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.