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The Train to Mandalay.

Day 4 Yangon with Min Zaw. Overnight train to Mandalay.

Taxi drivers can make 15-25 thousand Khat per day, which Min Zaw says is good money. The government moved to Napitaw 1 year ago and Yangon is quiet now. New roads are very good from Yangon to the administrative capital. Prices are higher now in Yangon than in Bangkok.

The Train to Mandalay

She bucks like a rodeo bull. 16 hours overnight sleeper car, bed No.1 Only thing served by the wait-boy is chicken and fried rice. Met Rene H and Debbie L in beds No.3 and 4. Bankers from Singapore. Said UN ruined East Timor (for tourists, hahaha.). Their tour guide was going to holiday in Australia. First time Rene ever had a tour guide who could afford to holiday in Australia.

Notes:

Mandalay – Sikhs, Muslims, Chinese, Buddhists, Shan.

Shan noodles, cold greasy but tasty – K600.

Coffee + 3 cigarettes – K300

Motorbike minimum K500

Walked the streets that Monday night.

Amerthyst stones, teardrop, grade 3, high facet(?)

2x8mm , 2×9, 1×10 K300,000 ~ $380

Textiles: longgi K10,000, Chin Design K10,000

Min Zaw and Mr Hla, a tour of Dalla township

Day 3 Yangon. A lesson in disaster aid money and real estate.

Sunday, 25 December

Went to teahouse with Min Zaw and Mr Hla, guides sculking around Sakura Tower/ train station.

– Yangon is better since 8 months

– Money changers on the street are cheats.

– Min Zaw works on donation

– His dream is to work in BKK and Tokyo Shinjiku.

– Went to Dalla Township by ferry

– Met Coco, rickshaw boy, a very skinny muslim of 22 years.

– Land prices have soared the last few years in Dalla. 40 square metres was $1000, now $15000.

– Japanese NGO paid for repairs to houses (after Cyclone Naga)

– House price $3000 USD for a timber shack.

– Monastery/Orphanage has 118 boys – see business card.

– They educate and pay for education of boys all way through university.

– No craft trade in Dalla except for pottery, most live there and commute to Yangon for work.

– Donghi needed to gain favour with the locals.

– You foreigner, you purdha, You donghi, you very good!

– Ferry $2 return Yangon-Dalla-Yangon.

– Only foreigners take rickshaw. locals use motorcycle, 500 Khat, very quick, the roads are new and concrete and increase the land value. Some main roads are awful.

– Purdha = very happy (man)

– Min Zaw like books about other places, 31 years of age.

– Mr Hla speaks Chinese and is a wood carving master of marionettes at Shwe Dagon Pagoda.

– Mr Hla says ‘don’t pay for train ticket in Mandalay??

— Min Zaw says Arunapura has silver working shop, wood shop.

– Min Zaw is hopeful for the future of Burma, waiting for 2015 when they can get visa to ASEAN countries.

Xmas Eve with Australians

Day 2, Xmas eve celebrations, and the inevitable downward spiral towards KTV Karaoke.

Sunday 24 December, XMAS Eve.

Suffered through the Xmas eve with a cohort of young Australians. Vow never to do that again.

Walked aimlessly around the Muslim Quarter of Yangon, east and south of Sule Pagoda – dinner only 1800 Khat. Internet cafes are everywhere, tourists her and there but hardly Bangkok or Luang Prabang. People stare but not with intensity.Went with young Australians to Mr Guitar for them piled 7 into a cab to go to KTV, closed already, went to 2nd KTV, full of expats, invaded their booth, but they left shortly after. I should have followed.

Notes —

Didn’t want to be alone for Xmas eve so when I found the crew of Aussies at the Guesthouse door, I waived better judgement and went along with them. Seemed the thing to do.

Mr Guitar was an upmarket (for Yangon) karaoke bar with a live band playing western music. Local etiquette seemed to be to quietly sit in booths and sip whiskey. Etiquette was utterly ignored, the sweetness of the houseband was overcome, as Aussies + beer + music = screaming. Cranberry’s Zombie is a standout. I have it on record.

When we assailed the group of westerners at the number 2 KTV karaoke place, found an Ausaid, utterly wasted trying to maintain her ex-pat crew through the tail ends of a nasty night on the drink. Then she invited the young Ausrtralians into her booth, and it was all over bar the shouting.

Never again.

Walking the Ruined City

Day 2 Myanmar, tours with Yvette. Food, drink, pagodas.

Saturday 24 December, Sunny.

Walk around all morning. Paper street near the Pagoda. Up and around til the railway station. The tool market near the Chinese shrine. Down to the cinema block on the other side. Tin Tin movie is showing. 5 or 6 movie houses all clustered together towards the river there an old Army HQ, fenced off with barbed wire. Built 1889-1892.

Pic 102-368 Paper Street

0302-0324 Tea house w/ Yvette

0326 0330 Checkers with Rocks

P1020363 — Exterior shot of Monsoon Restaurant, evening time.

P1020375 — Army HQ, note the clock face missing 4,7 and 9.

0331-0354 Shwe Dagon Pagoda

0306 Monsoon Restaurant

0356-3560 – Feel

0369-0372 St Marys

Passport Control, Yangon.

Day 1 Myanmar, Yangon, Airport

Landed in Yangon in a A320, but we touched down in what appeared to be a cow paddock. The smell of people wafts over me as i approach passport control. For a moment it is like papaya and oil in my nostrils.

Saturday, 24 December. Sunny.

Beyond customs is a small gathering of taxi drivers with red stained smiles, that same woody fruity breath. I don’t wait to settle on their high price but I know it is now a race between me and the fellow travellers on the plane. I give into the badgering of John, a short but well fed fellow with a red stained smile and laughing buddha eyes. He has his own driver and a rusted out van of which I am the sole passenger. There seems to be only cars, bicycles with sidecars and no motorbikes in Yangon. This is the town where Corollas and Sunnies come to die, their rusted out, held together with electrical tape, suspension coils with no memory of the youthful spring. Used by date already 20 years past.

I meet a girl, Yvette, at the Okinawa Guest House, a single serving friend. We walked around to a tea house where the food is laid out before you and take what you like — different from the Yum Cha in HK where you chase the lady with the cake cart. Cigarettes are bought by the piece, laid out in a holder , like the cake. Price for 2 ppl – 2700 Khat.

The food looks and tastes like Cantonese cake but there are also friend vegetable samosa. Yvette is a hotel consultant on vacation, American-born, chatty and energetic – it’s easy to follow her around for the day, a camera always appearing every few minutes to snap a few pics.

The Shwe Dagon Pagoda campus is huge, towering above the rest of the city. The guide, Win, is chatty but boring, the Pagoda is magnificent but gaudy – gold leafed and shimmery. A thousand images of buddha sit or lie in shrines around the base of the pagoda. LED lights flashing and swirling like so many street food carts.

Amazing pagodas of old, tea carving that are startling in their complexity, and new pagodas, shiny mirrors adorned, or tin sheds that betray an austerity and an absence of craftsmanship but built none the less because a rich man sponsored(willed?) it into existence.

The taxi drivers are so reluctant to bargain to local rates, adding 50-100% to the fare. But we go to Feel Restaurant for some buffet Myanmar food. The sweets are chinese (mooncakes) and indian (gulag jamon). The curries spicy and oily.

The beggars, though young and desperate are disposed to converse after a failed sale with talk of the their city and lives, most come from over the river to hunt for tourists – all of them sell postcards and can’t go to school, which apparently costs 3 dollars per semester. The old buildings surviving from the British are stately high ceilinged palaces, falling apart, rotting away.

The Strand is Beautiful. (no pictures, sorry.)

A study of surfaces

The streets of Hong Kong and Kowloon make an interesting study of the use of tiles on the outside of buildings. It is a study of public spaces and how people interact with that space.

I think this is something special about the buildings of last generation’s HK. Tiles preserve the integrity of the brick and concrete from the rain and humidity, lending lustre and gloss to materials that would otherwise blacken with soot and mould and stain with the grease of close urban spaces, say nothing of the dire, unimaginable! consequences of feeding animals in private areas.

It seems the presence of tiles are everywhere. Uniform square mat tiles, combinations of colour that echo the tastes of times past or the historical traits of luck and prosperity. Some time in the past, this green pictured above held some meaning, just as the colour of the red and ornate building below and the newer, black and severe building juxtaposed.

It seems like a sensible idea, but one that I hadn’t thought about much whilst living in Bangkok. The wet and humid conditions in this part of the world are a safe harbour for mould and scum to accumulate in the corners and crevices. The people accept the appearance and condition of the public space, at least here in HK, there has been a notion of defiance against decay. Check out the ruined plaster mouldings on the colonial buildings in Yangon to compare.

And there is evidence that the designers of these spaces were interested the possibilities of this medium. Imagine, this simple design below that has a modest resonance with the work of Piet Mondrian. There is a restraint of artistic endeavour (or of limited imagination, who can say), that says that the humble tile is a vulgar thing, so common and useful and everywhere.

Here’s a shopfront with a 2 tone circular tile pattern. Most tiles you see are the small square profile.

HK Xmas Milonga

The last time I was in Hong Kong was a dozy 4 hour transit stop on the way to London Heathrow. That was 2007, 2 months before the big jump to Thailand. This time I wanted to see Hong Kong itself, see the tango, stay in the city. But now it was December 10, and I didn’t know what I would be doing, nor where I would be staying for the 4 nights, amended to 7 nights, that I would be staying here.

The flight from BKK was flying towards dusk. Below us was purple cloud reaching toward the orange sunset. The clouds seemed settled at a uniform altitude, the ripples in the cloud seen from above was so intricate, it looked like a great woolen blanket cloaking the world.

I knew that when I landed, there would be a Christmas milonga somewhere in Tsim Sha Tsui. That much I had booked. 3 classes and a Grand Milonga ticket with Carman via email. I liked the idea of this romantic notion, of travelling light, with only a suit and a pair of dance shoes. I wanted to see if the Hong Kong of my imagination were anything like the Hong Kong of reality.

Finding a bus from HKG to Kowloon was confusing. I remember the bus taking us to another bus station, but I was not sure where to alight. I was struck by the colour of the city, the way the buildings illuminated the world, like toys.

What surprised me was the cold. On this night, people in the street were looking up into the sky, to see the lunar eclipse, a blood moon gazing back from that cloudless sky. I took a picture with my camera.

Intent on dancing, searched around for Middle Road and found the Mariner’s Club, the venue for the evening. I walked up a flight of stairs until I found a bathroom and changed into my suit before stepping into the milonga one floor above. I was greeted and seated and watched on amazed at how well presented everyone was. Ray the tall American was in a tux as were many of the men. I was at a table of nice people, strangers, and a shyness came over me. But I stayed and got up a few times and watched the performance by Diego and Graciela.

As night ended, I stepped outside alone to discover just how cold HK could be in December. It was 2:00am and I didn’t have a clue where I would be sleeping, but I thought if I could find a place called Chun King Mansions, I might be okay. A sense of optimism prevailed.

I walked back to the main street and turned left and walked 50 paces. A middle eastern guy was standing suspiciously outside a plaza entrance, minding his phone.

You want a room? he asked.

Yes, I said.

150 Dollars.

Okay, I said.

He lead me around the security grill, into the lobby and up the escalator. Then down a flight of stairs and through a rabbit warren until we came upon a door, which he opened. Inside was a bed against the wall upon which lay a rudely awoken fellow, middle eastern. He chatted to the other guy for a moment and then opened a door behind him to a room, my bed for the night.

By a dumb stroke of blind luck, I had fumbled a room in Chun King Mansions.