Dr Jim's Periglobal Perambulations: Burma- The Salt in the Soup

A beaming Burmese boy in Yangon

It's a metaphor based on the observation that the travelling experience can be quite same-same. You can stick to the well worn routes and not have to think about it much really. Nothing wrong with it as such, but it's not much of a challenge. Not to say we have strayed much off the well worn routes but, of the trip, there have been two places that you could say were definitely off the beaten track. One was Madagascar. The other Burma. And I say all this because 'travelling', as a life-event, seems to be common enough in our generation as almost not to warrant attention. People always seem to be jetting off here, there and everywhere. The people who haven't 'traveled' feel that they should do and people who have 'traveled' perhaps breathe a sigh of relief when they get home. That's that one out of way at least. If travelling has become just another expectation we place upon ourselves then perhaps the new travelling, in that sense, should be something else. Not travelling perhaps.

Found in Burma. Not seen one of these in a while!

That was a bit of a digression actually and in some senses just my way of trying to belittle this actually quite wonderful experience and make myself (and you) believe that this trip is less than it is; a bit insipid and banal perhaps. Same same. Unfortunately for my self-destructive sub-conscious Burma is neither insipid nor banal. And really (and this is where the metaphor comes in handy and I finally make my point) if travelling is just plain old soup, then places like Burma are the salt. They make it tasty, make it more exciting, unpredictable, dynamic. Too much is unpleasant, but just the right amount adds that oh-so-important touch that sets the rest of the experience, the soup, as being worthwhile. And it is worthwhile. It's wonderful (Burma that is). Simply wonderful :)

But you wouldn't think it on the surface. Burma has had a pretty hard recent past. And is still gripped by a military junta that has the final say in all governmental decisions. The democratic government installed recently is definitely of the puppet variety. Such things become plain when you see that most people in the country have no electricity or sanitation, but the government has just built an entirely new city called Nay Pyi Taw and declared it to be the new capital of the country (which they also renamed from Burma to Myanmar). A venture thought to have cost at least $4 billion. At the risk of sounding overly virtuous, it is a disgrace! But more terrible things have happened. The vast numbers of Burmese refugees in Thailand attest to that. Burma is probably a country where the full scale of what has happened over the past 50 years will only become apparent in the next 20 or more years. It'll be interesting to see but not pretty I am sure.

A little boy dressed in monk's robes begs for money in Yangon. Sad to see.

If you want to go to Burma then you needn't bother with your bank cards. They won't work. Neither will your mobile phone. The phone system is touch and go. The internet, when it is present at all, is still at the dial-up modem stage and much of it is blocked anyway. You can't cross any land border to get into Burma without having to leave the same day. If you want to visit you have to fly in with a pre-arranged visa and bring crisp, new, pristine $100 US bills with you. These you can change in to the local currency, the Kyet (pronounced Chet). Don't criticise the government, or the military. If you want to venture off the beaten tourist track you need a government permit, which would usually take longer than the length of your non-negotiable visa to arrange. Much of the country is completely off-limits to foreigners. I wonder why? Much of the tourist industry is government controlled and you have to be careful where you spend your money to make sure it goes to the local people and not the military generals.

Lots of symbols of a bye-gone (to me) age

Our bus into Yangon

But all this adversity makes it quite an exciting place to visit. The salt in the soup, as I say. We flew into Yangon (Rangoon) from Hanoi and I stood slightly anxiously at passport control expecting a stern examination about my visiting purpose and a military presence. The reality was completely different. A breeze through the border and into the country. No military seen at the airport or, in fact, for the majority of the trip. I expect they steer clear of tourist routes on purpose and my experience says nothing about the repression that is doubtless still going on, but nonetheless it did not feel an intimidating place. There was, perhaps by corollary, little sign of Burma's famous lady, Aung San Suu Kyi, either. It seemed that the government were trying to make the tourist trail as politically bland as possible. Presumably it's good for business.

One of the only signs I saw of either police or the military in the whole trip

A little boy gives us an impromptu guide around the city in Yangon

Unfamiliar symbols, but English (as ever) still much in evidence.

The independence monument in Yangon, with the court house in the background

An old lady (92 years old we were told) is still scraping a living together on the streets of Yangon.

Until recently, satellite dishes seem to be one of the only ways of receiving outside broadcasts in Burma.

A mass of wiring patched on to the electricity grid, which frequently fails.

A bit niche...

Coffee stall outside the market in Yangon

The people and the country itself feels like a mix between India and south east Asia. This has historical context as Burma was controlled as part of India by the British until independence, so much of the ageing infrastructure has an Indian colonial feel to it. The people, though, are more like the Thai. Full of smiles and honesty and friendly chatter. They make a kissing sound with their lips when they want to get your attention. They don't seem to make much fuss about material things, I guess largely because they don't have them and haven't yet been exposed to much Western culture. It's a refreshing change to meet people relatively untouched by Western media, even if they have had to pay a high price for it. Some part of me feels they have been saved. But the inevitable creep of capitalism and Westernisation is beginning. With us we bring our values, our behaviours and our media. It will all change and go the same way as the rest of the world. But for the moment the people are friendly, unpretentious and seemingly quite spiritual.

Buddhism rules supreme in Burma, and so the Buddha can be seen everywhere. I often wonder if the Buddha would've wanted all this fuss made. As a man who, as it is told, was the son of a prince, was brought up with every material need catered for and who subsequently renounced it all for a life of selfless devotion and meditation it seems a bit of a contradiction to his philosophy to then glorify him in as much glitz and gold iconography as possible. I don't think the Buddha would've appreciated the sentiment, although probably he would've been all zen about it, on second thoughts. Still, it reflects the one universal and paradoxical truth about religion, which is that people will use it for their own gain. In principal spirituality is great. In practice it gets corrupted very easily by people who clearly don't get it, or do get it but couldn't care less. C'est la vie.

Speaking of French, I had no idea that the French controlled so much of Asia. Whilst the Brits probably took first prize for sheer land mass, the French didn't do badly either. Most of south east Asia and bits of China were, at one point or another, under French rule. It shows today in the presence of patisseries in Vietnam, bistros in Laos, that sort of thing. But not in Burma particularly, where I don't think the French had much influence. Anyway, but as I say Buddhism, and particularly Theravada Buddhism, is the main religion here so, having checked into our charming little 1950's style guesthouse (the Motherland Inn 2) we went to the main attraction of the city- the Shewedagon Pagoda, a glorious Buddhist shrine with a myriad of golden stupas and constant Buddhist incantations and chanting that, after a few hours, make your head feel like it's full of cotton-wool.

The Shewedagon Pagoda in Yangon.

As dusk falls

At night. Truly stunning lit up.

The ritual of washing the buddha at the Shewedagon pagoda

Sweepers at the Shewedagon pagoda. Keeping everyone's feet clean!

We spent ages talking with some Burmese students who wanted to practice their English with us. This has been such a feature of this trip actually. Friendly people who just want the chance to interact with you and learn your language. I was suspicious of it to start with. I thought they must want to sell me something at least, but no. It really seems that English as a language is spreading through the world as the de facto second language choice for many people, seen as it is as the common semantic denominator. If it isn't, and I admit my observations are confounded by my own subjectivity, then English is definitely the traveler's language, at least in places I went. As I write this a Burmese woman and a German man are trying to communicate with each other in faltering English, and the man is having a frantic side-conversation with his German buddies about what the word 'platform' means. I'm not sure I can help and sit watching with detached fascination, which is a position I often take in these situations. Actually, in general it has been amazing to see quite how well people of non-English or north American heritage speak English. I find it a little shaming. My grasp of French was just about good enough to muddle our way through Madagascar, and this is the only country I have needed to even attempt speaking another language. I have become quite used to the rather brazen assumption that even if someone doesn't speak English, launching into it on my part is a reasonable thing to do because it is the travelling lingua franca. I've lost count of the number of people who have started talking to me on the pretext of trying to improve their English. Whilst I am genuinely happy to do this, I am ashamed to say I have never done the reverse and in fact, would find it hard to swallow my pride in order to do so. There is a certain arrogance born of being in a position where something that comes to you naturally is the aspiration of many around you. A feeling of being the expert, 'in the know'. But it is only by chance that I am in this position and it certainly is not something I can say is a product of my own effort. So the pride is unfounded, and so is the arrogance with it. This point could be applied to many facets of knowledge I suppose. The chap I was talking to in the Shewedagon pagoda was a case in point. At the end he apologised profusely for his, to his mind, faltering English and went on to praise mine. In fact he was well on the way to becoming fluent and could also speak Chinese fluently. What an irony. Me the mono-linguist held in some sort of high esteem for happening to be English and thus fluent in English; him the polyglot who can speak three, with far more adeptness and verve for languages than I will ever have, apologising for his efforts. Funny old world.

Me and a couple of Burmese students at the Shewedagon pagoda. Him in the centre fluent also in Chinese and nearly fluent in English. Lovely chap.

Yangon as a city doesn't have much else to offer. It's slightly grim and dirty and everything looks very old, faded and disorganised. It was a bit reminiscent of Indian cities actually (but more organised than that)! Aside from the Shewedagon pagoda (which is spectacular enough to make up for it) there's nothing else of note to see. Markets, colonial style hotels, stupas, cafés and restaurant. A few forlorn looking memorial statues to this or that. Everything needs a lick of paint, and often much more. A couple of days after arriving we were off on a bus up the Mandalay expressway, to Inlé Lake.

Inlé lake is in the Shan state of Burma, which occupies most of the east of the country. We pulled into the town of Nyaungshwe at about 5am and were shunted off the bus seemingly in the middle of nowhere. It was cold! Thankfully an ever industrious Burmese tuktuk driver was there to transport us to our final destination, the Nawng Kham inn. Pitching up there at 5:30am we found the place silent and dark, the only person at the reception fast asleep in the back. The inn was full so there was nowhere for us to bed down for a few hours aside from the back seat of a car in the driveway. Lucky the door was unlocked! An hour or so later the sun woke us up. It was no longer cold. We were in Burma just before the monsoon and the temperature would regularly creep over 40ºC in the daytime. No wonder that the Burmese tend to shut everything down in the afternoon and sleep. It's too hot for anything else. Anyway, that eary in the morning we were able to watch the processions of monks going down the streets collecting food alms.

Buddhist monks collecting alms in Nyaungshwe

For a tourist hotspot, Nyaungshwe is a sleepy and still authentically Burmese feeling town. Daily life still trips along without much notice being taken of the tourists. It'll change soon because the town is the natural spring board for trips into Inlé Lake. As with most places in Burma, the place feels stuck in the past, drifting along at an antiquated pace and not really minding where life takes it.

For our first day we hired a couple of rickety old bikes complete with wicker baskets on the front and propelled our selves down the bumpy, unsealed dirt tracks that wind their way through Nyaungshwe and out into the countryside around the lake. Our destination was a hot springs about 10kms out of town. Why we chose to go to a hot springs in 40ºC heat is something that'll have to remain unexplained. The 40ºC heat probably had something to do with it though. It really muddles your head after a while. Anyway, an hour or so down these body jarring roads we came to the hot springs. No one else there. It was a very odd experience going from the scorching afternoon heat into a scorching bath of hot water. Not that pleasant really. But pleasant when you got out and the water evaporating off your skin in the hot breeze made you briefly feel refreshed and alive. Everything takes a long time in Burma and true to form this was the only thing we managed to fit in to the day. I think we fell asleep on the recliners in the shade. I've noticed that sleep and wakefulness seem to slide into each other when you're in heat like this. You don't exactly notice when you go to sleep or when you wake up. It all just seems to slide into one run after another of the same slightly dopey consciousness. Dreams merge with reality. Odd experience but not unpleasant if you relax into it.

The countryside outside of Nyaungshwe. Lots of paddy fields.

Sunset outside of Nyaungshwe

So, one day slides into the next and indeed the next day we had hired a long boat with a driver and a guide and were off up the river into the lake itself. Our guide was an interesting character, if only because he seemed to be immune to the heat. Wrapped up in an anorak and gloves when we met him in the morning, he proceeded to only top it off with a sun hat as the heat of the day became ever more relentless. Questioned on his apparently super-human abilities, he brushed it off by saying he didn't like being cold. I was melting in a T-shirt and shorts. Each to their own I guess.

Ski gloves in 40C heat...!

Off in the little long boats that cut through the water so gracefully. The lake is pretty huge, but much of it is quite shallow. The water is an inky blue-black colour and a quiet, slightly eerie mist hung over it when we were there. It is quiet. If the description of it seems serene, then that's because it is. Not much is going on, but it's all the better for that in many ways. In the shallows of the lake we came across the people who propel their boats along by rowing with one leg. It's a curious sight that I've never seen before, the inside of the lower leg wrapped around the oar and the boat propelled with a sort of twisting backward kick of the leg, the rower standing on the back of the boat. Curious. Onto the boats were being loaded large quantities of a sort of seaweed like plant that grows in the shallow water. This is then taken back to the outskirts of the village (the houses all being on stilts in the water) and used to create raised beds on which crops are grown. Quite neat really.

Long boat traffic jam in Nyaungshwe

Another tour boat going out onto Inle Lake. The boat occupants throwing scraps into the air and the seagulls diving and following them.

Fishing in the misty eeriness of Inle Lake

Collecting seaweed for use as crop beds in Inle Lake

And transporting it back to the village, the boat almost sinking, propelled with this strange one-legged rowing action.

Beds raised out of the lake water for crop growing

Stupas and wats on stilts could be seen in the distance. The village we drifted into was seemingly quiet. The kids can't play on the streets when the whole village is built on water. But you could see very young children propelling themselves around on boats. And dogs. Stuck in the houses on stilts. Not the best environment for a dog. And families peering out at us, returning our waves and smiles. The boat driver and our tour guide being who they were, and this being Asia, we were then taken to a series of 'authentic' village craft establishments that were really just cash cows. Still, if someone really does want to pay $60 for a scarf just because it's sitting in a craft shop in Inlé Lake who am I to argue? Maybe it represents a necessary redistribution of wealth, although I doubt the money would actually get to the people in the village. This is an issue in Burma, and something talked much about by visitors to the country. Your imperative, as a good tourist, is to try and make sure your tourist dollars go to the people on the street, and not end up in the pockets of the generals that rule the country. You can do this to an extent by not pre-organising anything before you arrive in the country and not staying in hotels with obvious government affiliations. But it's easier said than done, especially when information about where to stay and what to do is comparatively hard to come by.

Coming into a village built on stilts in the shallows of Inle Lake

Often built surprisingly high. The endless uses of bamboo.

A Burmese Venice. Local transport options are limited!

But the kids get about too

Pace of life particularly hectic here!

Anyway, so whether the craft shops we were taken to in the village have a connection with the government or not was hard to tell. We went to a fabric shop, which aside from the usual silk and cotton paraphernalia (which definitely was not locally sourced) sold garments made of a fabric derived from lotus flower plants. It uses the stems of the plants, which when you snap them in half, leaves a thin fibre that can be pulled out and loomed together into a thread. A painstaking manual process, and to be honest the end result didn't feel particularly great, but it was interesting to see. This at least seemed quite genuine. Next up to a cigar making house where little handmade cigars are rolled together by using banana leaves. Tobacco combined with aniseed and something else that I can't remember. And then an umbrella making house and then a lacquerware house and then a silverware house. All of which coincidentally sold similar souvenir trinkets and other bits and pieces. It being Burma though, these trinkets were often quite unusual and I found myself picking up a few of the more eye-catching things to send back home. It's always hard to know about the authenticity of what you're buying. The sellers often spin you a fantastical story about anything you pick up which leaves you feeling like you're probably being cheated, or at least that the thing you've picked up most probably does not have the heritage and antecedents they claim it does. Ultimately they are objects to jog my memory of this trip, in the future, or as gifts for other people so my reaction at the time probably doesn't matter. It just annoys me a bit and I sometimes wish I was a traveller back in the 1940s or something, when travelling really was an unusual (and more dangerous) pastime, but in compensation you were experiencing something that few other people would ever have got to see, and experiencing it authentically too.

One of the more diverting attractions at the umbrella house

A brass mask. Surprisingly heavy!

A Burmese lady with a long neck, forced over years by the addition of sequential brass ringlets round her neck.

The sights and sounds of Burma are perhaps less impressive than the overall ambience of the place, and this I think is also the hardest thing to convey in words to someone who's reading this and hasn't been there. As I said before, whilst the military junta in charge is doubtless guilty of many transgressions against their people, perhaps an unintentional side effect is that the country has remained relatively immune to the changes happening in the rest of the world. And it is this, ironically, that perhaps people like me come to experience, quite apart from the sights themselves. What is life like without electricity/telephones/televisions/the internet/BBC news/the X Factor/prepackaged sandwiches/9-5, etc. etc? Well here you can experience it to an extent, because many people do not have these things (or need them). And the experience of life, as far as I could get into it, was a much more serene, less stressful, but perhaps also less exciting trip. The order of the day is growing food, eating, drinking, and looking after others. There is little pride, pretension or prurience, no vanity, ostentation or melodrama, just simple, honest people trying to get by, one day at a time. And that is really quite beautiful when you come from a materially obsessed society where people are more interested in the image of themselves as they would like to be, rather than who they actually are. That's a particular indictment of my generation, and by inference myself, and it was an emotionally salutary experience to be briefly exposed to people who have never had the time or the reason to give a damn about any of the things which we seem to get so wound up about in Western society. And amen to that. Thank you for showing me that life, when you strip all the pretension and bullshit away, is very simple, and in its simplicity, quite beautiful. And bloody hard, too.

This lady certainly seems to know what makes life pleasurable!

So, back from Inlé Lake and onto our next destination in Burma, the plains of Bagan. Travelling from place to place in Burma is not such an easy experience. The roads aren't good and neither are the busses. Going north from Yangon is fine as this is the one road that has had some money ploughed into it, but going anywhere else is a minefield of unsealed roads, rough tracks and bouncing, bum bruising journeys on busses that may or may not make it driven by drivers who may or may not get you there. Fearing for my life to start with, after a while I learnt to relax and they all tended to blur into one. Writing this now six weeks after we left, I can't really remember the bus journey to Bagan at all, which probably means it was fairly horrendous and I took a Xanax to take the edge off the experience. Benzodiazepines (drugs like Valium) really are a traveller's best friend. And ear plugs.

An unusual moth I found one day

My memory restarts when we got off the bus at Nyaung U. Competing for our Kyets (the local Burmese currency) were two guys, one with a rickshaw and another with a horse and cart. We chose the horse and cart. Of course! The horse's name was Madonna. I don't remember the driver's name but we got to know him quite well as he and Madonna took us round the temples for the next three days. Exuberant, impulsive, happy-go-lucky, child-like in a way, he was also clearly of an addictive persuasion because as soon as we had paid him a bit of money he rushed over to the nearest shop and started drinking beer at a fearsome pace. Waiting for us whilst we went on a little jaunt up the Mekong river, we returned to find him rolling drunk and in no fit state to command a horse. Thankfully the horse was wiser than him, and knew the way home. Quite a character. Lovely to trot about in a horse and cart all day.

Madonna, me and our driver in the and cart

Driver getting progressively more animated as he gets more drunk. He finally persuaded me to give him my sunglasses.

Staying at 'The Large Golden Pot' inn in Nyaung U was notable only for the name of the place really. Accommodation is not often great in Burma, but you don't expect it to be either. Running water is a luxury here, as is electricity. The same goes for a bug free bed. So long as a place has a bed with no biting insects in the mattress, and it doesn't smell of sewers (probably one of the more frequent problems) I can cope with almost anything else. We did pretty well all in all. Partly this was because we were visiting in the low season so could afford to be picky and partly it was just plain old good luck. Now that it is comparatively easy to visit Burma the number of visitors has shot up, and the tourist industry, we were led to understand, has not yet caught up. We had no problems just turning up and finding somewhere to stay but sometimes places we walked into were fully booked up, even though it was low season, so the signs are there. Notwithstanding this, it is hard to book stuff ahead in Burma anyway. The phones often don't work and almost none of the places we stayed at had internet presences. It'll change quite quickly now I expect, but if you're planning on going, and want to keep your tourist dollars out of the general's hands, it would seem reasonable to just turn up. Prices too were not what we were led to expect. Horror stories on the net about even the cheapest accommodation being 50-80 US dollars did not materialise at all and it was hard to see what all the fuss was about. It is a cheap place to visit. Anyway, just go if you can. In 10 years the place will be swamped, and it won't be the beautiful, backward place that it is today.

Transport options in Bagan!

Vehicles are often just cobbled together from parts of others.

Digressions aside, the plains of Bagan are one of the most beautiful places I have been on this trip, and worth the visit to Burma on their own. 4,000 Buddhist temples and stupas litter the plains of what once was the centre of the Bagan empire, all built in a 200 year period leading up to 1287AD, when the Mongols invaded and the empire collapsed. Every other vestige of this ancient civilisation having long since been eroded away by time, these 4,000 temples, dotted over this vast, dry plain, are an absolutely arresting sight, especially at dusk, when the fading, orange light and dull, heady remains of the heat of the day makes for a overall picture so tranquil, serene and downright spiritual, that I imagine even Buddha himself would've been impressed enough out of his transcendental state to pass comment.

Sunset over the plains of Bagan. Scores of Buddhist temples litter the horizon. A mesmerizing and stunning sight.

Off around the temples with Madonna and the cart along the dusty tracks. Often we were the only people around.

Temples...

Temples.....

More temples!

More temples

A man hand-painting and selling sand paintings and cloth paintings in one of the temples.

Did the pictures convince you to come? If not I'll only add, a bit obviously, that it is a hundred times better when you are actually there. And added to all the other quirks of Burma it really adds up to a trip with more flavour than a Thai green curry. The salt in the soup.

Time rapidly passing, and with our flight out of Yangon and through to Udap Thani looming, we decided to book a couple of internal flights to get to and from our final destination, Ngapali beach. It would take, otherwise, two days of busses and rickshaws to get there, and we would arrive only to have to set off again back to Yangon. Internal flights in Burma are a bit like in Madagascar. You need to go to the office directly to book them, and pay in cash. Actually we were fortunate enough to land in a guesthouse where they took care of the process for you, so it was all painless, but unless you use a specialised tour operator who does it for you, don't expect to be able to book internal flights within Burma online. It just doesn't work yet. Still, they all ran to time, in pretty ancient but serviceable prop planes, and it saved us a massive amount of time. Ngapali beach was gorgeous, and it felt a little like being back in Goa. It's where the rich Burmese choose to get away from it all, but even accounting for this there is not much there (I don't suppose there are that many rich Burmese yet). A string of guesthouses, some posh spas and a few restaurants, along a beach that rivals any I've seen on this trip. Chilling out for three days, interspersed with some snorkelling, gave us a chance to build up our mental reserves for the next stage of the journey, through Laos.

Sunset at Ngapali beach. Ro on a recliner in the foreground.

An island with a restaurant. And nothing else.

So goodbye Burma. What a ride! A beautiful, beguiling place, a world apart from home and worth coming just for that reason alone. I wish we had had longer there. It sounds odd, but a year doesn't actually translate into much time if you want to cover a lot of ground. Two weeks here, a month there. Two weeks is enough for a taste, a month enough time to appreciate, but to really savour a country, and to understand it and its people, you need many months at least. Maybe years. You could spend your life seeing the world. And all I know is that the more you saw, the more you would realise you hadn't seen. What a truly vast place the earth is, and how infinitesimally small it is in relation to the rest of the observable universe. Mind boggling. I'll leave you with a few more random pictures. Bye for now! xx

Little boys with monk's robes try to persuade me to give them money in Yangon.

A bookstore in Yangon

Setting of into Inle Lake. The hat may look silly, but it folded up in to a flat triangle and kept its shape. It was the most practical sunhat I have ever bought. $1.