Goodbye to All That (Burma 3)

((According to world news, a bad cyclone hit Myanmar several days ago--weather is one thing the generals can't control--with over a hundred thousand killed. Between destruction and suspicion, the West will have a hard time sending aid, and NPR's correspondent is staying anonymous and moving clandestinely, to keep getting the news out. The gentle Burmese people deserve a better fate... Meanwhile, visiting there in 1986, I was up country and ailing.))

June 28

Taking medicine, eating nothing, resting for long stretches. I roused myself sufficiently to tramp about for a few hours to visit eight or ten of the closer and more scenic jedis (pagodas). Some are massive, looming high over the dusty plains like Egyptian pyramids; others have baroquely ornate shapes and facades, like giant seashells; and many are compressed and crumbling away. The Buddhas sit unattended. Lizards and monkeys prowl the outer terraces and the stairs too worn to climb. But I did clamber up to the top of two huge platforms, to survey mile upon mile of scrub growth and hardpack fields, temples rising like tombstones in a giants' cemetery, distant smudges of mountain, and the flat, sluggish, meandering Irrawaddy River, so famous from the past, but looking just muddy and empty today.

Clearly my enthusiasm is minimal. Nothing--no design, no Buddha contemplating swarms of gnats, no breathtaking view of ancient structures stretching to the horizons--can rouse me from this drugged lethargy. Even the two metal statuettes I spent more illegal kyat on earlier, an antique opium-weight lion and a "good spirit" figure, seem just ridiculous this evening. So what? Now I must preserve the rest of my kyat to buy food (if I ever get back to eating), and my way out of Burma, come Monday.

June 29

Sitting at Pagan's dinky airport, awaiting a flight that stops here en route to Rangoon. Ordinary folk, including tourists, can be bumped off any flight if a government bigwig or other visiting fireman shows up wanting a seat; but things seem safely quiet here.

Still feeling punk. Out of illegal kyat, so I'm trying to decide if I should sell some dollars at the black market price for now ((which was about 30 kyat per dollar)), in order to get three times the amount back (in dollars!) at the time of legal reconversion. It's just crazy. Some people manage to slip around Burma spending as little as $10 legal by spending who knows how much il-legally, but I'll be out about $90 total since my sick, tired spirit demands an airplane return to Rangoon.

Well, between credit-card trouble ((I'd had Visa card removed from hotel "safe" in Thailand and a stack of forms run off, used for jewelry and other expensive stuff, that my watchful sister in the States noticed almost immediately, saving my ass)), kyat confusion, and crappy illness, I've about had it with Southeast Asia.

July 1

Stopover Delhi, about 4 a.m. My last days in Rangoon and then Bangkok seemed endless bus rides and waiting rooms and check-in lines, though I did have good conversations with an English cricketer, a Cypriot woman architect, a Scottish jewelry importer, an American farm-techniques Peace Corpsman, and a grand old dame (English) who sat next to me, Bangkok to Delhi, where she exited to head for the Taj Mahal.

Final thoughts on Asia: I guess I lack the requisite fatal attraction for the exotic East of Maugham and Conrad and company. I think one must be younger, less used to creature comforts, more flexible about dirt coating the skin, scabs dotting the legs, beggars in the streets, perennial humid heat and cold showers, smiling people eager to rip you off somehow. I'm tired of being stared at, laughed at, overcharged and under-rested. I'm ready to take on the different hassles of being an American in Europe in the summer of 1986 ((when Reagan had bombed Libya, outraging much of the world)). At least there I'll be less conspicuous, as long as I keep my mouth shut, anyway.

July 2

Yesterday's demented ravings before dawn convinced me I should concentrate first on sleep, but it eluded me for many hours more. Into Heathrow at 8 a.m., two hours getting through regulations and into the city via the Underground, then a half-hour walk lugging 90 pounds of pack and other bags to the hostel--but a good one, Holland House, an old Jacobean mansion at the edge of Holland Park, in the pricey area called High Street, Kensington. I checked in but couldn't get access to a dorm bed, had to try napping in a lounge chair.

No luck. At my nadir, 40 hours without sleep, my stomach aching steadily, feeling completely rotten, I decided to find the area hospital, for a check-up on leg and bowels.

But walking through the park got the blood pumping again, and I persuaded myself that exhaustion and lack of food might account for much, so I dragged myself to the nearby... yes, the High Street McDonalds, where I scarfed down two burgers, fries, and a cola (not a Coke, for some reason). Feeling full if not better, I strolled back to the park hoping to crash on the grass; but dogs and picnicking schoolkids had other ideas, so I returned to the hostel, where the warder studied my pallor and took pity--penciled me in as "sick" and let me go up to the bed area two hours early.

A nap worked wonders, as did the long-overdue clean-up and then a ramble around the park last evening. How civilized it is here! Soccer players and all-in-white cricketers, lovers lolligagging together on real grass, Arab-looking kids running, Caribbean men lilting and smiling, hunched old ladies mumbling to each other in their tired verbal shorthand, a popular and mobbed ice-cream seller, and--sounding forth, magnificently resonant over all--a live performance outdoors of Verdi's opera Un Ballo Maschera. I sprawled on the greensward for nearly an hour just drinking it all in. No ants, no mosquitoes, no filth evident; simply a warm summer's evening in a park in London.

I am a child of the West, however old now. There's no denying how much better I feel here than I did in Indonesia or even slickly Westernized Thailand. The hell with pretending any different.

((I guess I'm as biased and ethnocentric as the next ordinary schmuck.))

Mixed Up in Myanmar (2)

((Last post ended with me heading for the train to Northern Burma, speculating that the ride on wooden seats "should be interesting."))

June 26

That last remark qualifies as basic understatement of the week. Twelve hours of sleepless nightmare on slatted wooden seats too hard to relax on and too narrow to sprawl on, with four people packed in each facing pair. Since we tourists can't read Burmese numbers--my seat 29 looks something like "JC"--we need help right from the start. Then the train pulls out, racketing and rocking back and forth, the cloudy lights inside burning all night long, covered with insects right from the start. Metal louvers on the windows keep fresh air out, but admit bugs and rain. The toilets waft their aromas throughout the car whenever a door is opened. Yet nothing fazes the Burmese passengers, whole families travelling with every scrap of their belongings: bales, bundles, boxes and bags tied to the overhead racks and heaped everywhere else.

Gradually the bodies mount as well--determined nappers stretched across aisles, pretzeled into seats, hiding under seats, jammed among goods and feet. (I tried craning up straight, slanting across, curling down, and several other postures, to no avail.) But what a wonderful array of travellers! Dazed tourists staring blearily at nothing, mothers suckling two-year-olds, soldiers in Socialist Army olive-drab, venders scrambling over bodies and loudly hawking their wares, young girls checking their make-up, older men struggling to keep their longyis wrapped. (I was feeling like a character in Paul Theroux's famous book about Asian trains.)

Most affecting to me were a beautiful, sad-eyed woman tending her small boy, who handed me her copy of a Tourist Burma brochure, wanting me to keep it, wanting me to admire all the slick and pretty pictures of her (impoverished) country. (All this conveyed by gestures only.) And my seatmate, a handsome guy in his 30's, but with stubble on his face, violent tattoos on his arms and ankles, a blank despairing look, and bandages at both temples, as though he'd received some sort of electrodes treatment. Yet his pockets are full of rolls of kyat, and he offers friendly advice, in fair English, on Burmese numbers, expressions, even the right train station for my bus connection to Pagan.

But, before that, we watched dawn come to central Burma: dirt roads, woven-mat houses, women with baskets on their heads, boys squatting to watch the train pass, a man and his dog also squatting, but to shit. Scarecrows of flapping rags, horsedrawn carts hauling goods to market, clay pots (for water?) outside the doors of houses, stick fences around dust yards, patches of succulents and bushes and small trees, white Brahma cows pulling wooden plows, above-ground flat tombs filling the village cemeteries.

In Thazzi some of us transferred to a small mini-bus, six Westerners and 20-some Burmese all crammed in, on, and hanging off the van's slatted sides and roof. So we went, rocketing across the dusty plains for another four hours of severe discomfort--van ceiling bumping our heads, wind attacking our backs, hard seats cutting off circulation to legs, no room to stretch or avoid each other's sour breath... What can I say? I guess there's just no pleasing the ornery tourist.

June 27

And then, heaping insult on injury, after five safe months and with not many days left in Asia, last night I came down with a serious case of La Turista--cramps and diarrhea and no interest in food. Don't know whether I just got too cocky, or picked something up walking Rangoon's filthy side streets. Whatever the cause, I'm feeling listless and not real enthusiastic about tromping the ruins of ancient Pagan.

We arrived yesterday exhausted, and booked into various small guesthouses. Some tried to sleep, others to soldier on; I couldn't relax, so I walked out to explore, check prices, and wound up hiring a horsecart to take me to a lacquerware village where I swapped jeans, t-shirt, batteries, and spare cassettes for a nice plaque of Buddha, two shoulder bags, and some more kyat. So now I must go on a spending spree, once feeling better, to unload all the illegal money. What an odd system.

Last night in a stupor of pain, I had the possibly inspired revelation that the Burmese government really is slyer than given credit for. These Socialists have taken a reading on Western capitalist thinking and decided we are all greedy pirates of industry at heart; so the "pinko" bosses have devised the tourism system accordingly. Our visas are limited to seven days, which protects the Burmese citizenry from too much infectious contact with our decadent ways--and makes us think of a visit here as something special and desirable, yet kept so brief that we are easily channeled into the controlled routes to Pagan and Mandalay.

On top of that, the confusing kyat system: by turning a blind eye to our liquor/cigarette sales, goods trading, even most of the black-market dollar exchanges, the government accomplishes much more. The Burmese get enough (but not too many) Western goods, which the Socialists can disavow all responsibility for; and we tourists wind up with so much excess money that we must buy more food, drink, taxi rides, horsecarts, tour guides, and blessed souvenirs than we ordinarily ever would, thus providing economic support to both common people and cottage industries.

Diabolical, these Socialists! All the locals kept happy, all the travellers kept busy (and boring) with their scheming and dealing, working so hard to travel around for a week on, seemingly, next to nothing, laughing as they/we, uh, pull the wool over the government bureaucrats' eyes. In a pig's eye, says I! We're being led by the nose, all unknowing, every step of the way...

((Next time: seeing the sights of Pagan and bidding farewell to Asia.))

On the Road to Mandalay

((On the premise that not many people have ever managed to visit Myanmar/Burma, I'm returning to my 1986-87 journal to recount some adventures I had there--back before the military junta cracked down again, before Aung San Suu Kyi's seemingly permanent house arrest, back when Westerners could still visit, even if only for a very controlled single week.))

June 24

The Strand Hotel in Rangoon is another out-of-time survivor of the British Empire, preserved much as it was to please us romantic Westerners, but also slowly decaying beyond recovery. Patches on the carpet and cracked walls in the slightly seedy bathrooms bespeak the Socialist government's basic disinterest. But it continues to serve as a social center of Rangoon, ready for parties, weddings, and officials taking other officials to lunch.

Before heading up-country I'm sharing a double room at the Strand overnight, with Tomas, a professional photographer from Santa Cruz. He travelled here five years ago, says nothing has changed that he can see; but he hopes to rent a jeep and cruise the un-touristed countryside, something the government attempts to discourage/prevent. With my own more-limited time, looks like all I'll get to is Pagan's 40 square kilometers of temples and ruins (one of the wonders of the world, the books and visitors say), then back to Rangoon.

Turning the clock back (a suitable expression since Burma is the most placid and time-lost country left in Asia): it was pouring rain in Bangkok, with a two-hour wait at the airport till Burma Airways folk deigned to allow passenger check-in. There and on the flight, I spoke to more Americans at one time than I've seen in the previous five months of travel. (Everyone wants to see this mysterious country, I guess, envisioning Kipling and the Empire, WWII's Burma Road, Flying Tigers, etc.)

Then on arrival the customs/immigration/declarations/cash conversion process seemed interminable; my passport and one-week visa must have been stamped a dozen times. Anyway, I converted $100 in travellers checks, receiving 729 official kyat (pronounced "chaht"); these bills must be used for the government-sponsored travel and hotels. After that legal transaction, I ignored the inadequate offer from one of the customs officals and instead sold my duty-free fifth of Johnny Walker Red and carton of "555" cigarettes (total cost $14) to the taxi driver for 500 kyat, equal to about $70--which is how the traveller in Burma acquires "illegal" kyat to finance food, beverages, souvenir-buying, etc. The trick is to use up all the ill-gotten money, plus just enough of the official kyat to satisfy government watchdogs--a silly and time-consuming exercise in this land of double-think, where we have only seven days (six for me), much of which must be spent on planes, trains, or buses just getting around. Maddening, peculiar, confusing, and fun, and the long-standing Burmese tradition. Who am I to refuse?

(The other, more dangerous option is to sell U.S. dollars on the black market, at about 30 kyat each. My friend Patrick was here not long ago, was caught selling just $20, held for eight hours at the police station until the American Consulate effected his release.)

June 25

I stood in line at Tourist Burma to book an overnight train to Thazzi and bus from there to Pagan, then wandered the city. Rangoon seems almost blissfully quiet compared to Bangkok or Jakarta, but also unexpectedly dirty on the rain-splotched side streets.

Observations and encounters: Burmese women in sarong-like dresses, with streaks of a yellowish pasty substance dabbed on their faces, and the men in their wraparound longyis--a cascading human rainbow of colors and stripes and plaids, usually mixed together... The stares experienced by Westerners, neither friendly nor hostile, just watchfully blank until you make the first overture... The absence of garish advertising, with every movie poster subdued, save for the familiar James Bond scene of a woman's legs framing gun-ready 007; this one attracts a group of men who stare up, mesmerized...

Locals sidling up to tourists: "Anything to sell? Kyat for dollars?" One man's rapid-fire rap listed 20 different items he wanted to buy, but we couldn't agree on price. Another was dying to acquire two of my old shirts: "I'm a poor man. Many children. Not sell. For myself. How much you want?" He started at 20, went to 30, tracked me down a half hour later to offer 40. But, finally, I only sold him a Bic lighter for 10.

Block after block of grubby, three- and four-story, cracker-box-shaped buildings, all in need of a sandblasting facelift... Pouring rain driving me indoors to a cafe lunch of noodle soup (good) and lime pop (execrable). Suddenly a man sat down at my table, ordered his own meal, and began passing the dishes to me to share. We soon swapped names, addresses, and Burmese phrases as well. ("Thank you" sounds like "Je-zoo-te-mah-day," and "Hello" equals "Mingle-a-bah.") Then departing for his work just as quickly as he came in, Mr. Ko Kyaw Swe insisted on paying for both of our meals. "Welcome to my home," he said as he left.

On to Sule Pagoda, a tall gold-plated spire surrounded below by many Buddhas of terracotta, painted soapstone, and gold. From the many sellers clustered at each entrance, worshippers buy paper parasols, floral wreaths, braided ribbons, and incense sticks, all to offer up. Workers prowl the grounds pouring water over the Buddhas' heads. Young women stand pitching coins into buckets rotating on a lazy susan. A fascinating exhibition of photos and painting from all of the varied Buddhist countries of Near and Far East also includes three-dozen bright cartoon drawings like Disney animation cells, on the life and miracles of Gautama!

Finally, ambling back to claim my pack and head for the train, I stopped in a busy bookstore full of ancient dusty stacks of old Penguin and bantam paperbacks, most from the Fifties and Sixties, Classics and hot rods and Westerns, but also Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar and Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues! But all of these are ignored by the thronging Burmese who instead crowd the long front counter, shouting and waving their hands to obtain the latest International issues of Time and Newsweek.

The ride north on wooden seats should be interesting.

((As indeed it was, to be recounted next post.))