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

 
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