Mandalay Airport. 6th January, 9.25am:
This is the morning flight with "Whiteknuckle Airlines" (Air KBZ) from Bagan to Heho (the small mountain airport where Air Bagan so thoughtlessly crashed one of their passenger planes 2 weeks ago). There are no seat allocations, so everyone wearing a KBZ sticker had scrambled on and claimed a window when the flight had been first yelled by the man carrying the blackboard with the flight number across the departure lounge and urging us onto the old Japanese commuter bus on the tarmac..
We were now stuck at Mandalay as Heho was "full". It's hot. There is no power to our small prop plane. After 20 minutes, it's stifling, as we watch our air crew walk to the edge of the tarmac for a smoke (!) with the crew from Air KBZ's only other plane, also stuck in transit.
The rest room toilet jammed and wouldn't flush without power.
The crew invited us to get of the plane and enjoy the cool, standing in the plane's shadow and looking out towards the terminal. As long as we were wearing our KBZ stickers, we could walk around our plane and take lots of photos of the bald tyres, and so on.
The attendant climbed back in the plane while we stood, lay, sprawled or squatted with the rest of the crew. To our left, incoming planes were taxiing within 300 metres of our happy band. The smokers were invited to stand on the edge of the tarmac with the air crews. They were 400 metres from the take-offs and landings. Earplugs? I don't think so.
The steward reemerged from the plane and elegantly served "drinks on the tarmac".
The air crew took our photos. We took theirs. Planes continued to taxi in and out to our left, and to take off and land to our right.
At 10.15: "Heho available" so we all tripped up the 5 steps to our seats, new passengers arrived by bus from the bleak new terminal (wondering what the levity was about), and we departed...
Given the interesting safety record (not!) of Burmese planes, the words: "DEPARTURE LOUNGE" at airports take on a whole new meaning. So do some of the flight companies' slogans:
Air KBZ: "Flying beyond your expectations"...
Asia Wings: "Flying beyond your dreams"... (!!)
At Heho, the wreckage of the Air Bagan flight is surrounded by woven fencing, with just enough of the broken fuselage poking out from blue plastic wrapping to see how catastrophic the incident was...
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My "travelling companion" books on this trip have included: "Around the World in 65 Days", being the newspaper articles of one George Griffith who circumnavigated the world from London in 1894 (with all of his British Imperial prejudices intact, some quoted below...). "Burma Days" by George Orwell which I read after buying one of many pirated copies from a passing urchin, and "Smut" by Alan Bennett which added a certain literary salaciousness to the slow boat from Mandalay (and thank you Ms Lizzie for that interesting Christmas gift: it will be loaned only to select friends...).
At Mandalay Airport I purchased "Finding George Orwell in Burma" by Emma Larkin. Her recent attempts to trace the writer's journeys as a member of the police force in pre-World War II Burma brought her into direct conflict with the military rulers of the country and made it clear that groups such as ours only go to the managed "tourist" areas (spectacular as they are) and not to the reality of "modern" Myanmar with its obsessively cruel and controlling Stalinist government. In the introduction to her book, Emma Larkin asks a well known scholar in Burma:
"George Orwell', I repeated - 'the author of “Nineteen Eighty Four"’. The old man's eyes suddenly lit up. He looked at me with a brilliant flash of recognition, slapped his forehead gleefully, and said; "You mean the prophet!"... In Burma there is a joke that that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of “Burmese Days”, “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty Four”. "
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In tracing recent history, right down to the made-up-news and denial of reality in the daily media (Ministry of Truth?) and the deliberate shut down of universities and underfunding of basic education within propaganda of distrust of any "outsiders", and the lack of basic services, you can see why Orwell's books may be "read" as the recent history of the country.
Every Myanmar police station (behind the barbed wire barricades) has a large blue sign in English: "May I Help You?"
We were not tempted...
It's easy to be seduced by the crumbling colonial charms, spectacular pagodas and sunsets, incredibly welcoming people and forget the repression, the cavalier cruelty, the system of informers and torture and "disappearances" to rival that of the east German Stasi, the slave labour and planned backwardness and calculated ignorance of the population. The army guard-towers with machine gunners in place at railway stations are interesting, as are passport and security checks for internal flights. The system of control even came down to our visit to a poverty-stricken local school near Lake Inle (happy kids learning the basics and not much more: NAPLAN proponents would be pleased!!) where we were "requested' to sign a visitors' book, with full names (as these would no doubt be checked up on later by the local military security reps...).
It's also easy to forget that as travellers in defined areas (along with the military and government administrators and their cronies) we were rarely subjected to hours of daily blackouts endured by most of the population. We were also well protected from much of the news of the Myanmar Army's current aerial bombing of minority populations in the north east of the country, and the Islamic minority Rohingya boat escapees to Thailand from the south (where the local Thais welcome their boat people with food and supplies and accommodation while the Thai government goes through the charade of charging them with illegal entry...then ensuring they are housed and supported, then possibly sending them south into Malaysia or into slave labour).
Some random thoughts about Myanmar travel:
The TOLL lady at the Malaysian Airlines check-in desk at Sydney airport didn't know where Yangon was and couldn't find the baggage code. When I said: "Try Rangoon", up came RAN, the computer said YES and the bag did turn up 23 hours later.
A loud double hand-clap is to attract attention (or to stop a fight between women living on the platform on Yangon station). It works.
An extended kissing noise from the man behind you means only that he wants to get past you...
A quiet and repeated high pitched marimba note is the sound of hot food hawkers in the streets of Mandalay.
Multinational fast food outlets are unknown (due to the fairy effective international sanctions against the Myanmar regime) but you can find KFC in Mandalay: Konzedan fried chicken.
It's difficult to get "caught short" in Yangon, due to Public Mobile Urine Stations" (!). Thankfully the middle aged knees still work in squat dunnies...
Uniformed Officialdom seems to all have a high pitched whistle on a string. Furious blowing of the whistle in traffic has less effect than a double hand clap (see above).
On street corners in cities are manned phone booths, reminiscent of China before mobile phones arrived, assisting locals to make long distance calls. There are a few mobile phones, and they tend to be the old open-the-phone-with-aerial-and basic-texting type not seem by us for more than 10 years. Only tourists have tablets.
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Mr Griffith, on his Imperial travels, observes:
"Going ashore in Colombo I can only describe as walking in to a vast open air hot house. If you can imagine the Tropical House at Kew with its roof and walls taken away, its size indefinitely expanded, its contents multiplied, and its temperature kept about the same, then you will have a fairly distinct idea of my first impression of Colomba. Of course there will be white-walled and deep-verandahed hotels, shops and public buildings to be added, and with them, too, the few dusky-skinned and mostly scantily-clad natives, who were loitering about like so many Oriental Micawbers, apparently waiting for something to turn up."
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The Strand used to be the main, similarly Imperially pompous, riverside promenade in Rangoon, featuring the grand colonial facades of British official architecture which can be found on the "English speaking world's" waterfronts from Mumbai to Colombo to Wellington to Calcutta to Sydney to Singapore... but here it is in crumbling faded seedy glory. To the east (adjacent to the British Consulate: "NO PHOTOS") is The Strand Hotel, where, as in Raffles in Singapore, or The Peninsular in Hong Kong, gasping foreigners can be regailed with an extortionately elegant high tea or pink gin.
Across the road at the ferry wharf, young entrepreneurs ply their trade: the 12 year old girl selling postcards ("Cannot reduce price as my commission is only 500") offered to take me over the river to see the devastated villages from the recent cyclone (where the Myanmar government refused foreign aid, leaving thousands to die horribly with little help for others to re-establish their lives) . Escaping her entreaties, I ended up on the traffic island of The Strand, trying to photograph ancient buses with background colonial buildings, only to be accosted by a 9 year old boy (formal shake of hand and introductions - "My name is Roy and it is my pleasure to meet you and welcome you to my country..." - under the beady eye of blue uniformed officialdom blowing its whistle at struggling traffic). As I declined his tour-guiding services, he engaged me in answering every English Language Question he could think of before another formal handshake and a scurry through the traffic...
Behind The Strand are many blocks of decaying colonial edifices: some occupied by government offices but many being tenements suffering demolition by neglect. Along the laneways are second-hand booksellers or loan-libraries of very old books; a first edition of "Doctor in the House" - VERY pre-read - caught my eye, along with manuals for Windows software prior to 2000...
The "Oriental Micawbers"still exist at every ferry boat landing (really just a patch of sandy shore with hand hewn "steps" with a boarding plank to walk, assisted by a "human bannister" pole held by two crew members). And as you walk the unlovely streets of Mandalay visitors are greeted with the exotic cry of the Orient:
"Alooo! Where you go? You want TAXI?"
(And "taxi" can be the unhelmeted back seat of a motor bike...)
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Mr Griffith in Columbo:
"After these come a very long succession of native houses and shops, with every now and then the brilliantly painted roofs or gilded cupolas of Buddhist temples peeping out of the luxuriant vegetation that rose in a wall of greenery on both sides of the road. I am by no means botanist enough to attempt to describe with anything like scientific accuracy the most infinite variety of trees which rose out of the plantations on either hand, and interlaced their upper branches many feet above our heads.
Tree-ferns and tamarinds, jaks and mangoes were interspersed with hibiscus and tall grasses. The splendid dark green scalloped leaves of the bread-fruit contrasted with the green and cream foliage of the cabbage-tree, and above these rose the tall straight stems of the cocoa-palms, crowned with their spreading crests of leaves and their branches of nuts. while over all the orchids and Burmese creepers ran in long, flowery festoons that hung from tree to tree, and made triumphal arches of greenery and flowers for mile after mile along the road"
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Myanmar is a land of spectacular sunsets (and of spectacular dust which enables those sunsets...). On the full day voyage along the Ayarawaddy River from Mandalay to Bagan (Australians huddled on wicker chairs under the canvas roof; Germans, Italians and French frying to a rich Rosella red on the deck; every passing barge, fishing boat or passenger boat waving furiously...) the day commenced with a rich warm yolk-yellow sunrise over the glint and distant small ringing of golden pagodas and drifting wooden boats, dugout canoes and barges. Sunset: through the toddy palms across extensive sandbanks where local kids were bathing, changed the river from a warm brown to a pumpkin yellow to a milky coffee-gold before an extended silent dusk, with hot air balloons hovering over distant golden stupas.
Across the country the thousands of gold pagodas emerge from trees or on mountain tops or by riversides, glinting and quietly tinkling with small bells. They glisten in the hazy sunrise, radiate the sunset, and foggily loom as light purple silhouettes in the gathering twilight.
At Lake Inle, longtail boat motors were stopped so we could drift in the light mist among the fish and floating weed, watching the sun layer itself into parallel hues of crimson, gold and purple before dipping behind the mountains to the sound of distant chanting in the lakeside pagodas... before the roar of the longtails delivered us to a compulsory "culture show" at our cottages on stilts over the lapping lake.
The many (many, many, many) photos of Lake Inle suggest a peaceful beauty and impossibly poised leg-rowing fishermen (one leg on the wooden boat, right leg wrapped around an oar while maintaining their balance to cast fishing nets or bamboo traps) in beautiful peace... The reality was the amplified cries and moans and chants from the large monastery across the lake (from 5am) followed by the Mosque's call to prayer some time around 6, followed by amplified music and the first roars of longtail boats as they started ferrying passengers and goods across and around the floating markets and businesses and schools for the day...
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George Griffith again:
"A good many of them, too, indulge in the disfiguring practice of areca-nut chewing. This turns teeth and gums and lips so red that their mouths look as if they were constantly bleeding. The contrast of this with the brown skin and black hair and eyes may easily be imagined in all its repulsiveness. As for their costume it ranged through every degree of plenitude and scantiness from the flowing robes and high-crowned hat of the Parsee merchant lolling in his carriage to the carved metal fig-leaves of the smaller children toddling through the dust of the road, or paddling in the mud of the ditches"
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A traditional light yellow skin powder (thanaka) made from tree roots is used by many (mostly women and children) to protect their skin from the sun. Sometimes it is applied as a ghostly yellow face mask and worn all day) and sometimes it is in stripes, swirls or leaf patterns on faces and forearms. The first stark glimpse of a flat yellow mask with glistening blood red mouth with black teeth from chewing betel nut is starkly confonting.
Throughout the country, cosmetic companies are now hard at work advertising to the new middle classes the dubious attributes of "advance whitening creams" for women, and "Fair and Handsome: Only Made For Men". Sunscreens are promoted for their "whitening" qualities.
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Mr Griffith in British Singapore:
"Rickshaw men picked up their shafts and rushed at me regardless of collision, and shouting "Rickshaw! Rickshaw!" with an eagerness that seemed hardly justified by the ridiculously low fares that they were compelled to charge.
I did not hire one - at least not just then- and I must confess that the reason why I did not do so was due to a lingering remnant of the Man-and-brother theory, which put me against the idea of using a human being as a horse. It is about two miles from Borneo Wharf to the town of Singapore, and I thought I would walk it.
I started out to do so. In two hundred yards the remains of my western prejudice had literally melted out of my constitution. One of the Syces evidently knew it would, for he followed me, and, just as Nature gained the victory over prejudice, dropped his shafts invitingly beside me. I got in, and from that moment I walked no more under Eastern suns than I could help."
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There are bicycle rickshaws in Yangon and the taxi-motorbikes in Mandalay (and everywhere...), hawkers ply the trains and streets and in Bagan schoolkids hover around tourist buses and hotels with their drawings ("Real postcards, Mister!") and "genuine" and "unique" "sand paintings done by myself" are flogged all over the hundreds of stupa and monastery sites. At one particularly large temple (with Gothic-style arches and frescoes from 12th century) actual sand painters were at work between the arches. I weakened and bought from a real artist...
We didn't get to ask how many of their families had been forcibly removed from old Bagan by the lovely military government to create such a tourist oasis. Our tour leader did point out a brutal looking brick tower in vaguely stupa'd style which was the army's way of controlling the whole area.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------George Griffith:
"Singapore has one of the most perfect climates in the world. It really is a climate, and not a series of ill-assorted atmospheric samples. The weather is practically always the same, and nearly always fine."
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This also describes central Myanmar in January. However, Inle Lake was "cool"... with blankets provided for the magical early morning transit of the lake through rising mist for travellers who'd packed for hot weather. Sandals were worn with flight socks by several travellers... I plead guilty to this. There are no known photos.
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George Griffith in Hong Kong:
"These shops, some twenty feet deep, and with a frontage of about half as much, are not very unlike those of Europe, and, what with their brilliant contrasts of colouring, their profusion of gilding and silvering, and the quaintness and beauty of the wares on sale, they were decidedly attractive, not only to the eye but also to the contents of the pocket. As these shops were specially set out for the attraction of the Barbarian, most of them, in addition to pendant hieroglyphics possess some remarkable essays in imitation of English sign-boards. For instance, one gentleman styled himself, "Dealer in Tailor and Draper, Manilla Cigar all kind, a Silk Handkerchief outfitter." Over the door of a cook shop of an aspect more curious than inviting, one Wong-Foo announced that he "Always has any France Pastry Dinner Lunch Supper All Kinds of foreigners cakes For Sale""
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With their ignorance of the language of Myanmar, (and much of Myanmar beyond the latest "Lonely Planet", which is everywhere) travellers are just pathetically grateful for any English signage, dodgy spelling or not, although it was a mixed pleasure to be purchasing breads at a BARKERY in Mandalay...
Other English usage can be intriguing:
The pamphlet for the "Malika" river voyage from Mandalay to Bagan: "Travel from one exciting destination to the next ... while you enjoy expensive views. Our ships are designed with a variety of features and intimate amenities..." (I think that meant the manually sluiced sit-down loos.)
The bleak "Treasure Hotel" in the boonies of Mandalay demonstrated the Burmese' acute understanding of irony.
The school group on excursion from Mandalay to Bagan proudly wore their Education Centre's motto: "Intellect, Morality and Confidence".
At the East Hotel in Yangon, every waiter was trained to say: "and thank you for waiting" each time they served the tables. The wait wasn't ever overly long but when it was, for - say - the Burmese pork curry with black soy paste, the food was spectacularly good.
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Mr Griffith again:
"Of course you will have tea, or at least what they call the tea in China. We had some, and, as I was trying to drink it, I pictured the sort of wash that would be made by rinsing out the tea-cups and tea-urns after a Sunday-School tea-fight, adding hot water and straining off."
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"Coffee mix" and "tea mix" are heavily promoted by Nestle and their multinational competitors in Myanmar. These large sachets contain instant coffee or tea with a synthetic "whitener' and enough sugar to promote hyperactivity for the next few hours.... Even street and train hawkers give you a choice of brands, but they all taste sickly and bland. The rarer sight of fresh jasmine tea arouses feelings of pathetic gratification...
Some more random observations:
Males and females across Myanmar wear the elegant sarong-like "longyi" wrapped around the waist and tied at the front. Men in particular spent a significant amount of their day adjusting their longyi knot and whatever may be beneath... The fabric is tied higher to create "shorts" for soccer games or for wading and is of a heavier fabric in cold areas. Around sunset each afternoon across Burma, kids in "shortened" longyis are flying kites or playing dusty soccer games on any patch of land (and on most roads and rail lines). Public washing is done with the extended longyi worn with a range of elegant and interesting manoeuvers reminiscent of Mr Bean on a beach...
Several water bottles of fuel on a wooden stand with an air pump constitute a "servo". A hose over a wall constitutes a bike washing business.
Each bus has a crew of (at least) two. On coaches, the "assistant’s" job includes using a large hooked pole to lift low hanging power and phone wires so the bus can travel through. He also stands in front of oncoming traffic to provide space for his bus to turn or reverse.
At the very special Golden Island Cottages on their spindly stilts above Inle Lake (a training, management and business project of the local Pa-O ethnic community after they had made their peace with the Myanmar government in 1991), the internet (dial up) was only available in daylight hours: power was needed for cooking and lighting after sunset. Every new arrival (each by boat) was greeted with banging and gonging on traditional percussion. (So an afternoon doze is out of the question....?). Light globes were the lowest possible wattage. In the words of Spike Milligan: "when you switched on the light, it just made the room look darker."
Airport security at Mandalay: "Do not worry about the camera and watch and water, Sir, just walk through and the alarm will ring. There is no-one to watch the screen."
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And lastly, it's not much fun if you are a 6 year old, blond German kid travelling with Mum and Dad in Myanmar. At every stop to see the many pagodas in Bagan, as soon as Burmese girls sighted him, he was mobbed, kissed, photographed and hugged and reduced to squalling tears and cries to be rescued from the pop star maulings.