Category: Myanmar

I discover to my amazement that to travel the 500km from Kalaw to Yangon requires 14 hours on this bus. Stopping for food and passengers all along the way, all through the night until dawn the next morning. I have a seat at the back of the bus on the left hand aisle seat. What amuses me is to see that even the standing aisle of this bus has seats that extend out from one side of the bench seats. On this aisle-aisle seat, is a mother nursing a baby. Some time in the evening I look down at and see vomit settled on my trouser leg.

It’s only starting to dawn when the bus arrives in Yangon. I realise that Lily had snuck me onto a bus that would put me in Yangon 2 hours before my flight. I also find out that I am still miles away from the airport, and I don’t have any money left.

I walk the gauntlet of taxi drivers awaiting the bus. I tell them a few times that I don’t have an money left, and after some consultation they direct me to the bus stop for a bus heading towards the airport. At the stop I meet an army engineer, an officer, old as I am, who ushers me onto the bus and who also takes care of the bus fare for me. All through these travels in Myanmar, I am the recipient of these acts of kindness from strangers.

Although I didn’t record his name, he tells me of his travels, his work in Malaysia, his family and his desire to travel again. This year 2015 comes up again as a date of promises, of freedom to journey beyond the borders and a chance at living in greater world.

I arrive in time to board my flight and I leave with ten US dollars still in my pocket, my Doc Martens boots on my feet, and a hope to return some day.

Thursday, 5 January, 2012.

No dreams, but memories of a vivid day and a quiet wish to never leave this place. I wake eagerly to see the grey town bask in the light of morning. To hear the singing of the girl-vendors as they wander up and down the streets. To hear the coming of the monk procession, to see the women exit the guesthouses and give alms.

Wednesday 4th January, Nostalgic, misty.
The breakfast again delicious. I just remember the fresh chapatis, so good. It’s checkout day and I have a bus to catch back to Yangon. It means I have a few hours to loiter around the guesthouse and around the town before I leave. I will run rings around the markets, I will sit and drink tea and eat cake at the teahouse. I will take photos before I go.

Aunt Lily has confused me with her insistence to put me on a particular bus. I book the bus ticket with her, but suspect that she is fleecing me of a few dollars somehow, I can’t shake this suspicion. Money is not really an issue. I want a later bus, but she books me onto an earlier bus and I can’t determine why. I want to reach Yangon airport RGN for my departure time 8:30am 5th of January. It will be Burma Independence Day, but I won’t have time to see it as I hoped.

There are a few dollars left in my pocket and I want to buy a cow-bell somewhere in the market stalls, but I can’t find a stall who has one for a price. I flirt with the stall owners, but only inspire disappointment and mistrust when I cross paths with them and say I can’t buy their wares.

The teahouse has a small table outside where I order cigarettes, cake and tea. I smoke and watch what little goes on around here. Boys running after each other. A man dragging a 44 gallon drum affixed to a cart. The cakes are sweet and the tea is smooth and bitter.

When it comes time to leave, I return to Golden Lily, and there is Lily, ushering me to the bus stop with the aid of one of her servants. I hand over the remainders of my travel supplies, a bottle of metronidazole, in the hope they will find a use for them. I think of those snotty children we met on the hills.

I’m on the bus at 3pm(?). It seems too early for me as I guess that there is only 500km of road between here and Yangon. I arrived on top of the bus, but leave inside the belly of another. I know that the winding road through the hills out of here are not as magnificent from the vantage of this seat as it would be high up in the sun and dust and wind. It is sad to go.

From Viewpoint, we trek to Palo, a monastery atop a hill. We are greeted at the ascending hill climb by 4 kids playing on the road. Well accustomed to tourists and our cameras, they pose, like celebrities for the swarm of cameras. They take special interest in my gorilla pod tripod.

We are soon at the hill top monastery and swarmed by more kids all wanting to touch my gorilla pod. What is it? they wonder, playing with the legs. “My Name Is…” they ask, wanting to know my name. “Goodbye!” they greet us. Back to front and upside down. These kids are lively and dirty and snotty and coughing.

There are few adults in the village, they are all on the hills, tending to crops. Only a few men and women sit around, working on making grass brooms or men just talking. All the way along we hear the jangle of cow bells as buffalo wander around the roads and fields.

Two day from now, there will be a wedding. Three pigs are brought up the hill. They will be served at feast. Turmeric is being dried in the front yard of the house we are invited to enter. We take tea with the grandmother and great-grandmother. The old one is 73 years old but her first attempt to say so comes out as 700 years old. Everyone has a good laugh.

There are fields and fields of poppies beyond the elephant mountain. Over the ridge lies Shan State, we stand in the Mandalay administrative area. They adjusted the border to the state just in case Shan State succeeded.

We visit the Shaman atop the hill of another village. “Ming la ba” I say to the prettiest girl playing in the forecourt of the shaman’s house. She is really beautiful and we fall in love immediately, but I may need to wait a while. She is 8 years old. Obviously I am not the only one to think she is beautiful, she poses coyly in front of the camera like a girl in a burmese karaoke video.

Rambo, our guide looks like a jungle warrior, but has the gentle presence of a kindergarden teacher. His story is like many I have spoken to. Adept at several languages and the terrains of Kalaw. Lived here his whole life, unable to travel whilst he himself meets, helps, guides, so many people from around the world. He says he would like to work elsewhere, cousins are working in palliative, elderly care in Australia. Cousins working as geologists for Australian mining companies. What opportunities lie in wait for Rambo? he would like to trek the northern states, if the government ever opens them for people to visit. The mountain regions of the north. I want very much to help him. His aunt Lily owns the guest house while he earns his money from treks during the tourist season. Only a few people trek in the hot wet seasons.

Lily is also kind and lovely, but a little sneaky, slipping a few non-tender-able 1 dollar bills into my small change. You cannot use dollars that are creased in the middle or a little dirty. All US currency must be pristine.

I part ways with the 3 day trekkers to return to Kalaw. ( Everyone on the trek except me is continuing to Lake Inle.) It is around 5:30pm and the sun sets early in the valleys. The local guide and I make haste to make the most of the light. He is mountain fit and keeps moving at the pace for all of the 2 hours we walk. When the light has faded & the sky is dark indigo, we see the half moon smiling at us and venus burns a hole in the night sky. Orion’s belt appears from behind a hill as we wind along roads and tracks and trails. The way is lit by moonlight and fireflies drifting along our path, guiding us to town. It’s magic.

We hear the horns as we stumble along the railroads stopping only to let the freight cars pass us. My right hip aches from the pace and the whole day’s hulking once we hit the sealed roads, I’m unable to walk but unable to stop, unable to ask my guide to stop.

When we finally reach the Golden Lily, i’m destroyed but grinning.Lily says “You’re very late and it’s dark! We were worried about you!” In 2 minutes of chatter with Lily, my guide is out of his seat again and walking off. I don’t have the energy and I’m stiff from walking but I go to Pyae Pyae for bubbling hot pot noodles again.

From a slow start we leave Kalaw for the hills, navigating through red clay roads slicken by unseasonal rain the night before. The range looks wonderful from up high, every turn and twist of the road reveals a new vista of valleys, floors carpeted in paddy stalks, little stepped terraces in the raveens. stopped shoulders of tea plants, unhedged, brimming over the cup of the valley. The sshhhh of rain on the next hill approaches, but never actually soaks us. although the noise is on top of us.

Tuesday, 3 January, Rain threatening.

Half an hour into the trek, scot/brit fell behind because of a stomach bug, big guy, unfit and gasping for breath, he had a wet pallor. Brit gave him some isotonic agent to put in his water and he moved on. The spanish guy/Anthony Bourdain look-a-like struggled to keep balance on the slipping mud. “Go, go, I must be make careful”

We take the scenic left track at every fork – it’s a delight at every turn.

Teahouse. Nepali.

Lunch is a gift of hot chapati, melon curry and a sweet and savoury chilli paste, just hot enough.

The view from Viewpoint is of an orange-tree grove cascading off the hill top steeply. Chickens cluck and puppies yelp! and chicklets tweet. I want to live atop this hill.

The building itself is a barn, wood and corrugated iron, clad with mud and straw. All 20 or so trekkers from Golden Lily have arrived here for lunch by various ways and means. An American named Jeff came on a delayed flight from Mandalay riding pillion on a bike. Sports apparel, white socks. iPhone, white teeth, a shhh sound in his accent, I think that came from the porcelain veneers.

The chap from Calcutta is an extrovert, turns out he is a drama teacher. Not an arrogant guy so muc, as Michael said, but assertive, his big camera lense always probing, he separates from the group, forges ahead in the morning only to miss us at the forks in the road. He rejoins us at the lunch spot with a suggestion or two about how to operate a proper trek.

The french are everywhere in Myanmar.

I am answering an open answer questionaire. The questions are about life, the answers on the page I disagree with . Someone else perhaps has filled in the answers.

I am weak, stumbling out of the car, no strength in my legs or my back. I am drained, as though host to a parasite. It is a cancer drink away at my life.

I feel ecstatic, energy drained, I ask the driver to slow down so I can get out, the car still moving. It is a public toilet in Korbusser, Berlin. But it looks like a park fountain, people milling around in 2s and 3s talking. Tall handsome people, talking in the sunshine, I overhear, This could not happen in Thailand, a scene so nice here in Germany.

I return to the questionaire and I know the answer, against the answer already on the page. A moment of inspiration, joy, but now I am overcome with grief, for I am about to die. A sadness, a sorrow, mourning feeling arrives. I am wanting to cry – this life, it ends, it departs me and I cry for myself , for the lifeI am about to lose. Gone.

Tuesday 3 January 2012, cloudy.

It is 5:48am and I am woken, waking from a dream by the sobbing and the tears brimming, and trailing out the outside edge of my eyes, they trail down the sides of my face to the pillow behind/under my head. I think of my sister, myself. I feel as though I have just foreseen my own death, watch this movie of my end of life. The essence of a thing. I feel as though I have just discovered the truth of it, the essence of a thing.

I am up at 6, dressed and outside as the light creeps into the valley and the town.The clouds drawn and drifting north, the buildings cloaked in smoke, white.

Sunday, 1st January, Sunny. Cramped.

Hellbus wake up call @ 4:30. Was bundled into the bus with a breakfast bag by the Im Wa people (such hospitality!) (I am in the most rear, most left seat of the bus.) The seat in front cuts into my knees and the baby in the seat in front keeps vomiting. Aleady by the first and second stop at 7 am and 10am, people loo very worried. By lunchtime stop near Thazi, people are quite fragile. Eating Chicken fried rice at the truckstop, I spot 2 people climb onto the roof of the bus and I react straight away, pay my bill and one last gulp of tea and I run up to the side of the bus and climb onto the bus also.

The scenery & fresh air and space to move! bUt I forget my things in the bus so as the bus starts backing up, I dive belly-down to the rear left window and knock. The burmese guy seems me waving and hands me my longgi and pillow. The two people next to me on top of the bus think I am crazy and hold me by my legs. I realise immediately that the best decision of the day has been made. The view is amazing as we crawl up the valleys to the tops, winding around farms, and streams and bamboo, and paddies and banana plants, constant dust and roadwork all alone with men and women in broad conical cane hats – it’s like watching Chinese break rocks and blasting mountains to lay rail road track in the old west of America.

Suddenly I feel joy that I am sitting in first class whilst the rest of the crew suffer below decks. That could have been me! I think. the older french couple who I saw climbing aboard at the truckstop were Daniel and Agnes(?). They were celebrating 28 years of being together. They tell me, the first time they travelled together was when they met in 1983. They travelled 6 months in India, Varanasi. She was 20 years old! First time on an airplane! Now they have travelled together ever since, had 2 twin girls who are both attending University.

Rooms are $6 per night @ Golden Lily, super nice Sikh family business. Advised to tour top of pagodas east of town of Kalaw. I decide to skip Lake Inle and laze around the mountains and hills here. 1 day, market of convening tribes. I day trek, 1 day 17bus from Kalaw to Yangon, then fly at 8am back to Bangkok.

Sunset on the hill to the east, watching the sun set in the west range.

Dinner in 7 Sisters, great curry , conversation with D&A. Big table of 30 germans behind in the main room.

I realised that I forgot my 15 year old Doc Martens boots on the bus, under my seat. The hotel madam called the bus company @ Thanggi and after I returned from my walk she told me that the boots were found and would be returning on the same bus on it’s return run to Bagan at 7:30 tomorrow morning.

Night, Saturday 31 December, New Years Eve, Nyaung U.

When Burmese invite guests to their house to heat, the guest eats alone and the remainder is eaten after by the family (the large extended family) – this ensures that the guest eats enough. My Burmese hosts cannot afford to eat much curry so they eat a lot of rice with just a little curry for taste (This was information sourced from Mr Wintun @ Weatherspoons).

The remainder of the food at Mar Mar San’s would be shared by 7 adults and 2 kids.

Burmese hospitality is generous to a fault, but it is their way.

[The family sat quietly watching the television whilst I ate alone. Mar Mar San would tend to my needs with stewed chicken and curried vegetables. There was too much food served for me, but not enough for 3. And there were more waiting their turn to eat. Awkwardly, I withdrew from my meal, unsure of what gratitudes were expected for hospitality such as this. I took my bicycle and MMS walked with me down the dusty track, back to the road to Nyuang U. Walking away at a harried pace, shame spurned my departure, set off-balance, unsure of the protocols that I imaged must come with such welcomes and farewells. And with that I rode back on the dark roads from Old Bagan back to the place where my bicycle was hired. Then suffering the strangeness of the new years eve, I wanted to spend the last hours in Nyaung U at a favourite place, Weatherspoons.  ]

I was not invited to the tourist table congregating for NYE. Frankly, a little hurt, but glad not to endure bland conversation til ears bled. Still, not as bad as the Australian crew @ Xmas eve.

Spending NYE writing this story.

Spending NYD on 12 hour hell-bus to Inle Lake. 5 am lift off.