Burma

Joe and I are big fans of the Lonely Planet guide books, preferring to be charmed rather than puzzled, for example, by the Burma guide's description of a woebegone, tumble-down little burg called Hpa-an as "small-town Myanmar at its finest." Granted, it didn't help that we were there on one of the hot season's rare cool and rainy days. No town looks good with its mascara running. But even minus the shivering homeless dogs in the restaurant entryways, Hpa-an seemed not so fine to us. Optimistically, Lonely Planet must have been looking beyond the potholed streets and dilapidated colonial-era shop houses to the animating spirit of the town's inhabitants, which, as in the rest of the country, is a mix of quiet humor, vast reserves of patience, and faint but lasting hope. Burma's fineness is mainly in its people, or at least its non-military people.

A man goes into a bank. He wants to withdraw money from his account. At a private bank, this simple transaction would take a few minutes. But this man lives in a town like Hpa-an, too small to have a private bank branch, so his bank is run by the Myanmar military government. Withdrawing $500 takes four hours. Four bureaucratic steps are necessary for completing the transaction, each requiring the attention of a different bank employee. The problem is, the politically connected employees make only $60 a month, so they could care less about pesky clients. While customers wait, they chat on the phone. One or another may hang up a "back in a while" sign and head out for tea. Or they play video games on their computers. The Burmese friend who told us the story of the four-hour withdrawal---explaining why he was a bit rushed the evening he met us---said he factors experiences like this into his daily schedule. Where the generals rule, it's a way of life.

Showing casual contempt for its citizens isn't the worst thing the Burmese junta does; I'll list some far more serious practices in a posting next week after trekker Joe rejoins me here in Bangkok. Meanwhile, I can report that we had a good visit, reconnected happily with old friends, and even covered some new territory.

We had never been to Pindaya. It's a town in the Shan hills not far from Inle Lake that was holding its annual Full Moon festival the day we flew north from Yangon, and Htun Htun Naing, our Inle guide, had arranged a ride for us. You're up around 4,000 feet here, so the air is crisp and the sky as white as grandma's linen. The two-hour drive took us over a decrepit one-lane blacktop road with rocks and mud on either side and oncoming traffic competing for use of the bits of pavement. The rule seemed to be, might makes right. We gave way to buses and shooed motorbikes into the dust. The Shan plateau here consists of a series of dry low mountains and cultivated rolling hills that reminded me of upland Eritrea. There were fields of hay and vegetables and---shade for the farmers---occasional lone mint trees, looking shapely and Magritte-like. Closer to the road were banyans, under whose massive canopies rested the somber festivals-goers whose cheap and unreliable Chinese motorbikes had broken down.

The road was thick with pilgrims headed for Pindaya's Shwe Oo Min Pagoda and then the nearby festival. What amounted to a forty-mile long convoy included cars, motorbikes, buses stuffed with people, trucks with pilgrims clinging like geckos to every available surface, and tractors pulling carts containing what looked like entire village populations. Most of the pilgrims were Shan or Danu, with a smattering of Pa-O tribespeople; this was also their national day, so the Pa-O were out and about in their distinctive black outfits and colorful terrycloth (towels, in fact) headdresses.

The Shwe Oo Min pagoda is at the entrance to a series of limestone caves that contain over 80,000 golden Buddha statues. Legend says that seven princesses who came down from heaven were caught in a storm and sought refuge in the caves, where they were attacked and held captive by a giant spider. A prince who was an expert archer rescued the princesses. Images of the prince and the spider abound in the pagoda (later Joe will get some pictures up), but it's the 80,000 golden Buddhas that really grab your attention. The lighting is unsubtle and the mob scene in the cave on festival day chaotic and frightening---I felt like some English dowager standing there exclaiming "My word!" as I was pummeled. But the place is resplendent with real gold leaf---tons of it, it looks like---and the effect is dazzling and somehow---the Buddha's image nearly always accomplishes this---reassuring.

The festival, on the edge of town, was like a big country fair. There were all manner of snacks, gambling---what looked like bocce ball for money---and consumer items. For 50 cents, I bought a DVD---"Classics Film---World Classics Film is Carefully Chosen"---that included "Cheonnyeon Ho" and "Detective Dee." We had the most fun watching festival rides that had a Burmese twist. The kiddie car ride had no motor, just a muscular lad who placed the frightened tots on their seats and then set the thing spinning manually before stepping back.
Even more entertaining was the non-motorized ferris wheel. It was about half the size of an American wheel. The seats were tubular boxes that could hold four people. Since the device had no motor, laws of physics were employed. A young man heaved the thing to and fro manually until each of the ten boxes was occupied. Then, astonishingly, with a key box poised at the 11 o'clock position, six teenaged boys clambered acrobatically up the outer wood and steel structure and hung onto that box. When the sixth boy was in place, they all leaned in the same direction, and the box plunged earthward, setting the wheel in rapid motion. When the key box whizzed past the ground, each of the boys leaped off effortlessly, landing like Olympic athletes. We awarded each of them a score of ten. The perfectly balanced wheel then spun around several times on its own volition until it lost momentum and creaked to a halt. What a show! And talk about green energy.

There were just a few other Western tourists at Pindaya, which was surprising because overall tourism in Myanmar is way up. The release from house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi and then the "election"---more on that next week---have rendered Burma less of a pariah tourist destination. The hotels were busy, and on a number of occasions we noted French tour groups soberly contemplating the food that had been set before them in hotel and other dining rooms. (One of the things you don't go to Burma for is the cuisine.) Our most memorable tourist sighting was in Bagan (bah-GAWN). That's the 11th to 13th century abandoned royal city on the sweltering Irrawaddy plain famous for its thousands of Khmer-style huge temples and stupas. Around sunset one evening, we were riding to dinner at our driver's house (where to our considerable embarrassment family members insisted on fanning us throughout the meal) when we passed what I'm still not sure wasn't an apparition. A convoy of bullock carts was proceeding across a field in a cloud of dust. But instead of bearing sacks of rice or other farm produce, the oxen were hauling...a tour group! Each of the eight or ten carts held three or four Westerners, bouncing and clinging for dear life, and barely discernible through the mist of red dirt. And not only that, but the bullocks were...costumed! They were adorned in little outfits with pink ribbons. The idea of group travel has never appealed to Joe or me---the people in tour groups look too much like convicts in Southern chain gangs in the 1930s. But this bunch was so wonderfully surreal, that we almost, but not quite, wished we were a part of it.

While we were in Bagan, an earthquake hit upper Shan state, about 300 miles northeast of us. Although buildings swayed as far away as Bangkok, we felt nothing. We were dining at the time of the quake in our guide's bamboo house, a safe place to be. Being unable to afford masonry has its advantages. The official death toll was 75, although The Bangkok Post said the real figure was 150 or higher. For the Burmese junta, it was a loss of face. "A hundred and fifty is embarrassing. Make it seventy-five."

Saturday I came back to a Bangkok that is unseasonably cool and overcast, to which---after 99-in-the-shade Bagan---I have no objections.

Old and new

Among the features we prize when we come upon them in this streamlined vital metropolis are bits and pieces of serene, funky old Bangkok. Until 30 years ago, Krung Thep (its other Thai name) was a swampy conglomeration of canal-laced neighborhoods full of teak dwellings and stucco two-story shop houses with tile roofs and pretty fretwork over the second-floor shuttered windows. There's still some of that vanishing Bangkok left in Chinatown and over around the Grand Palace, but not much elsewhere.

So what a pleasure it was last week when Al Roberge, the former Broadway musical performer we met in Hua Hin, suggested we dine at the Ratsstube, a German restaurant on the grounds of the Goetha Institute, a ten-minute walk from our condo. We had looked down on this leafy oasis from our room at the Pinnacle Hotel when we stayed there, and we had ambled down the quiet soi that leads to the German cultural center. But we'd never thought to venture past the front gate.

The food was excellent---we shared a big plate of sausages, sauerkraut and fried potatoes---and even better was the gorgeous old house with its tiles and dark carved wood and flowering bushes and trees that were as an organic a part of the architecture as the interior decor, which Joe described as Siamese Bavarian shloss. The economic pressures on throwbacks like this place must be fierce---similar former multi-acre refuges are now occupied by shopping malls---so I don't know how long this place can last. The same goes for the old Baptist Seminary across the soi from us. Historic preservation does go on here, but it helps if the government or the royal family are involved. One wonders if the Baptists might eventually be seduced by the almighty baht. There's another condo tower about to go up down the soi from us, and we aren't happy about this. We've lived here for under two months, and we're already complaining about more people like us moving in.

It's always fun to do things with Dick Sandler. He's an American who has lived here since the late '60s, knows everybody and everything, and speaks Thai like an erudite native. Yesterday, we met Dick at the Royal Hotel for another excursion into the inner recesses of the old city. The Royal is a dank Edwardian heap of marble not far from the Grand Palace. It's not much of a hotel anymore---we met some Americans who fled from their grim room in February---but it's famous for housing the Thai students just back from Paris who led the 1932 revolution that put the monarchy out of business until King Bhumibole revived it after World War II. The Royal is also where the bodies were laid out in 1973 when the Thai military put down a revolt by shooting nearly 200 university students. It was one of the darkest events of modern Thai history.

We chose the Royal simply as a place to meet, before Dick led us to one of the best small restaurants in the city. The New York Times of October 12, 2005 ran a piece by R.W. "Johnny" Apple, the Times's beloved political reporter and insatiable gourmand, about his favorite place to eat in Bangkok. (You can easily Google up the article.) In the company of his friend Robert Halliday, Apple dined at Chote Chitr, a tiny family-owned place on Prang Phuton. This is an out-of-the-way area behind a former minor royal palace, circa 1910, that's now a health clinic. Apple's descriptions are wonderful and his joy infectious. Halliday tells Apple they have to order the banana flower salad, which is "one of the wonders of the world, up there with the late Beethoven quartets." Writes Apple: "The banana flower salad was stunning indeed, another example of a standard transformed. Prawns, chicken and the shredded red buds of the banana tree, among other things, went into the dish, but its brilliance, as with all the best Thai dishes, lay in the complexity of its seasonings---sour in the front of the mouth (tamarind pulp), fiery in the back (dried chilies), and sweetly nutty at the top (coconut cream). Eating it left me punch-drunk with pleasure."

Among other dishes, Apple also had the tum yum pla, "the eye-poppingly vibrant fish soup" that was "hot, rich and sharp" and which "owed everything to the liltingly fresh, vividly perfumed lemon grass, ka-prao or holy basil, coriander and kafir lime leaves that flavored it along with the obligatory chili."

So guess what? Chote Chitr was just closing when we arrived at about 12:30; the proprietors were taking a week off to visit family in Chiang Mai. Phooey. The owners did, however, advise us to try a place down the street. We did, and its hard to imagine that the food at Chote Chitr could have been better. After all, this is Thailand. We had a curried crab dish that was as exciting on the palate as it was on the plate---all red and orange and tumeric yellow---and a sweet soup with chunks of omelet in it and a crunchy, flavorsome green vegetable of unknown (even to Dick) origin that was kale-like but not kale. We shared a bottle of red soda pop, because we had been wondering why the bottles of pop left by prayerful merit-makers at spirit shrines around Bangkok were always red Fanta and never orange. We asked the restaurant owner about that, and he said it was a Chinese tradition that's taken hold in Thailand. To the Chinese, red is a lucky color. After lunch, we walked across the little park behind the former palace and had dessert at a shop that sold nothing but coconut ice cream. You could get it with fruit or nuts or corn kernels on it, but we just had unadorned dishes of the most intensely coconutty dish I ever tasted. It was more icy than creamy, and in the 97-degree heat, just the ticket.

What else have we been doing? Joe is sorting through 50,000 pictures of dried squid on a stick. We saw True Grit---Joe became impatient with the cliches, but I loved the Coens' fresh variations on them. We went to the drag show at Dee Jay Station, a gay club. Unlike the mind-boggling gay "fuck show" (the vivid Thai term) we took in on our first trip to Bangkok, this one was not raunchy, it was FABULOUS. My favorite act---basically a diva lip-synching, with a couple of Isaan lads flinging themselves about on either side of her more or less in unison---was "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" done to a disco beat. The gorgeously be-gowned diva had a couple of rhinestone encrusted chandeliers dangling from her ears, and affixed to her head were what appeared to be three black minks. Not mink hairpieces but actual minks. The audience---80 percent young Thais, 20 percent young and old farangs---cried out with glee over these antics, and so did we.

This blog is about to go to sleep for two weeks. We leave for Burma on Monday. I'll be back in Bangkok March 26, trekker Joe a week later. We'll be incommunicado in AOL-free Myanmar. We're looking forward to meeting Burmese friends and hearing their stories---the "election," the release from house arrest of "the lady." We'll tell some of those stories when we get back. So-long for now.

Still eating, raving and getting about

Culture One rave "outfit"














































































These women were passing out a caffienated drink with vodka






























































































































SALT



South of Bangkok on our way to Hua Hin, along the Gulf of Thailand, one passes paddy after paddy where salt is produced. Here is a description I found on the internet of the process.
In the making of budu (fish sauce) used in cooking, Thai southerners depend on salt from Pattani, as this southern province is the major source of sea salt in the region. The taste of Pattani salt is not as strong as salt from other parts of the country. Salt production in Pattani dates back to over 600 years ago. The production technique of Pattani salt has been transferred from generation to generation. Most salt farmers are men. So in the salt fields there can be fathers and sons, younger and elder brothers, grandfathers and grandsons, or fathers and their sons-in-law. Women take part only if there is a shortage of men to work the fields.
Pattani salt farmers say local salt fields tend to be clustered in Bana, Tanyong Luloh, and Barahom subdistricts of Muang Pattani district and in Bang Pu subdistrict of Yaring district. The production depends on the weather. It lasts long and gives high yields in a dry year, but in a rainy year, producing sea salt is difficult or even completely impossible.

The production usually starts in January, when salt farmers build earthen dykes around their salt fields. They make the dykes and the fields firm with rollers made of hard wood or coconut trunks.

In February the farmers allow a small amount of seawater into the fields to test their soil. If a thin layer of salt remains when the water evaporates, the fields will be ready for full production. Farmers usually keep the level of seawater in their fields at about the depth of their index finger and wait for 10-15 days. A low level of seawater will quickly produce salt that is not too salty. A high level of seawater will yield more salt, and make it more concentrated. Pattani salt farmers favor a taste that is not very salty, unlike their counterparts in Phetchaburi province, whose product has a stronger flavor. The time of the salt harvest in Pattani is in March and April.
Salt sales occur between May and July, but farmers do not have to rush. They can wait for satisfactory prices because their product never rots, and salt prices certainly climb if they wait until the rains. The salt sale period is the prime time for the farmers. Traders from many towns get their salt supply from Pattani as they are impressed with not only the good taste and cleanliness of Pattani salt but also the long-standing business culture of Pattani salt farmers.
One important tradition is that farmers willingly give customers one part of salt for every ten parts purchased. Ancestors of Pattani salt farmers told the younger ones not to take advantage of their customers. They explained that salt might spill while it is being shoveled, so the one-tenth giveaway compensates for the spill. The giveaway culture still remains when customers buy salt directly from farmers, though it might not be applied in markets where standard measuring tools are used. Although the old-time culture has been replaced to a certain extent by technology, Pattani salt farmers still possess the spirit of fair trade and are ready to pass it along to future generations. The ratio of one part given away for every 10 parts sold continues to complement the uniquely pleasant taste of Pattani salt
















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The only food I have bought on the street that I really didn't like was this candied gourd. I threw it in the river.








Amok
In South-East Asian cuisine, "mok" or "amok" refers to either the process of steam cooking a curry in banana leaves or to the resulting dish. Thick coconut gravy and galangal are classic ingredients, added to a wide range of possible kinds of leaves and staple ingredients. Amok is major national culinary tradition in Cambodia and a major dish in Laos and Thailand. This one was a light fish pudding covered with a sticky-rice-flour and coconut cream.













Deep fried barracuda head



My favorite snack
are these hot, not
too sweet banana
fritters covered
with sticky rice-flour
batter with coconut













Some of the endless skewered grilled offerings on the street.













Just when you think you can't eat another thing, comes the smell of some wonderful freshly made concoction that might change your life for the fourth or fifth time that day. Do you really want to take the chance of possibly missing out?

















A pork curry with tons of fresh ginger




















A curry stall in the market by the Grand Palace













Duck hanging in a shop in the market















Steamed seasoned rice in lotus leaves









Grilling is very common. Here we see a very popular preparation where fish is coated with salt; some of the fish in the back are filled with stalks of lemon-grass and herbs




Near the amulet market is a soi where they are making Buddha images and depictions of revered monks.

































Hua Hin, from the balcony at the condo lent to us by our friends Simon and Poe

















Children with their mother releasing fish into the Chao Phrya river and getting a lesson in merit making. The market nearby sells small birds, turtles, and fish. People believe that by releasing them they are freeing them and will be rewarded with merit in their next life. There was a young girl in the water who had an entrepreneurial spirit. She was gathering up those released and selling them back to the vendors.














Pigeons become part of the architecture













February 18 2011 Makha Bucha Day / Magha Puja Day
This is in commemoration of a spontaneous gathering of 1,250 Sangha followers who came to meet Lord Buddha 9 months after his first enlightenment. They were ordained by Lord Buddha and enlightened. Celebrated with candle light processions three times clockwise around the temple, usually in the evening. It is also a day when many people give alms like instant or canned foods and necessities like robes, incense and candles to the monks.
The date changes from year to year. It is always on full moon day of the 3rd lunar month, Makha. In Bangkok, went with Poe to celebrate this day in the evening with a few thousand others parading up the 366 steps to this hilltop temple overlooking the city. Below one could see other glowing lines of monks and devotees making their way around surrounding temples in the area. The only noise came from the ringing of bells, gongs, sermons broadcast over loud-speakers and of course Celine Dion, and JayZ piping up on a cell phone.

By the sea

In addition to their elegantly be-gardened Bauhaus-style house near the beach just south of Hua Hin, Simon and Poe also own a condo, and we stayed in it. It's on the eleventh floor of a South Miami Beach-like part-hotel called the Blue Wave. During our five days there, the place was crawling with repressed Swedish middle-aged couples and unrepressed Thai tour groups, a mix that works. Simon and Poe bought this place for "a song" and put few thousand more into bright, simple furnishings and redoing the bathroom. The big single room's chief attraction is the view from the balcony. Looking south along the Gulf of Thailand, there's a long arc of sandy beach ending in a rocky outcropping with a huge standing Buddha emerging from it. Inland along the beach is a sea of shimmering green that at first glance is a series of lovely paddie fields dotted with coconut palms, and on closer view turns into a Thai military officers' golf course. Simon and Poe plan to rent this place out next year; for now, friends use it, and we plan on returning for Songkran, the Buddhist New Year water festival, in mid-April. That's when Bangkok goes berserk for five days of water-tossing and -spraying mayhem and Hua Hin makes do with just one day.

Part of the Hua Hin fun for us is catching up with the ex-pats and their Thai boyfriends that we've met on our four previous visits. An old pal of Poe's whom I'll call Lek had an elderly Norwegian boyfriend who died last year and left Lek a lot of money. Now he gardens and looks after his investments. Lek's British boyfriend seems cool with all this; he arrives for a visit next month. Lek's Thai boyfriend, meanwhile, is envious; he is shopping the "silver daddy" websites for his own benefactor---one, Lek jokes, who "won't last long."

A couple of the Brits have had health scares---these are mostly men in their sixties---but they've come through these well enough. A Canadian, whose Thai boyfriend is an airport ground controller, thinks Thai politics are too uncertain, and he has hedged his bets with a second home in Bali. That somebody who knows the region believes Indonesia is stabler than Thailand is unnerving for those of us who want to keep coming back here. In Ethiopia, people used to say, "If and when Haile Selassie dies...." The doddering king here is a crucial part of the glue that holds Thailand together. After Bhumibole, it gets murky.

We dined out every night at one or another open air venue with food as varied as the people eating it. One night, Lek ordered "dancing river shrimp," tiny living creatures trying to jump out of the lime and chili sauce and back into the river. He ate these as a kid and is crazy about having them hop around in his mouth. Poe advised us against tasting them; he said we might get parasites. We did try the fried "duck's mouths"---they're like chicken wings, except not as meaty.

One of Simon and Poe's acquaintances who joined us for dinner one night was Jose Villaverde, who was visiting from Los Angeles. Jose is a 79-year-old semi-retired movie casting director. He's a small gentlemanly fellow in a white silk suit and many jewels who grew up in Shanghai with his Russian mother and Spanish diplomat father. Chased out of China by the communists in 1953, he landed in Rome and soon got involved in the movie business. Jose was casting director or dialogue coach for DeSica and Fellini on a number of films, including The Garden of the Finzi Continis.

Jose is a bottomless fount of wonderful stories. He told about a proposed joint filmmaking venture involving Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa. Jose was present when Fellini and Bergman met to talk about it. Kurosawa was to have been there, but he cancelled at the last minute. (I asked, "Was Abraham Lincoln also unable to make it?" But this story was one of Jose's dining-out set pieces, and he did not acknowledge my interruption.) Jose said, "I could tell when they embraced each other---'Federico!' 'Ingmar!'---that they loathed each other." The project never came off.

Jose also told about working on The Madwoman of Chaillot, with Katherine Hepburn, Edith Evans, Margaret Leighton and Giulietta Masina, among others, and directed by Bryan Forbes. Masina spoke barely any English, but she refused to be dubbed. She was fed her lines in English by Forbes. Whenever she froze in a scene and shouted "Yes!" Forbes would give her the line. Once Hepburn tried to help out with a line, and Masina barked at an uncharacteristically abashed Hepburn, "THAT man will tell me when to speak!"

Another night we dined with Al Roberge, a delightfully ebullient man who was a Broadway song and dance man and later a dealer in fine white pearls in Hawaii. He was a newsboy in Gypsy and later toured "for way too long" as Charlie Brown.

Is this sounding as if we are somewhere other than Thailand? We aren't. One night last week, while we were still in Bangkok, Joe went to a very Thai rave. He was interested in both the music and the visual projections, and, as an old club kid, the excitement. The event was called "Culture One-2011 Art and Music Become One-Bangkok International Dance & Music Festival." This happening was at a convention center and ran till four in the morning. About 5,000 people showed up. It seemed as though outrageous costumes would be appropriate, so Joe found a costume shop and bought a long scarlet coat with tails and a feathered hat that looked like Admiral Nelson's. He wore this with long pants and no shirt. As it happened, none of the young Thais wore get-ups, and they all wanted their pictures taken with Joe. Plainly, he was a star of some type. There was quite a lot of alcohol and "Koreans sniffing things," but it was all pretty mild, he said. He did manage to get into the VIP area with the "media" badge somebody stuck on him at some point. It all sounds like his Studio 54 days, when he was ushered promptly past every exclusive velvet rope in New York. It was a wonderful night of going back to his roots---not 1620, but 1979.