A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Kyiaktiyo, Myanmar

I had been travelling half the day before I hit a major snag. By bus and truck I had made it to Kinpon village at the base of the mountain with the Golden Rock temple, but it seems that during the rainy season there just aren't many trucks going the rest of the way. So I sat myself down on a concrete bench in what seemed to be the women and children section of the truck stop and began to wait for us to reach the magic threshhold for the truck.

It was an easy trip up until that point. At the tea shop in the morning I met a former teacher with good English who helpfully got me on the right bus, one of the local variety in which you crawl over sacks of grain to get to your seat with the exposed springs. The next step, getting off the bus at the right village, was made easier by the fact that my guidebook has a big color photo of the Golden Rock on the cover. As usual, pointing and looking inquisitive did the trick, and a crowd of fellow passengers not only made sure I got off at the right time, but also found me a personal escort to guide me through the village to the trucks that would take me to the base of the mountain. Thankfully, my escorts also arranged for me to sit in the front seat with the driver for this leg -- there were already people hanging off the back and sides of the truck when I arrived. There is no concept of maximum occupancy in Myanmar.

So in Kinpon I waited with the Burmese ladies, played with the children, and began to get another taste of Rainy Season Tourism. When I arrived in the village the weather was decent; cloudy with some sunbreaks, as we say in Seattle, but here was the key thing -- I could see the golden rock from the village. That is critical -- if I could see the rock from the village, it should mean I would be able to see the village from the rock.

Unfortunately, we waited for 90 minutes for the truck to fill up. And this was no pitiful Toyota pickup this time, oh no. It was dump truck sized and wouldn't move without a minumum of 35 people. Mind you, many more than 35 could fit on this truck -- in Myanmar, a unit of public transportation is never too full to add more passengers or cargo. On my trip back, for example, we carried maybe 40 people plus 20 huge baskets full of durian (the stinkiest fruit on God's earth -- reportedly smells like rotting flesh, though I'm no expert on rotting flesh). There were six guys actually perched atop the cab and several hanging on the sides for dear life as we corkscrewed down the mountain at top speed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The truck, which winds up the mountain for 45 minutes, doesn't take you to the Golden Rock itself. It takes you to a parking lot surrounded by restaurant shacks from which you walk steeply uphill for another hour or so before you reach the government outpost where they charge you $6 for the privilege (this was one of the most annoying things about Myanmar -- very high admission prices which go not to the temple but directly to the repressive government of amoral generals. It became a bit of a game to avoid these fees in various ways.) The hike was a good workout, but I could see as I sweated my way up, swatting aside the sedan chair guys who were waiting for me to collapse in a panting heap, that I had waited for the truck for just a little too long. The fog lowered, and it started to rain. Incidentally, why do those sedan chair guys all stick so close to me on these hikes? I must look like I'm about to have a coronary.

After parking myself uninvited at the government checkpoint to wait out a sudden downpour (the guys there were quite friendly and bored with their jobs -- I found that most government workers loathed the government), I climbed the last bit, several precarious sets of stairs and a long marble walkway among temples and monuments. This was only precarious because of the requirement that you do the whole thing barefoot; with a little traction that marble wouldn't have been nearly so treacherous.

By this point, the temple complex was entirely fogged in. I gingerly made my way along, having painfully learned the lesson of slippery marble the day before, and just as I was thinking "hey, I could walk right past this damned rock and never even see it" I heard a loud "Hello Hello" from a young man who was running across the plaza toward me. Damned surefooted Asians. Anyway, I had indeed just passed the Golden Rock, so I came on back. It is indeed a cool thing, though it certainly doesn't glow in the rain like it reportedly does in the sunshine. Its billing as a "wonder of the world" on the t-shirts may be a bit of a stretch as well. The gilded rock, with a little stupa on top, is perched impossibly on another rock on a cliffside. The area is prone to earthquakes, and it is indeed remarkable that it hasn't just toppled over at some point. Here's a picture: Kyiaktiyo.

Despite the somewhat disappointing rock, no journey is wasted in Myanmar. The village at the base of the mountain was delightful, and even though they must see a fair number of tourists there, they aren't a bit jaded. Men, women and children alike say "hello" and "bye bye" somewhat interchangeably, and as I walked by mothers would point me out to their kids. The village is poor. In fact you can tell how far Myanmar is behind the other Asian countries by how few metal or tile roofs they have. The housing and shops in the southern country side are still, for the most part, built with bamboo, spare boards and stuff from the jungle; very picturesque for tourists, but I bet in the rainy season they really wish for a better roof.


Copyright 2003 Katy Warren


posted by Katy at 8:45 PM

 
My favorite headline from Thursday's Bangkok Post:

ACCENT NOW ON NIPPLES AND GENITALS.

And my favorite quote from the article, from the Thai Interior deputy permanent secretary on massage parlors:

"It turns out that some of them provide commercial sex to customers." Good to see that Thai authorities are right on top of things in Bangkok.
posted by Katy at 8:08 PM

 
Bago, Myanmar

My arrival in Bago, a town a couple hours northeast of Yangon, was greeted by a flock of hovering, chattering trishaw drivers. I went with Khin, the one with the best English, who said the magic words: 3-dollar hotel room. It was quite a blessing that I happened upon Khin (or vice versa, to be more precise). After checking into the hotel (about what you'd expect for $3) I contracted with Khin to wheel me around town for the afternoon in classic colonial style, all for a criminally low $2.

I should first explain what a trishaw looks like. There is a varation on this trishaw/rickshaw theme in every country of Southeast Asia, always involving a bicycle or motorbike and a place for one or more people to sit. Tourists and locals alike use them for short trips around town, and you will often see them carrying cargo as well. The Burmese version has the seat affixed to the side of a very sturdy bicycle. It's actually two seats, one facing forward and one backward, and these seats are definitely made for those with narrow hips. I squeezed myself in like a sausage.

So we set off to explore Bago. Did I mention it was raining? I suspect that if it hadn't been I wouldn't have leaped at his offer. There's only so much walking in the rain that I can take. It was still wet, huddled under my disintegrating Chinese umbrella in what basically amounts to a bicycle sidecar, but I covered a lot more ground in one afternoon than I would have on foot.

Our first stop was the largest monestary in Myanmar, housing over a thousand monks (though when in Mandalay I also walked past "the largest monestary in Myanmar", so this could be local hyperbole). These wasn't an especially religious monestary, as it was basically a school where all the students live like monks. And a more bizarre teaching method I have yet to see -- hundreds of sienna-robed, hairless monks sitting in lines on the floor of a large sanctuary reading aloud from Buddhist scriptures. The weird part was that they weren't reading in unison; they all went at their own personal pace, and much of it was sung or chanted. Loud, but eerily musical at the same time.

With my typical grace I managed to slip on a slightly angled section of pavement and fall flat on my back during our monestary visit. I was lid out absolutely prone on the wet tiles, wind knocked out of me and hoping I didn't have a concussion. Khin chattered nervously while miniature monks started to gather and stare in fascination. Eventually I hobbled to my feet with a new respect for wet marble. Hours later, despite multiple Mandalay Beers, I still had a headache, but the real pain was in my tailbone, which I knew the moment I tried once again to squeeze my generous backside into the trishaw seat . Those things are not meant for plus-size women with painful posteriors.

Still, I soldiered on. Our next stop was another monestary, this one (presumably temporarily) monk-free, but overloaded with gilded Buddhas. After that, Schwemawdaw Pagoda, the tallest stupa in Myanar at 114 meters. It's anotehr one buit to enshirine hair relics of the Buddha, and as an added bonus this one reportedly houses a sacred tooth as well. Mind you, you never see these hairs or teeth or whatever. I have no idea if they are even accessible. The most interesting thing about this stupa is that after the whole thing was destroyed by a 1917 earthquake they rebuilt the whole thing but incorporated a big chunk of the rubble from the original, kind of tacked on to one side. The stupa itself is very beautiful, don't get me wrong, gold and very well designed, but the asymetry of the added chunk gave Schwemawdaw more character and you get a bit sick of perfect golden stupas after a while.

Next stop was a cheroot factory -- a welcome shift from the religious to the secular. Cheroots, which are like small cigars, are more common than cigarettes in Burma, a country whose inhabitants are still so poor that most smokers buy their cigarettes or cheroots individually rather than in packs. Though cheroots are smoked by many, they are especially favored by wrinkled little old women at the market. The cheroot "factory" was the open first floor of a rickety wooden house in a Bago side street. One side of the room held huge woven bags of tobacco, the other had 15 women sitting on the floor next to low round tables rolling cigars. A girl typically rolls a thousand a day, working 7am to 5pm. Local women who can't spend hours at the factor roll a few hundred in their free time at home as a part-time job. They use d real leaves, not paper, that were cut to size and soaked in water to increase flexibility. The filter is made of corn husk and newspaper (and let me just say that the New Light of Myanmar newspaper fully deserves this treatment) and the filling is three-quarters tobacco, one quarter wood shavings, and I think they add or soak in tamarind and other flavors. Rice glue sticks it all together -- a 100% natural, carcinogenic product.

After a couple more buddhist sites we walked into a village (past an all-monk road crew -- you don't see those in Seattle, let me tell you) to watch women weaving the longyi, the sarong-like national costume of Myanmar. It's basically a tube of material, and unlike India and Thailand where this traditional garment is no longer in general use, Myanmar has been so isolated from the outside world that they haven't yet succumed to the lure of trousers. Both women and men alike wear the longyi, though in slightly different ways. Women fold the material over and tuck it in like a wraparound skirt, and their longyis are generally flowered or have designs of various types. Men's longyi are more complicated - they fold from both sides to create a complicated, decorative knot in the middle. Even in Yangon (described to me by one Burmese as the most cosmopolitan city in Myanmar) I'd estimate that 90% of the women and 80% of the men wore these garments, and it's even more common in the countryside. It's a delightful thing to see, graceful and lovely and so very foreign to western eyes.

Well, that was my day! Tomorrow I'll write about the Golden Rock Pagoda, a rock that's not so golden when it's pouring down rain.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 9:40 PM

 
Yangon, Myanmar

As is perhaps fitting in a country as religious as Myanmar, my first day was spent visiting buddhist temples.

Shwedagon Pagoda was a truly amazing place, clearly the sight to see in Yangon and indeed in the whole of Myanmar. Built on a hill in the middle of the city, it has four massive staircases (and two elevators for the feeble and the military) leading up to a platform covering over 12 acres with temples, stupas (solid semi- conical pointy monuments to the dead or to house Buddha relics), grand walkways and shrines surrounding the massive golden stupa. This stupa, rebuilt in 1769 and created to house eight hairs of the Buddha, is regilded every year and positively glows. In 1995 it was estimated to have accumulated 53 metric tons of gold leaf, not including the 13,000 solid gold plates covering the banana bud shaped top just under the Burmese umbrella-like thing that crowns all pagodas. The gilded umbrella itself is studded with over 5000 diamonds and 1400 other stones, including a 76 carat diamond. All that is for the benefit of the Buddha alone, since at 100 yards tall, it's impossible to make out the details on top with the naked eye.

Although its artistic and architectural features are most impressive, the best thing about Shwedagon is that it hosts thousands of worshippers every day. Families come to pray, listen to monks, and have lunch. The place is a constantly moving and bowing anthill of saronged Burmese making offerings to any one of the hundreds of altars and temples available. Many come after work to relax and unwind and see the sunset glint off the gilded monuments. Monks hold impromtu services for a handful or a crowd, and tourists mill about and soak up the atmosphere. It's a fabulous place, and perfectly captures Burmese life -- very religious, very family oriented, very simple.

My second temple of the day was decidedly weirder, but equally full of families. The Botataung Pagoda, alongside the Irawaddy River in downtown Yangon, also boasts a giant golden stupa and a number of Buddha hair relics. There the similarity ends. During World War II the RAF bombed the historical stupa at Botataung into rubble. When they rebuilt, they decided to go for a "happy blend of the ancient and of the ultramodern," according to the handy English brochure I got for my $2.

The weird part of this stupa wasn't the outside, which looked like a standard gilded bell-shaped monument with the usual stylized umbrella on top. The difference here was that they made the new and improved Botataung hollow, so you can walk right into it through a glittery antechamber. Being Buddhist and Asian they didn't stint on the shiny stuff inside, either. It was set up a bit like a hall of mirrors, with many angled walls and display cases holding Buddhas and statues of stupas and coin trees. The walls were made of thousands of small mirrors angled in various directions; the whole thing was gloriously tacky.

There aren't many tourists in Myanmar, and American tourists are even more rare and interesting to the Burmese. I had my own entourage throught my visit -- several children dogged my footsteps, repeating my every word in English. A monk was also intrigued by my presence -- he gave my whole arm a good squeezy feel. I'm thinking I'm going to need to do some upper body toning if this happens too often.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 3:53 AM

 
Yangon, Myanmar

Just south of the Sule Pagoda, a big gilded temple in the center of town littered with praying and lounging locals, there is a large British colonial-style building that I took to be City Hall. The street in front of it is blocked off, heavily guarded and punctuated with hundreds of cement-filled barrels and barbed wire blockades. Signs in Burmese and English identify it as a restricted area and warn against photographs.

Naturally I was a bit alarmed that a government building would need to be so heavily guarded. The place is practically an armed fortress just meters from a small playground and a constantly shifting crew of soccer-playing kids in the adjacent street. It wasn't until hours later that I looked more closely at my map. The fortress is not, in fact, the Yangon City Hall, but rather houses the U.S. Embassy. My suspicion is that the heavy duty security around it is not to protect from angry Burmese citizens, but from the Burmese government itself, who deeply fears and hates the U.S..

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 3:53 AM

 
Yangon, Myanmar (aka Rangoon, Burma)

My first evening in Yangon I stupidly forgot my umbrella. Actually it was worse than that -- I remembered as I walked out of the hotel and felt the sprinkling, but as I was out of shape and staying in a windowless 4th floor walk-up, I immediately adopted a "hope for the best" attitude that went horribly, horribly wrong.

The good part of it was that I discovered that the Burmese are quite helpful and friendly and find sodden, dripping foreigners very approachable even when walking at a rapid clip. Before the rain started I was approached by only two people. The first was a very sweet girl who thought I looked confused while wandering through a temple (which I indeed was). The second was a long man who invited me to his monestary to practice English. (Is that a line? Hard to tell. He didn't look at all monklike.) After the rain, and in the dark no less, fully seven men offered assistance of various kinds (not that kind, get your mind out of the gutter). Admittedly, the first one wanted to sell me bus, train or planetickets at a markup, so he wasn't exactly The Good Samaritan. My second companion I couldn't get rid of. He saw me scurrying by and gave chase, determined to share his umbrella and make whatever conversation is possible when no language is shared. He did have some English, but not enough to understand "Why are you here" or "where are you going", so we adopted the English country village lane mode of discourse and talked about the weather. Or rather, we repeatedly exchanged exciting snippets of dialogue like:

Umbrellaboy: Rainy rainy!
Me: Yes, rain good! [I often find myself inadvertently speaking pidgin English in these situations]
Umbrellaboy: Rainy good good!

Sure, it was no My Dinner with Andre, but we were communicating, I had half an umbrella, and he was clearly thrilled to be providing it.

My next assistance came under a cement overhang, where Umbrellaboy and I paused to take a peek at my map. I had taken a somewhat circuitous route when leaving the hotel, had failed to note the address, and wasn't at all confident of my ability to find it easily during a downpour in a city with no operational streetlights. I was quite a sight by this point, hair cemented to head, clothes dripping in tandem with the raindrops, glasses uselessly opaque with fog. Apparently I wasn't as scary as I thought, as several men immediately came over to check out my map, make small talk, and give us directions. They eyed Umbrellaboy with some curiosity and I explained that I had no idea why he was following me. They accepted that without question; perhaps inexplicable whims are commonplace in Yangon.

Several blocks later another map check brought us two more helpers, a father and son who had learned English in Bombay. They examined the map and insisted guiding us personally, so I arrived back at the Daddy's Home Hotel streaming wet with three local escorts. Lord only knows what the hotel staff made of the situation. My only comment as I picked up my key at the front desk was a smiling "Forgot my umbrella!"

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 8:56 PM

 
I'm back, and better than ever! Ok, maybe not better, but just as good as last month, and I've learned that I can live without internet access.

I'd like to wholeheartedly recommend Myanmar as a vacation destination for the more adventurous among you. You may be shaking your heads in skepticism, but it's really a great place, about which I'll tell you more over the next couple weeks. You can't expect me to write everything right off the bat, especially given how lazy I was about writing things while actually in the country and how backward the areas I'll be in over the next couple of weeks (southern Laos).

First a little background, since Myanmar hasn't exactly captured the imagination of American tourists thus far. In fact, in 4 weeks in the country I met only one other American, and she was actually living in Australia. The thing is, the only information we get about Myanmar is bad, and justifiably so since the government there is perhaps the worst in the world, or at the very least is in the top five.

So here's a pitifully brief recap of thousands of years of Burmese history, based solely on my faulty memory as I didn't bring my guidebook with me to the internet cafe. For thousands of years various kings held sway over most of Myanmar, at times stretching into present-day Thailand, and famously reducing Thailand's capital Ayuthaya to gilded rubble in the mid 1700's. The Thais are quite bitter about that little episode to this day, and the Burmese don't have very nice things to say about the Thais either. Anyway, these kings, particularly the ones during the Bagan era in the 1000's or so, cemented the hold of Theravada Buddhism over the country, but with an added animist element that gives Burmese buddhism a very different flavor than the rest of SE Asia. This is not to say that a single line of kings ruled over Myanmar for the many centuries. There was quite a bit of conflict as the various ethnic groups in the area -- Bamar (from which "Burma" was coined), Mon, Shan, Karen, etc -- fought for supremacy and control.

In the 1800's the kings got too big for their britches, moving the capital this way and that around the Mandalay area, declaring their invincibility and wasting precious resources that they should have been spending to shore up their lazy defense department in preparation for the Anglo-Burmese Wars. The British cleaned Myanmar's clock in a series of small wars, the result of which was the addition of Myanmar, renamed Burma, to the Raj, and the final movement of the capital to the previously sleepy southern delta town of Yangon, renamed Rangoon. (The British, with their legendary prowess at foreign languages, renamed every major town in the country according to the way they heard it, which of course wasn't at all close to the actual name in most cases. For especially difficult towns they just scrapped the old name altogether and replaced them with names honoring colonial officials. I can actually sympathize with this strategy, having just spent several days in Pyin Oo Lwin.)

For some years the British reigned fairly peacefully, controlling all of central and southern Myanmar and reaching agreements with the largest ethnic minorities around the edges (Shan, Karen) to allow them relative autonomy and control of their own regions. Still, the Burmese wanted out from under the Raj -- so unreasonable, all these obstreperous colonies fighting for independence. During the late 1930's General Aung San and a group of other Burmese officials went to Japan to get revolutionary training and the help of the Japanese in overthrowing the British. They played into Japanese plans, as the Japanese were eager to get a foothold in South Asia, and Myanmar would provide valuable ports and land access between SE Asia and India. It was a valuable property, and the blood flowed accordingly during WWII. It is said that nearly 2/3 of Japanese war casualties occured in Myanmar.

Though he and his army assisted the Japanese in invading Burma in 1942 and fighting against the allies until 1945, Aung San eventually saw the writing on the wall, and switched his army's allegiance to the British. In 1947, he negotiated independence from Britain and held elections. Sadly, he and six colleagues were assassinated later that year by a rival, before the country's independence went into full effect.

Despite this tragedy, Myanmar saw a few years of relative peace (in a typical tumultuous 3rd World style) until 1962, when Ne Win, a general who was not quite as committed to democracy as Aung San, staged a coup in which the parliament was disbanded and all members were summarily jailed (and remained so for 7 years). Through his "Burmese Way to Socialism" Ne Win nationalized all businesses, from the largest multinational down to the smallest fruit stall, and collectivized agriculture under the control of military members with little or no interest in the subject. Myanmar, which until 1962 had been the most prosperous country in SE Asia, began to starve.

By 1988 the situation was dire. The infrastructure was in shambles, the education system practically nonexistent, food scarce, and laws and regulations harshly enforced. Students and workers took to the street in protest, calling general strikes and demanding changes. Aung San Suu Kyi, General Aung San's daughter, led the charge, giving speeches throughout the country advocating peaceful resistance and rallying desperate citizens to the democratic cause. At first things seemed to be improving; greater press freedoms were allowed, Ne Win announced his resignation. It was a false hope, however. The old general was still pulling the strings, and at a massive demonstration in Rangoon in September 1988 the army moved in and slaughtered thousands. After touring the country to wildly enthusiastic crowds with her democracy message, Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest.

After losing the 1991 elections to the National League for Democracy (which they refused to recognize), the generals about-faced on the Burmese Way to Socialism and decided to embrace capitalism instead, slipping into bed with the Chinese and starting to ship Myanmar's natural resources (teak, rubies, jade, heroin) out through its northern border. The Democracy Movement continues to this day, and as recently as 3 months ago a demonstration was brutally supressed by the regime, with up to 200 beaten to death by stick-wielding thugs dressed as monks. Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested again, and has not been seen since that day.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 9:19 PM