you begins. The sensation comes and goes quickly, but it’s powerful. I had the same feeling when I was traveling down the Mekong in Laos.

Inle was a nice escape–but Myanmar’s not really the kind of place you escape in for very long. I would come to recognize this more as my travels continued, but even in a tourist haven there’s plenty to remind you of just where you are. For one thing, you can’t miss a sense of desperation in tourist areas of Myanmar. The country gets a fraction of the visitors you’ll see in Thailand, less even than Laos, but in tourist areas a disproportionate percentage of locals seem in on the industry. Granted this is not a high season, but the number of people who will literally follow you down the street for blocks hungry to do anything at all for you–from taking you out in their boat to just carrying your bag–can be disconcerting. (Not to mention how many children seem to be working or begging and not in school.) This happens again and again at the main sites and in the cities. Mandalay, which I’ll get to, can seriously drive you insane. Read the rest of this entry »

From my field notes:

“Bicycling through a small village near Inle Lake, young children call out to me in greeting: ‘Bye-bye! Bye-bye!’ Peculiar. Is this charming–or ominous? I do not linger long enough to find out. “

Merely one of the strange customs and habits of this unusual land. For example, did you know that the people of Burma:

• Conclude a business transaction not with a handshake but by chopping each others’ heads off?
• Have over one hundred words for “comb”?
• Are permitted to take several wives, and may marry anything–close relatives, television sets, rivers?
• Summon waiters by making loud, obnoxious kissing noises?

This last one is true, and I’m still not used to it. I keep imagining what would happen if someone did that in New York. In fact, that will be one of the scenes in my hilarious fish-out-of-water movie about a Burmese immigrant. Another funny gag will be how people constantly mistake his betel nut-stained mouth and bright red spit for blood; everywhere he goes, people will say “Hey pal, just get into a fight?” This will happen at least twenty times. Then of course, he’ll actually get into a fight but by then everyone will be used to the betel nut and will think he’s just kidding around. Can you smell the sweet box office gold?

I’ve been here five days already and I still don’t know what to think about Yangon.

The first impression is one of entropy. The center of Yangon is all decay, things falling apart: sidewalks are broken, colonial-era buildings crumble, telephone lines sag, garbage rots on the roadside. But among the ruins, the streets overflow with life, crazy, chaotic.

Men wear button-down shirts and longyi. Women and children cover their faces with thanaka. An alternate universe of brands: no signs for Coca-Cola or Pepsi, thanks to Western boycotts. Instead, you see Red Ruby and London cigarettes, Star Cola and orange Crusher, Tokyo Donuts, Storm cosmetics, Heathers Gate whiskey. (There’s even a MacBurger restaurant, with a suspiciously familiar-looking logo).

Betel-nut spit collects in red pools and stains the sidewalk. Kids play in building courtyards in total darkness. Walking at night takes concentration–missing pavement slabs and holes in the sidewalk are large enough to fall into. The heat is intense. The smell of sewage pervades.

More than anywhere else, I find myself guessing at the underlying reality here. What is really happening? What is just beneath the surface, what is underground?

Last night I went to Shwedagon Pagoda, the biggest tourist attraction/religious site in Yangon, for Buddha’s birthday. Afterwards, I passed a group of outdoor tables near a public park. A man called out to me, and invited me to join him. He was having sugar-cane drinks with a policeman, an army soldier and a couple of ordinary-looking guys. I just couldn’t resist the absolute strangeness of the situation. We started chatting. Where are you from, my new friend asked. America, I said. He translated for the group and someone said “CIA!” and they all laughed.

I asked what my “friend” did. He said he was in the army too, that he spent his days just “looking, looking.” (I didn’t feel the need to ask for what.) He seemed a little drunk and laughed a lot, although I wasn’t always sure what the joke was. He bought me a sugar-cane drink and asked if I wanted to drink beers with him later (”duty-free,” he quipped.)

Another man appeared; ordinary-looking, but my friend said he was an army officer. He sat down for a couple of minutes, and then the two of them got up, excused themselves, and drove off. A strange and unsettling experience.

I’ve wandered around town with monks desperate to practice their English. I hung out one night with a group of hip-hop kids at a huge outdoor hip-hop festival (featuring J-Me.) Yangon has been funny, moving, disturbing.

Got to run for now. I’m leaving for the Lake Inle area–a sixteen-hour bus ride to a town called Taunggyi, the easternmost point foreigners can go by road in Shan State.

Or Myanmar. Maybe both. OK, just Myanmar. The visa came through without a problem and I’m flying out early tomorrow morning. (First, I’m going to spend the night in the airport, something I’ve always wanted to do. Expect many photos from my not-quite-fixed-but-it-will-have-to-do camera. Does anyone have a Nikon D40 that they don’t want?)

I don’t take the decision to visit Myanmar lightly. Conscientiousness will be my 18-letter buzzword. So will forethoughtfulness.

Also, antiferromagnetism. And of course, gedankenexperiment.

Seriously, I’ve thought a lot about it. Ultimately it’s a selfish decision–I just really want to go to Myanmar because it seems so different from anywhere I’ve ever been. I’ve met Burmese immigrants here and they’ve encouraged me to go. Other travelers have said it’s been a highlight of their trips. How not to do damage; how to try to shift the balance to positive, or at least neutral? Is it possible? I know that tourism can help some people there on a one-to-one basis. There are also volunteering opportunities; I’ve already been in e-mail contact with a Burmese guide who can arrange this. Any thoughts/suggestions/information welcome.

A few Myanmar links:

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (The Nobel laureate and leading voice discouraging travel to Burma.)
Free Burma Coalition (Another viewpoint, from an anti-boycott group.)
The Irrawaddy
Mizzima News
Burma News International
BurmaNet News
The Burma Project
UNICEF Myanmar
The Myanmar Times (state-run)

My return flight to Bangkok is on May 21st. Internet access should be no problem in Yangon and Mandalay and other more-visited sites; beyond that, I’m not sure.