(Yangon to Mandalay)
The title is Lonely Planet's description of train travel in Myanmar. Judge for yourself:
2.20pm Thursday: Yangon (Rangoon) station.
After a pleasant morning of wandering crumbling colonial edifices and being subjected to the linguistic skills of 9 year old entrepreneurs with postcards and offers to guide me where I did not wish to go on "the cyclone island", I'm ready to sit on a train and see more of Yangon. In order to pay my USD1 for a ticket on the local circle line (with is more than 5 times the local fare, but if you are a foreigner in this authoritarian nation desperate for hard currency: get used to it) I had to show my passport, exit card and answer several questions. (Makes Cityrail ticket machines or Myki look soooo simple...). The sign at the booking office says "WARMLY WELCOME AND TAKE CARE OF TOURISTS". The 1.40 clockwise train didn't happen, so the 9 stray foreigners on the platform (who had all read the Lonely Planet Guide saying this would take two hours) are clambered by "warmly welcoming" railway staff into the 2.20 anticlockwise service for a "three hour tour". Burmese trains are not slow so much as desultory. Imagine an organisation where technology appears stuck in the 1960s (or earlier) and the whole system runs on "make do and mend"... Nothing is in a hurry, and with hand-laid and barely ballasted tracks, trains make that old "clicketty clack" noise and bounce and swerve along uneven metre-gauge lines. When you see track workers (mostly looking like kids) digging between tracks with their bare hands and carting gravel in baskets, you understand why 40kph seems a reasonable speed. The local train chugs around Yangon in a circuit up to the area of the airport and markets and back again every two or so hours, connecting all the junction stations. Carriages are basic: no glass on the windows with three big open doors and plastic seats along the sides. Hawkers offer water, home cooked meals in styrofoam containers, sliced fruit, newspapers, 20 to 30 year old second hand books and drinks; jumping from carriage to carriage at each stop. There is a reason for so much floor space. You soon find out why. About an hour into the circuit, the train grinds into a large junction near the industrial zone and adjacent to a huge dusty outdoor dry goods and vegetable market. The guy selling the second-hand books helps the banana-seller cart his baskets off the train as huge bundles of dried tobacco leaf are hurled through one door and two windows. Passengers retreat to avoid the onslaught. Within a couple of minutes the carriage is half full of aromatic leaves, two young blokes sitting on them and sweating from the exertion, and two girls who spend the next half hour of trundling west to east around the airport counting and rebundling the leaves while the young guys offer small bundles of chewing tobacco around the train. Crowds of people: mostly going to/from markets with large baskets push in and out of the train at over 40 stops as it continues on...
Forty minutes later, a large cigar in the mouth of a severe elderly woman yells from a passing platform and ten tobacco bundles are thrown to her through the open windows. The guard does not accept the offer of chewing tobacco as his preference is betel nut, but he's happy to charge a fare for the piles of tobacco. His other jobs are to flap the green flag vaguely out of the back window at each stop, after he's handed a leather satchel to the station attendant. He struggles to stay awake. An hour further and we reach a junction on the eastern edge of the city at dusk: the remaining tobacco is hurled onto the platform even as the peak hour crowd is clambering aboard, and waiting passengers make way for flying bundled leaves as mother pull fascinated kids away from danger. The girls and tobacco chewing blokes follow into the crowd. Noone on the train journey has smoked. In the carriage was Charles: a language teacher who has started his own private school near the industrial zone. It's his second full circuit on the train today. He knows that foreigners take the trip and he practices his language skills, including trying to understand the strange regional accents of English. During the first hour of the trip he's conversed with me in English (with an office worker travelling home joining in) at the same time as he's maintained a parallel converstion with Chinese visitors in Mandarin. He is disappointed that the German couple (with their protective tour guide) won't join in, as he had wanted to speak in French as well(!). The two hour "three hour tour" actually is closer to a trundle of 4 hours. This is not a problem as all of the visitors stay on board, fascinated, for the full circuit. The Germans' tour guide tries not to look "over it"... The train guard is dozing. The walk back in the dark from the fading majesty of the station to the two star hotel, dodging open drains and motor scooters, includes a street selling many calendars and images of Aung Sun Su Chi. They also sell white peace posters with a dove on a traffic sign saying "No U Turn". -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Friday: 5.30am. Check in time for the "11 Up" express from Yangon to Mandalay. This is not the "Road to Mandalay" but it will take nearly 17 hours to cover less than 400 miles. (You can work out the speed...). At the seedily elegant booking hall of the ornate old Rangoon station, "WARMLY WELCOME AND TAKE CARE OF TOURISTS" means that it takes 6 (yes SIX) railway attendants to direct me from waiting room to seat: one to find me and take me to the barrier, one to send me to the next ticket barrier, one to direct me to the back of the train, one to run after me and direct me to the FRONT of the train, one to take me from that person to the carriage door, and one to drop my bag while climbing up into the train and then dragging it to my seat. They are all very eager for this hour of the morning. I am not properly awake and give rather too generously to a passing nun. I am not sure this will benefit my next life. I have joined the "Upper Class" of traveller (as a foreigner paying in US dollars this is mandated and grossly overcharged: Thank you, Generals!). The seat is skewed and "reclined". At one time this may have been quite a smart carriage but anything mechanical no longer works: fans are broken, the flooring has warn through to bare boards, the three fluorescent tubes for the whole carriage shed light gloom, and the seats are "reclined": the mechanism for reclining is "broken", as are the tables and as is the once grey (now grime) velour covers. Hand sewn apple green cotton sheets have been laid over the seats. It all seems a bit grim until one look at the adjacent "Ordinary Class" carriage with its wooden slat seats puts the next 17 hours into perspective: it's very “ordinary” indeed! Back in "Upper Class" most of the other reclined seats are occupied by sleeping train crew who shake themselves awake as the passengers arrive... Only to return to doze between shifts during the day. The spare seats here are also the preferred dozing-off places for travelling monks. Open windows mean that the whole carriage is covered in a thin layer of dust and diesel grime, except for the apple green covers, but not for long. Open windows and doors also mean the real noise of a moving train rattles, crashes and roars for the full journey. This express travels mostly at the awesomely relaxed speed of the local trains for most of the day. At times the driver seems to suffer a need for speed and the farting diesel reaches a crescendo while the train bounces and bucks and swerves on the uncertain track. Watching the adjacent car bound over a metre upwards and sideways and plunge down at speed goes from alarming to acceptable as the day wears on. In the "reclined" seats, the urge to sleep through the noise and jumping and violent swaying becomes almost impossible to avoid... until the hawkers yell out their wares between stops and prod you: "Water? Beer?", while armies of more sellers crowd through the train at each extended station stop. The railways have given up on providing a food service, leaving it to desperate private enterprise. At the start, water and tissue sellers target the westerners in Upper Class. By mid morning the coffee sellers (your choice of instant sweetened premix), fruit sellers and drink men (everything from Coke to local brands to beer to locally bottled hooch) are doing the rounds. A couple of them seem to be train crew, but competition is intense. Betel and chewing tobacco sales are good. Pity the waiting passenger who scores pre-flavoured saliva spurted in an elegant curl from a passing train...
It's double track all the way in this main line: passing trains roar past and seem to be mostly local affairs with very basic passenger carriages and a couple of open freight cars in tow for market goods. "Fast" trains are older and grimier than the mail trains we might remember as kids, with more "modern" carriages bought from the old eastern bloc or second hand from Japan or purchased from sanctions-busting friendly countries such as India or China. Signage is in Burmese, although the grander colonial junction stations and some wayside halts maintain the bilingual signs at the ends of platforms. Using the dodgy official map doesn't help work out where you might be, and the timetable looks aspirational...
But it's what you see through the permanently open windows that makes the trip: farm workers with ancient wooden carts drawn by brahmin cattle are dotted across every field, hugely contented black pigs forage along the line, a large flat landscape of small fields and pastures: looking almost like the Thomas Hardy descriptions of intensive populated farming in nineteenth century Dorset, complete with ancient threshing machines. The intense orange soil and lighter green crops blend with distant mountains and dark olive colured trees and tropical palms into almost Mediterranean colours. This is relieved only by the grim, grey pompous distant monumentalism and vast empty freeways of the generals' new capital city: Naypyitaw, a bit over half way through the journey. The crowds pour into the ordinary class cars and fill the train from here to Mandalay. A crew of four checks every ticket on the train- again. Hawkers' sales of the local hooch provoke loud singing in the Ordinary carriage behind ours... and at about this time last night's yellow lentil curry suddenly reminded me of its existence. I tested the remaining, basic, train facilities to their utmost... And for the final few hours the landscape became a brilliant yolky full moon in a darkening, silken-purple sky as Mediterranean landscape hues turned to from milky mauve to rich royal blue, punctuated by distant chains of green coloured lights on mountain pagodas and subdued chaotic fluorescent town and station lights as the train rumbled and lurched towards Mandalay.