Myanmar

PARTS ONE THROUGH FIVE

Boy and his brother, outside Mandalay

Daybreak at the Shwezigon Pagoda, Bagan

I landed back in Bangkok last night, after a month traipsing up and down the length of Myanmar. It is the most unique place I've ever visited. Decades of relative international isolation has led the country to evolve on its own separate timeline, and every day is filled with unique quirks. There is no such thing as banality in Myanmar.









I encourage anyone thinking about going to go. Go now. The people of Myanmar are friendlier and gentler than anywhere else I've been. I made some lifelong friends. It seemed impossible to walk outside and not get invited to tea or lunch. And Burmese food is a bizarre roller coaster ride of flavor that's virtually unknown outside the country (separate food post coming soon).

Below are links to the first five posts about the country. I hope you like.

(a caveat: some of them are quite long)

1. Yangon

2. Mandalay

3. 30 Hours North

4. Pyin Oo Lwin

5. The Golden Rock

The Golden Rock

In mid-April, the country erupted in aquatic violence. The five-day celebration of the New Year had started, and with it, a nationwide water fight, called Thingyan. As I made my way down to Myanmar’s jungle-clad southeastern appendage, the common sight in each village was of a block party, every young person out in force, most of them drunk, dancing to bad techno music and throwing buckets of water on anyone brave enough to drive by. No one was spared. The practice derives from the traditional custom of sprinkling water into a special bowl to cleanse one’s sins from the previous year, but has more recently gained significance as one of the few times a year the hard-line government allows massive public gathering.

The water festival not incidentally coincides with the hottest time of the year. Temperatures were regularly peaking well above one hundred, and in the small, humid town of Kinpun, being dowsed in water was the only real solution. The first day of the festival, I spent all afternoon drinking beer and walking the streets, while strangers drenched me without mercy. It was the most comfortable I’d been during a month in the country. A fact accentuated by the only housing option I could find.

The “room,” I was given at the guesthouse was an enclave at the top of the stairs. A sort of second floor relaxation area with lots of stuffed chairs and good views out the window and a Buddhist shrine. Instead of a door, I had a bed sheet tacked up to the walls, which didn’t quite make it all the way across, and I was forced to enhance the visual protection with a towel whenever I changed, which caused a potentially awkward situation every time I came back from the rust-flavored drool of a shower, when for three seconds between detoweling and seclusion, my god’s grace was on full display for anyone climbing the stairs.

The mattress permitted a new and enhanced understanding of the term “discomfort”, whereby my body sagged inexorably into a crater-like sweat-stained hollow beneath the protective heat barrier of the mosquito net (which, without a fan in the “room”, doesn’t flex in the unctuous, soporific quality that I’ve come to rely on in situations like these). And on the wall, what during the day seems a benign and generally unnoticed formless flexible brown smudge transforms in the shifting layers of night shadow into a malevolent moth or cockroach that taunts my attempts to sleep. And the bunched up, sweat-stiffened sheets turned into razors under the pressure of my exhuming flab. And thoughts like: “How did these ants get on my shoulder?” and “At what point do the severe, linen-induced indentations in the fleshy areas across my back become permanent fixtures?” and “Will three liters of water be enough to keep me from dehydrating from my own sweat tonight?” float through my head.

All these factors allowed for a general hatred of everything to do with my guesthouse, so I spent most of my time outside, where the town throbbed. The reason I couldn’t find anywhere else to stay is that the New Year is a popular time for pilgrimages, and Kinpun has the market cornered when it comes to location. As the solitary waypoint for pilgrimages to the holy Buddhist site of Mt. Kyaiktiyo (pronounced tchai-teeh-yo), the derelict collection of wooden shacks and muddy tire tracks offers accommodation, food and transport. And it’s the only way to get up the mountain. The village hawkers have also found an interesting sales niche. Who knew that Theravada monks loved playing with life size bamboo assault rifle replicas?

By the second day, I was ready to get me mine, western style. I spent two hours hunting the city for balloons, which I planned on lobbing from the roof of my guesthouse at unsuspecting bystanders. After walking through the market for hours, I finally found a Muslim couple selling inflatable rubber balloons. They weren’t water balloons, but I bought the entire pack anyways. Back at the guesthouse, I filled them at the sink, noticing with concern the thickness and tensile strength of the blue rubber. To get these to explode, I was really going to have to hurl them.

Armed with my water grenades, I stepped out onto the street and waited for a pickup truck to drive by. I didn’t have to wait long; a group of rowdy teens was rounding the corner, sporting water guns and a poorly rigged sound system. Looking as innocent as possible, I waited until they crawled in front of me, then unleashed a wicked hook shot. The balloon arced gracefully through the sky and connected with a girl’s face. It didn’t erupt, just knocked her head back and fell to the bed of the truck with a thump audible even over the deafening bass.

After that, I abandoned the balloons. Instead, I ripped a water bottle in half and engaged the children that lived across the street, brightening their afternoon by presenting the largest, whitest target they’d ever find. 

My main adversary was an older boy with Indian features. He was the chubbiest of the lot, and his saturated shirt clung to his torso, enhancing the bounce of his young man-titties when he chased after his skinny peers. The green T shirt only emphasized his body’s wet ricochet, with a decal printed across the chest advertising Curves: The 100 Minute a Day Exercise Program. Whenever the mischievous dark-eyed grin appeared in my face to blast me with his water gun, I couldn’t help wondering if the back and forth sprints were effectively working off his own curves.

Meanwhile, I was rooting for another faction. The troupe of kids three houses down were clearly from a poorer family. Instead of T-shirts and shorts, they wore 80s era raggedy tank tops and saggy briefs. Their equipment was substandard – plastic kitchen cups going up against Super Soakers and water balloons – but what they lacked in hardware they more than made up for with gusto. They were coordinated, patient, and their blood was boiling. They delivered pincer attacks, using the cars parked on the side of the street to outflank their bewildered neighbors. And when they threw their pitiful amounts of dirty plumbing fluid they whipped their arms through the air like Randy Johnson on speed, eyes squeezed shut and teeth gritted, only to yelp and run back, stumbling across the wet asphalt to refuel while their opponents were still wondering what hit them.

Every so often a neighbor poked his head out from behind the metal grates of his front door to watch the battle. He had what can only be described as one very advanced eyebrow, which flexed with emotion as we ran across the street to attack the children. Towards the end of the battle he began giving me subtle, non-verbal attack and defense cues, cocking the furry worm attached to his forehead to indicate an oncoming deluge or a straggling defenseless child.

Children wait all year for the five-day water fight. But the holiday is an early Christmas for anyone lacking in the maturity department. Besides the droves of children, people who enjoy throwing water on strangers include anyone with booze in their system, grandmothers, westerners with nothing to lose, and women looking for an opportunity to display their attraction towards a man. Thingyan is one of the few times a year when Burmese gender roles are turned on their head. Women are allowed to kidnap men and paint their faces, or dunk their heads in buckets of ice water. Even the staunchest desire to stay dry crumbles at the sight of a grinning woman hiking up her sarong to jog across the street with a bowl full of water directed at her target. Hearing giggles, I would turn around to see two or three girls racing my way. What could I do but bow my head and take their love in the face?

Besides the water festival, the town itself would have been unremarkable if I hadn’t fallen instantly and indelibly in love with the girl standing outside the curry house. With a cup of mixed thanaka paste and a bucket of water, she walked straight at me with steel in her eye. Without a word, she doused me in the icy water and started painting my face – her wet, sticky fingers dancing like silk across my cheeks. She designed my forehead, ran a powerful forefinger down the bridge of my nose and pressed her thumb into my chin, then stood back and examined her work.

“You are beautiful,” she said.

“No, you are beautiful,” I said back, staring into her shimmering black irises, her enormous wet whites. I drank in the buttery curve of her jaw, how her nose wrinkled with her smile. She grabbed my hand and I squeezed her wet palm. “Please come eat,” she said, never breaking eye contact.

My mind had dripped out of my body with the water pouring off my hair, pooling in the dirt between us. I didn’t look back as she pulled me inside.

The miserable hath no medicine but hope.

I came back every day to eat lunch and get my face painted with PiPi, her father (Mr. Curry House) and her two younger sisters. They would refill my bowls of chicken and rice and sour soup while Mr. House asked me questions translated through PiPi.

“What’s the English word for this?” she would point.

“We call this a cucumber I said,” snapping it off my finger with my tongue.

“Koo Comb Ah,” Mr. House would repeat, while behind him, his eldest daughter smiled.

In three days, we never touched, but our eyes fulfilled the affair of a lifetime. Mt. House wasn’t a dull man; he noticed his daughter’s rapture on the second day, and his questions shifted dramatically.

“My father wants to know, how old are you?” PiPi relayed.

“I am twenty three.”

“Berry young,” said Mr. House. But his smile was drowned out by his daughter’s gasp.

“I am also twenty-three,” she burst out. Then, slower: “My father wants to know if you have wife?”

“No wife for me.”

“Girlfriend?”

“No girlfriend either,” I said with a grin, as the thought occurred to me that PiPi might be the most brilliant manipulator of men I’d ever encountered. The breathless possibility that she might be making each of these questions up on her own, and simply relaying irrelevant falsities to her father, was an irresistibly seductive fantasy in its own right. How simple it could be, to tear up my passport and live in the back of Mr. Curry House’s restaurant. I could cook during the week, and on weekends organize English-speaking tours up the mountain. And at nights PiPi and I would make beautiful, dark-eyed babies and paint each other’s face with thanaka under the moonlight.

When I am not aware of what I am thinking, my thoughts are liable to be quite childish and unreasonable

Then I thought about my visa, about the string of zeroes my bank account was about to display. I bought another beer and kept answering PiPi’s questions.

We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.

Like so many maroon-robed monks, I too was here to make a pilgrimage, to the top of Mt. Kyaiktiyo. In the clouds, overlooking the green valley below, rests the mythical golden rock. The enormous boulder is The Burmese love to cover anything holy with gold, and the boulder is no exception. Every day, thousands of men (women are not allowed), walk across a short bridge to plant a piece of gold leaf into the rock’s surface, which glints in the sunlight and can be seen for miles. 

Most people make the journey up the mountain in the back of a pickup truck, scaling the endless switchbacks in half an hour. I wanted to do it differently.

I woke up at dawn, before the air began to boil, and set off on foot to the top of the mountain. The damp, dewy earth encouraged me with every barefooted step. I had left my sandals at home. Someone had mentioned to me that shoes weren’t allowed on the mountain, that the entire site was holy. I had just finished reading Born to Run, an account of the lost art of human running, which, among other things, presents an excellent argument for spending time barefooted. After all, the human foot has been engineered over millions of years to be the perfect shock absorber for day after day of walking and running. After all, Homo Sapiens was originally a migratory beast.

The walking path meandered through seven miles of dirt, gravel and stone steps, winding up the mountain through a series of rural homes, people who make their living selling drinks and snacks to hikers. Although, as I soon found out, almost all that business must come from people walking down the mountain. I didn’t see a single other person walking up. Instead, hundreds of well-dressed Burmese families came hustling down the hill. All the boys seemed to sport bleached Mohawks and insolent T shirts, and the women carried knock off purses with confused labels such as Gucci & Gabbana and Nike Puma. Everyone was wearing shoes.

But I liked walking barefoot. It made me go slower. My tendency when hiking is generally to charge as fast up the slope as possible. Like most other things in my life, I have a hard time pacing myself, which results in lots of water chugging and heavy-breathed lumbering bulk. Instead, I was forced to place each foot carefully, and by the end, gingerly, flexing my toes around the smoothest looking rocks I could find. I tortoised my way up the mountain, and never stopped moving. A hike I originally hoped to make in four and a half hours I made in three.

Bare footed travel is naked and pure, rooted right there to the soothingly apathetic enormity of the planet. For the first time in months, the frantic necessity to leave everything behind was extinguished. The immediate now-ness of the moment flowed from my toes and up my spine, slowly coaxing me forward. Cold earth whispered its unique brand of indifference in my ear. I wasn’t running anymore. I was walking.

If only I could have been alone. Every downhiller had something to say. I was compelled to say hello to several hundred people, occasionally forced to shout “America,” or “Daniel,” over my shoulder to acquiesce their incessant curiosity. When the young men walked by I would get a few verses of Burmese shouted into my face, or else they would point their toy-gun souvenirs at me, and the quiet pilgrimage trail I had hoped for would rattle with violent plastic clacking. If they didn’t happen to have a gun in their group, they would settle for blowing a bombastic plastic horn in my ear. Instead of a solitary trek up a mist-clad mountain, I found myself feeling like an animal in a cage, subjected to the leering smiles people reserve for the exotic and the bizarre.

And I had to protect myself. At every wooden shack, children were waiting with buckets of water to pour throw at bystanders. My audible requests to spare my backpack filled with notebooks and a camera went ignored. But I couldn’t deny how refreshing it was to have ice water splashed over my sweaty face every twenty minutes.

Eventually, the vertical steps leveled out, and I found myself walking along a dirt ridge. This was actually harder than the uphill. On the flats, tiny pebbly gravel peppered every inch of the path, and dug into the decimated soles of my feet like needles. By the end, I was sanctimoniously limping, savoring the votive quality of my quest to the top.

I turned a corner, and there it was, at the end of the ridge, glimmering like a beacon: the enormous balancing golden boulder, 3000 feet in the air, looking, even from a mile away, like it was ready to topple off the cliff on a breath of wind. The dirt track ended abruptly into a steep stretch of asphalt, and I continued uphill, my bludgeoned feet rebelling against the cooked black pavement. Voices were getting louder, the pilgrimage road more populated, and pretty soon, I passed a parking lot where trucks were unloading. I was awash with people walking the same direction, staring at me, pointing at my barefooted toil. I passed under a gate and suddenly the ground under me was smooth and cool. Polished marble. I looked around and realized that I had unknowingly passed into the holy courtyard; behind me, women were packing their sandals into plastic bags and continuing into the sacred space barefoot. Now the ground had been designed to accommodate naked feet, and the glassy white surface felt like a cold bath, even as behind me, bloody toe prints marked my passage through the courtyard.

On all sides, people were devoting themselves to the religious in the savory fashion only found in Myanmar. Picnics and pictures and blown-out speakers are the theme for the Burmese faithful. It made finding my way to the immense gilded rock difficult. Every family wanted to pose with me for a picture. “It’s good luck,” a man told me, before directing me to pose with his wife, sister, daughter, son, other son, himself, and then the whole family together. He thanked me, I told him to have a nice day, and then I was grabbed by another man and marched across the courtyard to his family. By the end, my smiles were less than beaming, and some grandson fifty years from now will look at his family’s mantelpiece and find a sweaty, bearded foreigner with his teeth bared in a grimace and an arm draped around his grandma.

One of the few things that I could always rely on in Myanmar was a free lunch. The Burmese love to picnic, and they do it in style. Entire families gathered in the shade, surrounding by the smells of feasting. From huge cauldrons of rice, pots of sumptuous oily curry and soup and sautéed vegetables, bouquets of fresh herbs, everyone grabs at the communal cornucopia and eats with their hands, the way outdoor eating should be. If I visited a shrine or pagoda, or even just a shady area of town, I would inevitably be invited to sit down and join. So I naturally kept finding myself wandering aimlessly between banqueting relatives whenever midday hunger pangs started showing up. I tried not to think of it as taking advantage of the country’s natural hospitality, but as I was increasingly being shown, Burmese women and I had a very strong understanding of each other. Myanmar is a place for lovers of intense eye contact. As I walked through the crowded courtyard, every individual felt in necessary to stare directly into my eyes for as long as I occupied their line of sight. It came from a source of natural curiosity – I didn’t see a single other westerner on the mountain– but looking at someone like that in the States would be considered unduly aggressive. When a young man locked me in his stare, holding it, unsmiling, until I walked past, it felt like the precursor to a fistfight. But when the women stared, it was with warmth and humor, and though my western upbringing made it impossible for me to maintain such rigorous soul-searching as long as they did, I found myself smiling back into motherly faces. And so I was offered samosas, plastic bags of rice and curry, sodas and ice cream, all gratefully accepted into my calorie-deprived shell. 

 

Finally, I made my way through the scrum, and I was there. The courtyard extended around three sides of the boulder, on two levels. Only men with specially purchased gold leaf can walk onto the actual rock and touch the sacred boulder, but anyone can stand beneath it and delight in the dreadful sensation that a puff of wrongly directed air could send the six hundred ton hunk of shiny granite crashing down to annihilate onlookers. According to legend, what keeps the rock so perfectly balanced on the sharp, diagonal ledge below is the golden pagoda placed on top, which is said to contain a perfectly situated hair of the Buddha, keeping the entire delicate equilibrium in holy stasis. I couldn’t help but wonder: If Siddhartha had a shaved head, as is Buddhist custom, where did the hair come from?

Bruise-footed and spent, I lingered for only a few minutes before retreating back down the path, where, gratefully, I didn’t see a single soul walking up. Every ginger step vibrated through my entire skeleton, to a head contemplating the difference between satisfyingly painful pilgrimage and the profound emptiness found within the fevered throng of foreign custom.

Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.

The mists took hold of the ridge; my feet took hold of the dirt. If I had turned around, I would have seen the gilded boulder bathed in the light of the setting sun. But I didn’t. I was happy to keep walking slowly forward. 

Pyin Oo Lwin

When the scorched lowlands of Burma became too oppressive during the dry season, the British colonists came up with an ingenious plan: go up. For several months every summer, the capital was moved to a hill station in the mountains forty miles east of Mandaly. Called Maymyo (meaning May Town, after Colonel James May, who commanded the local Burmese regiment in the late 19^th century) the small city exuded a refreshing, hard to find charm, and grew into an Anglo base. Christian educational missions set up schools, and Indian gardeners were brought in from other parts of the empire to take advantage of the fertile highland soil.

Flowers at the National Kandawgyi Gardens

Now it’s called Pyin Oo Lwin, one of the many places renamed in 1989 when the military junta turned Burma to Myanmar, Rangoon to Yangon, and Moulmein to Mawlamyine. With the de-anglicized name came a swell of nouveau riche Burmese, and the town now functions much as it always has – as a vacation spot for people who can afford it. It’s a place where flowers can actually grow. Where the air doesn’t try to strangle you with every breath. It has hundreds of massive old colonial buildings sitting there as leftovers. And it’s only two hours away from Mandalay.

In just over forty miles, the road to Pyin Oo Lwin climbs over three thousand feet. That’s a lot of work for a truck from 1983, as in the case of our battered Toyota Hilux. The pickup was loaded in Mandalay with as many people as possible. On top of the truck’s roof was welded a black bed frame for carrying cargo. Today it was loaded with (what else but) beds! Spongy-looking mattresses towered high in the air, steel springs flexing under the weight of bulging sacks of concrete and chicken feed. Our center of gravity was somewhere above my head. Whenever we hit a bump our heavy tower sucked up all the vibration and kept bouncing long after we had moved on, jerking the truck up and down throughout the entire trip.

Halfway up the mountain, every truck pulls over at a rest area. Even though the drive is just over two hours, there is a water break. This is for the truck more than the people. Hoses were lined up through the lot, designating parking spaces. While the passengers ate and smoked and used the toilet, our driver opened the hood and stuck the hose into the already uncapped radiator. He never turned the engine off. All down the line, every truck was exhaling a torrent of superheated steam, suffocating from the uphill struggle. It was just one more scene of the everyday in Myanmar. Another coping method.

I had come to Myanmar rather glibly thinking about wide-open rural fields, small villages and lots of farms. The truth is that Myanmar is crowded. Close to 60 million people live in the country, thriving on proximity and packs and noise. Even in the northern hinterland, it was almost impossible to extract myself from the crowd. Almost everywhere I visited, I was surrounded by droves of Burmese people, all excited to see the exactly one westerner. People treated me like an anomaly, and stared at me like an animal in a cage. Instead of relishing in the sensation of light and free solo travel, I felt squeezing eyes from every direction. It was grating and anxiety provoking. Sometimes I wanted nothing more than to lock myself in a small dark room and curl up in a ball.

But within the sweaty multitude, the country’s unique and attractive quirks came through the cracks. Quotidian life in Myanmar is filled with delicious nuggets of eccentricity. As I watched the engine boil, hoping that a spume of boiling radiator fluid didn’t erupt in my direction, a disaffected youth – one of my fellow truck passengers – walked in front of me and lit a cigarette. I had been so busy looking at the impressive mountain vistas on the way up that I hadn’t noticed him until now. He was wearing tight black jeans, a red armband around his right biceps, and a shirt with a black and red diagonal swastika set on top of a picture of Hitler. Below, the letters NAZI were spelled out somewhat gratuitously.

Nazi paraphernalia has become an unsettlingly popular fashion statement among seditious-feeling young Burmese men. I had seen swastika armbands and hats and jackets. An enormous swastika T-shirt covered in illustrated bullet holes was particularly popular. This was not the religiously symbolic broken cross of Hindu and Buddhist tradition. The angry diagonal version is sole property of 1930s Germany.

But this was the first time one of these confused rebels had been so close to me. While he stood there looking angry, I walked up to him with a smile.

“Hi,” I said. “I like your shirt.”

He looked down at his chest, but didn’t say anything.

“What is it supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Nazi.”

“I think Nazi shirts are very popular in Myanmar right now.” When he just shrugged, I asked him why he wore the shirt.

“Hitler.”

“Do you like Hitler?”

“Yes. Love Hitler.”

I asked him why.

“Because he was great leader for his people. And everyone in the world hate him.”

“Do you know that he killed many millions of people?”

He just smiled up at me, his eyes empty of understanding.

I continued, “If a Jewish person saw that shirt he might be very offended.”

“There are no Jew peoples in Myanmar,” he shot back, leveling an insolent look at me through his shock of long gelled hair.

I wanted to teach him something, to educate someone. I wanted to tell him that if he had been born in Hitler’s Germany, he probably wouldn’t have lived through the war – that he was about as far from Aryan as possible. He should know that if he wore that shirt in Germany today he would probably get arrested. I wanted to remind him that the Nazis’ ally Japan invaded Burma and killed 270,000 soldiers and prisoner-laborers. But every time I opened my mouth, his retreated deeper into a scowl.

Instead, I said: “You know, I’m actually Jewish.” I was talking louder now. Too loud. People were staring.

He was silent, his seditious look concrete.

“And guess what…I fucking hate Nazis!” I turned my back and marched back to the truck to stare at the floor and fume.

Of every genus of Southeast Asian privileged youth, the young and moneyed Burmese men seem the most clueless. We’re talking about a very few individuals here, but their very existence is enough to throw the whole equation out of balance. When international relations go out the window, so does real education. If you knew nothing about the Nazis and saw the flag, it’d probably look pretty cool and angsty. In one of the most oppressed, backwards countries on Earth, the angry youth are looking to even more violent archetypes, even as they chant for democracy in the streets: “NLD! NLD!”

__________________________________________________________________________________

It’s not surprising that the British came here. There are pine trees, horse-drawn carriages and fields of wildflowers. The whole city is surrounded by farmland, waterfalls and caves. Instead of scorched red earth, there is green grass and cool breeze. The air smells like autumn.

After spending three days meandering around Pyin Oo Lwin by foot, I asked the owner of my guesthouse if there was something outside of town that I should see before I left. He recommended Peik Chin Myaung, an enormous cave complex decorated with golden statues, pagodas, and artwork depicting the Buddha’s life. He told me where I could get a ride, and I set off to find a pick-up truck heading that way.

I arrived at the market a minute too late; the one pickup heading east that early in the day was full.

“No,” was all the driver said when I pleaded with him.

“I will give you extra money,” I said, and tried to push a couple of dirty notes into his hand, often the magic Burmese grease in these situations. But he wouldn’t budge.

“No eehh-speaking,” he shouted. But he pointed to the packed truck bed, clearly trying to make the point that there weren’t any seats left. I snorted. A simple matter of space had hardly seemed to stop Burmese transportation efforts any other time.

“What about the roof?” I asked quickly. The young man couldn’t understand a word I said, but he could see where I was pointing.

He raised his eyebrows, trying to decide if I was insane or perhaps testing his sense of humor. He shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the makeshift ladder. I whooped, clapped my hands and started hauling myself up. This was going to be awesome. When would I get the chance to make a roof ride through the windy mountain roads of northern Myanmar again?

I pulled myself onto the baking white metal and tried to nestle into the sacks of rice tied together on the back end of the roof. As soon as I was sitting, the diver threw the truck into first and lurched across the dirt parking lot, and I gripped onto the canvas sacks as he swerved between motorbikes. With the pine scented air roaring past my face and the distressed gurgle of the truck’s engine, it took me a while to realize that the sack next to me was breathing. On one particularly abrupt switchback, I was thrown to the right, barely grabbing on to something before tumbling off and creating a new human-shaped stain on the asphalt. As I yanked with my left hand to get back in the middle of the truck, someone screamed.

“Aaaaahhhhhh.” It came out exasperated and monotonous, as though whoever issued the sound was overwhelmingly bored. I looked at my hand, and realized why I had gotten such good purchase with my life-saving grip. My fingers were buried in a patch of starch-white hair. Fur. I peered over at the other side of the sack and saw a goat’s daintily horned head roped up with the rice. The comfortable pillowy sack I had been nestled up in was her warm rump, tied to the rice around the hips. She looked at me and yelled again, this time more grunt-like. “UUAAAAGGGHHHHHH.”

“Sorry,” I said. “We can share the space. I feel bad that they tied you down so tightly, but maybe they thought you were stupid enough to walk off the roof.”

“Aaaaah.”

“Yes, I know. You’re smarter than that.”

In the cooler upcountry, I hadn’t spoken anyone in days. I had spent my time wandering aimlessly through streets decorated with grandiose colonial architecture transformed to government offices. When I wasn’t house-peeping, I was walking in the woods, or the excellently manicured National Kandawgyi Gardens, one of the most soothing botanical enclaves I had ever explored. It’s hard to beat the homey scent of pine needles wafting through a grove of supertall bamboo, even if a poorly percussioned Burmese rock band was broadcasting sonic inconsistencies from the nearby field. After a few days of linguistic solitude, I was happy to talk to anyone, even a goat handcuffed to the roof of a truck.

“They’re probably going to eat you, you know,” I mentioned cautiously. “You seem too friendly to go into a stew. Although, I don’t know, maybe being nice has made your meat more tender. If you had a name it’d be harder to kill you. I’m going to call you Melba. Is that OK with you girl?” And I patted her on her cozy rump.

“AAhhh.”

Be slow to fall into friendship, but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

“What do you think of this driver, Melba?” 

Silence.

“Nothing? I think he’s kind of amateur. Check out this sharp turn coming up. I bet tons of people die here every year.” The truck leaned precariously to the right as we hurtled down the inclined bend. Melba’s warm weight smushed me securely into the rice.

Pine trees and bamboo

She let out a yelp. “Auuughh.” Her inertia was pulling her neck against the tight rope, squeezing the air out of her face, so I hip-nudged her back into a more comfortable position.

“Is that better babe? I haven’t driven a car in over six months, but if I was commanding this beast, I’d make it more comfortable for you. These people are all insane drivers. He’s probably high out of his mind on six or seven wads of betel nut.”

The truck ambled through farming villages. In the higher altitude, the soil around the mountain enhances vegetative possibility. Green vegetables and fruit groves dotted the landscape, and enormous trees cast lush shadows across the road. Lounging on the roof with Melba, I was more comfortable than I had been in weeks. A strange force, the combination of necessity and lack, has directed the isolated world of Myanmar. It was unlike anything I had ever encountered, a sudden break from the continuity of the rest of Southeast Asia. It made sense that I had to fly in and fly out, that land border controls function on incomprehensible, fluctuating rules. A thick, quivering line around the country has established an independent dimension of attractive weirdness. Of everywhere I had visited, the sheer diversity of experience within the country had me most flummoxed and receptive. The infinite Burmese eccentricities  had begun resonating with my own fluctuating internal wavelengths – as evidenced by my new ruminant friendship.

The truck dropped me off at the gravelly entrance to the cave, and I said bye to Melba for the first and last time. Buddha caves are a dime a dozen in Southeast Asia, and generally little more than niches carved in the rock and set with a single small statue. So at Peik Chin Myaung I was surprised to find myself hiking for twenty minutes up a subterranean river. The path led under shallow, dripping stalactites and opened up periodically to display an army of glittering Buddha figures. Families asked me to pose for pictures with them, and only at the very end of the cave, up a set of slimy stone steps that most people seemed afraid to walk up barefoot, did I find actually quiet: in a grove of sheet metal trees covered in paint. Incense sticks were not allowed, because of oxygen deprivation, but it was still OK for workers to lather fumigating gold paint on dozens of surfaces at once. I came to the mountains for the trees and air, so with my sinuses corroding under the sharp chemical gauze, I made my exit quickly, and found a motorbike man to bring me back up to the road.

His name was Anlee, and he made a point of telling me about himself before we set off. He wasn’t Buddhist, he said, but came to the cave every day for the business.

“That’s very shrewd of you,” I told him.

“Yes. My family, very good at business. My grandfather, he come from India in 1906 when the British needed gardeners. He used the money to start a farm. My father, he was also a farmer. But now I can make more money with the motorbike. I used to be translator for nice hotel. But I only make $50 a week. Now I can make more to feed my family.”

“Excellent.” I said. “Shall we go?”

“Yes please. You need to get close to me on the seat please. For going uphill, it is easier please.”

I scooched up into his girth, blind behind his massive head of gray hair, and we were off up the rocky path to the main road. A minute into the ride, we rounded a corner and Anlee began honking the horn like crazy, pushing the button faster and faster until it was one constant blast. I saw another man on a motorbike streak by to my left, and I peaked out to see what all the commotion had been about. 

They say that the most horrific situations happen in slow motion. As I our bike continued towards inevitably, I examined the entire entanglement the instant before it happened. For the smallest fraction of time before the collision, I had time to observe, but not to brace. The motorbike in front of us, moving laterally across our path, tried at the last minute to cut back to our right, the same direction we were trying to turn to avoid him.  Our front wheel caught the other in the flank, rubber burning against competing rubber for a moment, before both were forced outwards. The momentum carried the bikes into each other, plastic composites crumbling and splintering, and we bounced to a jagged stop. As the back end of our bike rose up, I found myself flying through the air, over Anlee’s right shoulder. I landed with a crunch of plastic on top of the other driver. Both bikes were lying on the ground like dying horses, engines coughing, tires spinning.

Anlee had managed to leap clear of the wreckage with a sprightliness of a much younger man. Crouched over the wreckage, he turned to me, “Are you hurted?”

I peeled up myself off the human still below me. It was just a little kid, no more than twelve, and he looked he was on the verge of losing control of his sphincter. “I think I’m fine,” I said, creaking back up to my feet. As soon as the words left my lips I knew they were a lie. It felt like a frozen pickaxe had been wedged into the inner reaches of my right hip socket. I tried to disguise my pain as an unexpected wave washed over me, of pity directed at the old man. I don’t know why I felt like I had to protect him from the truth, but he was taking the accident, in a word, unwell. He walked around the bike to look at the useless chips of plastic hanging off the front of his bike, and yanked against his tufts of white hair, which pulled his scalp into painful looking shapes. The little kid was standing up, silently looking at the ground. Anlee turned to him and began furiously shouting in Burmese, waving his sunglasses in the air and jabbing a finger at the bike, then the kid, then back at the bike. I leaned against the nearest tree, taking the weight off my right leg, and tried to follow the interaction.

I had survived an hour on the roof of a speeding truck, but after three minutes on the back of a motorbike, I was a crash victim.

Anlee kept pointing to the bike and back to the terrified boy. Once in a while he would point two fingers to the sky, as if hoping that Brahma himself would come down and replace the front half of his motorbike. The child hardly opened his mouth. We were standing right outside of what was presumably his house. As we rounded the corner, the boy had been merging onto the road, and Anlee’s honking had been to warn anyone in the way that we were coming around the blind curve.

Suddenly, the boy took off, sprinting down the road, his bare feet pounding over the dagger-like rocks. “Please, sit down,” Anlee said, gesturing to a stump on the side of the road.

“Is everything OK?” I asked. “Is he running away from you?”

“No. He go to get his mother.”

“What did you tell him?”

“He will give me 5000 kyat This is his fault. I am good driver. I horn-ed. You heard me. I was horn-eding the whole time. Going very slow. He should have moved out of the way.” He looked at me with pleading eyes. He was utterly embarrassed to be seen like this.

“Wait here,” I told him. I walked down the road, favoring my left leg, and found a fruit stand selling apples. I bought two and tossed one to Anlee. He pulled out a razor blade and began shaving off the dirty red skin. I just bit into mine.

“This my first accident ever,” he told me. “I am a very safe driver.”

“Will 5000 be enough to cover the damage?” I asked him. It was the equivalent of about six dollars, and Anlee’s bike needed a new front end.

“No. It will cost 25,000. But his family is very poor. Look at this house,” he pointed behind us to the one room shack. “This was his first time. He was just learning.”

“Pretty young to be driving for the first time. He couldn’t have been more than twelve.”

Anlee said: “My father taught me how to motorbike when I was ten. How old were you when you learned to drive?”

“In America we do not learn until we turn sixteen,” I told him. “But that is not with a motorbike. That is with a car. Much bigger.”

“What about motorbike?”

“Most people in America do not have motorbikes. Just cars.”

He thought about this for a while, shaving slices of apple and popping them into his mouth. We both stared at the mangled remains of the cheap Chinese motorbikes sprawled out in the middle of the road. Anlee hadn’t even bothered to pick his bike up. I noticed for the first time that the black and purple pattern on the shards of plastic perfectly matched the 1980s nylon track jacket that he was wearing.

After half an hour of apple munching, a horn blast pierced through the silence. We looked up to see a woman heading out way on a motorbike, the angry-looking youth sitting side-saddle behind his mother. 

As soon as she pulled up to the crash site, she leapt off the bike and began yelling at Anlee, wagging a finger in his face and pointing to her son with another. After a few minutes of back and forth, Anlee turned to me. “Please wait here. We must go to the workshop. She will not pay the 5000.” He hopped onto the back of her bike and they bounced off down the road, leaving me with the little kid.

Once his mother was out of sight, the boy walked up to his busted ride and started kicking the rear tire furiously, tears welling up in his eyes. He had the look of a kid who had just been grounded for a very long time.

After a while, he gave up, plopping himself down in the middle of the dusty track. His ratty red T shirt was stained with sweat from his previous sprint, and now he used the sleeves to wipe the snot off his face. I dug into my bag for some tissues and handed a few to the boy.

“Here you go, kid,” I said. “Don’t worry about it man. Shit like this happens all the time. It’s part of growing up. You make mistakes.”

He stared at me blankly, but accepted the tissues.

“Do you speak any English?” I asked him.

The boy just shook his head, but other than that remained motionless. I passed him my bottle of water.

“Here, drink something.” He looked exhausted from the hysterical sprint Anlee had sent him on. I wasn’t sure whom I felt worse for: Anlee, whose job was at stake because couldn’t get the money to fix his bike from this poor family; or this little boy and his mom, who lived in the backwoods in a shack but could somehow afford two bikes. The intricacies of the situation were lost to me, and I felt the true isolation of an outsider. What had the mother said to the boy? What had she said to Anlee? Had he threatened them in any way? My only information came from the tubby driver in the mismatched tracksuit.

When we heard the rumble of an engine, the boy leapt up and walked across the road to stare back at me. Anlee and the woman rolled up, he was carrying an enormous, heavy looking sack in one hand. “Please sit,” he said, patting the sliver of a seat that peeked out from beneath his magnificent backside. “She will drive.”

I squeezed on and held for dear life as the woman took off. I turned back to see the kid picking up the two bikes and wheeling them to the side of the road.

“What about your bike?” I asked Anlee.

“We will come back after she drop you off.” It was a grand gesture on his part to come along for the hour-long ride back to Pyin Oo Lwin, but part of me wished he had stayed back with the bike. As it was, I was afraid I was going to fall off two bikes in a single day. 

Conversation was impossible with the wind and the bike helmets, so I tried to enjoy the scent of pine needles – although this too was interrupted by the powerful musk emanating from Anlee’s underarms. When we finally pulled up in front of my hotel, I thanked both of them for being so helpful. Before they took off to do the entire ride again, I asked Anlee what was in the bag.

He pulled on the drawstring and pointed the opening towards me. Inside were two new frame pieces. Almost an entire body kit for a motorbike.

“How did you…” but he cut me off.

“Her brother owns workshop,” he said. “I make her buy for me.” He held out his hand, and I realized that he still expected payment for the ride. It seemed a rather gregarious request, seeing as he only drove for about a minute, and this silent woman had paid for the gas to deliver me here. But I dug out the 3000 kyat and wordlessly handed it over.

“What about tip?” he asked.

I looked at him; he was actually serious. “Tip is customary,” he went on. “Please sir, to feed my family.”

I stared at his enormous gut. I thought back to him telling me his family has always been good at business. I thought of the poor snot-nosed kid and the woman in front of me who had been extorted on account of a child’s mistake. I remembered the apple I paid for and the sharp pain working its way down my right leg.

The pleasures of the rich are bought with the tears of the poor.

“You’re not allowed to ask for a tip,” I said. And I turned my back and walked into the hotel, privately hoping that Anlee would fall off on the way back down the hill.

__________________________________________________________________________________

During my short time in Pyin Oo Lwin I sought comfort in a daily schedule. I found quiet paths through the woods to walk every morning. I knew the location of the best Internet café, and every evening I went to the same beer station. For three days I sequestered myself in the encouragements of the mundane.

Of course, it was absurd to imagine that I could ever hide within a routine. And why would I want to? Marvelous and bizarre proclivities color every minute of the Burmese day. There is no wall strong enough to hold them out. Finding the best Internet place also meant finding the most crowded one. And every morning I sat next to the same young man, forced to control my peripherals as he watched full screen voyeuristic pornography and massaged his sarong-concealed genitals. When he left to use the bathroom one morning, I took the opportunity to brazenly stare at what he left up on the screen. He was watching a video of a young girl, asleep on a park bench. A man wearing a traditional Burmese longyi sarong walks up to her and begins fondling her pale breasts, miraculously removing shirt and brassiere without waking her. Eyes closed the entire time, the woman lets her mouth hang open while the man manipulates himself into her orifice, standing on the park bench with his sarong hiked up to his waist. It’s not exactly a rape fantasy, but the unabashed mechanical indifference offers an intriguing insight into the young Burmese male psyche. There’s plenty of porn on the Internet, but this is what he wanted to watch: A young woman behaving like an especially well made toy. A mute. The faux-voyeurism took place in a public park, and he was watching it in a crowded room filled with women.  A sort of meta-voyeurism. In a country where you can’t escape the public crowd, the privacy of a peeping tom is a fantasy in itself.

 

During my last night in town, I walked down the main drag, looking for a place to grab a bite, and a bright yellow sign caught my eye.

SPIRULINA BEER GIVES US HEALTH.

Healthy beer? I went closer to investigate the rest of the sign.

SPIRULINA BEER

Anti-Aging Drink

Young Forever

It is blended from spirulina extract and

Mandalay Beer

using German Technology.

Myanma spirulina contains

over 100 synergistic nutrients

rich in protein, essential fatty acids,

carbohydrate, vitamins,

minerals and other trace elements.

In Asia, Myanmar is

the first producer of Spirulina Beer.

It enhances not only the original taste

of beer but also contributes the very

special flavour of Spirulina.

It promotes your health to be strong

and healthy.

Spirulina Beer Gives us life.

SPIRULINA BEER

gives us health

The large room was packed with men loading up on essential fatty acids and trace elements. Naturally, fearing for my health should I not drink, I ordered a glass. Cold, bubbly and golden, it looked a lot like beer. It tasted a lot like beer too. The same empty, insubstantial taste I had come to associate with every Asian beer. But if it was for my well-being, I prepared to do what was necessary.

Inside the beer station, I found a pamphlet detailing the exact physical benefits of drinking spirulina. The plant, which is a form of algae, will “Improve your muscle tissue rebuilding,” “Improve your recovery rate,” “Satisfy the appetite and provide essential nutrients to weight watchers,” “Cleanse your body of free radicals,” and is “Rich in Phytonutrients”.

As far as I was concerned, my physical self needed all the help it could get. What a spectacular invention – finally, a way to drink my way to internal cleanliness. Not wanting to dilute the powerful medicinal properties, I eschewed any food, and quickly found myself drunk on phytonutrients. When I loped out of the bar a couple hours later, I was immediately intercepted by a man driving a motorbike, at this point, the last thing I wanted to see. He drove the ancient machine right up to my knees and hopped off, offering me a hand. When I grasped it to shake, he held tight and stationary, linking us together for the entirety of the conversation, as is the Burmese custom.

“Hello. What is your country of origin?”

“I originate from America,” I said.

“Ahh, America. An excellent country. You are a very rich people, not like us Burmese.”

“Not all of us are rich.”

“Would you like to have tea or coffee with me at the nearest teashop?” he asked.

It seemed a dark and odd hour to have tea, but I said “Of course I would.” And as we were standing across the street from a tea shop, we walked in together and found a table.

He was a skinny old man with big magnigying lenses over his eyes that made him look lie an especially eager frog. He said that his name was U Kyi Thaw, and I told him mine. U Kyi Thaw was a professor of English at the local secondary school. “I have been teaching for forty years,” he said, holding up four fingers. He took his small cup of tea and poured a bit into the shallow saucer. He swirled the brown liquid around with a finger and then raised the dish to his lips and drank it all at once.

“Wow, so you must have seen a lot of kids go through your class.”

“Tell me,” he said, “How do you find Burmese peoples’ English speaking skills?”

I told him that generally the older generation seemed to have a greater grasp on the language, that most young people I spoke with didn’t know anything past “Hello,” and “Thank you.” 

He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I produced the matches and he leaned across the table so I could light the quivering tip of his Red Ruby cigarette. “As you know,” he exhaled, “We have been oppressed under the boot of the military government for a long time. In 1964, two years after they came to power, the military government closed all the missionary schools. We older Burmese people went to these schools when we were younger, when people had money to afford such schools. That is why my generation can speak English quite well. But in 1964 the government closed all the missionary schools. So many of the younger Burmese cannot speak English. That is why my job is so important.” He poured more tea onto the saucer, swirled it, and downed it once more. “What is your profession in America?”

I told him that I had written for a newspaper, but when I left the country I had quit my job.

“I am also a journalist,” he said proudly. “I have written many articles for newspapers and magazines. I am currently writing a biography about Thakin Than Tun, He was General Aung San’s brother in law, the leader of the Burmese communists.” He pulled out three large notebooks, each completely filled with meticulous, tiny Burmese glyphs. “I have been working on this biography for many years. I am almost finished. I want to send it to publishers this summer, or maybe sections of it to magazines or newspapers. But for us Burmese people, we cannot say what we want in the newspapers, because we are under the boot of the military government.”

Looking at his watch, U Kyi Thaw, stood up. “I am sorry,” he said. “I have an engagement at 8:30.”

“Thank you for inviting me for tea,” I said, and I pulled out some money to pay the bill. But before I could signal to the waiter, Professor Thaw pushed my hand back.

“No, no. In Myanmar, the person who invites someone to tea must pay. One person always pays for everyone else.”

“That’s very kind of you, professor.”

“Plese, tell your great leader, President Obama, thank you from the Burmese people. And tell all people in America about Myanmar. Burmese people love foreigners, especially Americans, because you have always supported and encouraged democracy for us.” He strapped on his oversized motorbike helmet. “Now I must go. Goodbye Daniel. I will see you next time you come to Pyin Oo Lwin.”

“I hope so.”

 

30 Hours North

Many things in Asia are small. Seats, leg room, doorways. I usually knocked the top of my head against something once a day. My beds were never long enough. I always felt ungainly. The steps leading to my hotel room in Mandalay were maid of slick granite treads, shallow and with an overhang. Half my foot hung out into the air when I walked up or down. It was treacherous, slippery, ankle breaking territory, and I found myself hanging onto the banister like an old man. Leaving for the last time, I slipped on the second flight, bags and bottles sent tumbling down as I bounce-slid down the last steps. My right leg collapsed under and across, twisting my knee grotesquely beneath my body. It hurt, but not so much physically as visually. Instead, I felt a faint popping sensation, and an oddly empty feeling, as though most of the inside of my knee had been newly devoted to airspace.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I stood up; my leg felt like jelly. The last two flights took an eternity. Hobbling into the reception area, I tried to smile to the guy behind the desk. Paying him for the room, I collected my bags and left with a wince.

Myanmar is an exceedingly protozoan-shaped country, gangly and longitudinal. I was headed to Myitkyina (pronounced mit-chee-na), in the upper lobe, as far north as tourists are allowed without paying for special government permits. It was also the farthest north I would have been on the entire trip. The idea to go sprang from a certain preoccupation with latitude. Just the possibility that I could go that far north made the journey a compulsion. So far in one train ride. I would be covering three and a half degrees of latitude overland in thirty hours. Then my plan was to take the slow boat back down the Ayeyarwady River to Mandalay, a four-day journey on the brown spill that cuts the country in half.

The train north did not leave for four hours, but the thought of hobbling around the fumey streets of Mandalay on a busted knee sounded less than appealing, so I caught a motorbike ride straight to the station, where I sat on a hard plastic chair in the waiting area and decided to feel horrible.

I grumped and moaned and wrote things in my notebook like, I feel terrible. I want to go home. I can’t shake the exhaustion and my stomach is fizzing.

I felt grimy and wet, like a puddle everyone was staring at, coupled with a sense of hopelessness. The waiting room was dreadful, but it was my only option. There were two trash cans. One was green, which was for miscellaneous plastic everything. The other, adjacent, red, was color coded for betel juice spit. It was almost overflowing with the rank, tannic-scented bubbly liquid. The air smelt like acetone and I was breathing heavily; I felt so exposed. In solitary confinement surrounded by the sound and smell of human, the flustered atmosphere of heavy transit thrummed all around. The standard procedure here was for a six person family, sweating heavily, to unload fifteen to twenty fully stuffed suitcases, plastic bags and bundled sacs, then sprawl on the dirty floor around their mountain of luggage, waiting for their train to be called. Everyone seemed to be moving and yelling; there was never any quiet. Motorbikes were driving into the station and honking for attention. And I was suffocating. I couldn’t feel the flies crawling over my arms and legs anymore. Or maybe I just didn’t care. I needed a wide-open field, cold wind. Not a single other human. 

I brought out the book and turned to a page at random.

Whenever I am not aware of what I am thinking, then my thoughts are liable to be quite childish and unreasonable.

__________________________________________________________________________________

On the platform, squatter communities had set up camp. Families sprawled out on their mats and tried to make a few bucks selling water and beer to people on the train. Their cluttering presence lent a sense of urgency to the atmosphere on the platform. Families bustled and yammered while the train stayed stationary. One man lay on the ground with his toddler-aged boy, who was naked. The child’s dreaming was impervious the echoing metal container he found himself living in. Lying on his back, the sleeping little boy sported a prominent erection, which the father ashamedly attempted to cover with his cupped hand, looking around to make sure no one saw. When he saw me looking that way, poorly disguised by sunglasses, he prodded his boy awake. The child started screaming; his dream must have been a nice one. I turned away to find my carriage.

“There is no sleeper,” the officer told me when I showed him my ticket. “You have to sit in Upper Class.”

I had paid for a sleeper seat, but this train didn’t have a sleeping car. Instead, it was split into ordinary class, first class, and upper class. Contrarily, first class was not the nicest. Upper class meant reclinable, semi-soft old leather and metal seats. They looked ancient and smelled industrial. In Ordinary, people did their best with wooden benches set at a rigid ninety-degrees. My back hurt looking at them. First class fell somewhere in the middle: Hard backs with soft seats. Still no bend.

Outside the upper class carriage, a woman was directing the porter on how to stuff her things through the window. She had enormous wrapped picture frames, bulging wicker baskets, and five small trees, whose roots had been wrapped in plastic and tied for the ride.

“You sit here,” said the conductor, pointing to one of the widows with an adolescent ficus jutting halfway out of it.

I stuffed myself into the chair between the tree and a monk in need of deodorant. The seats were set along the carriage in groups of four, so that two sets of two faced each other. I was looking at an older Canadian couple, the only other westerners on the train. Like me, they were going north to go south, to take the ferry from Myitkyina down the Ayeyarwady River. The monk didn’t speak English, but across the aisle from him was a woman determined to practice her tongue. She was a dumpy woman, a mother and a matriarch, and she was the one with the trees. She carried a lot of accessories and at every station would lean out the window to buy meat, fruit and drinks. Her name was Toi An, and when I sat down she hung her head across the aisle and bellowed into my face: “YES. NO. THANK YOU.”

“You speak English?” I asked.

She held up a thumb and forefinger. A little. “What name?” she asked.

I told her.

“How ole?”

“23” I held up two fingers and three fingers.

“OOOHhhhh!,” she squealed. “I love you.”

“Thank you…?”

“I be your train mama.” She passed me a can of Orange Crusher across the aisle. When I was hot, she wrapped a block of ice in a wet nap so that I could dab the back of my neck with the condensation.

My spirits picked up remarkably in the presence of my new Train Mama. Her enthusiasm for me was unbounded. Once the train whistle moaned and we pulled away from the station, the melancholy that had gripped me sitting on the plastic bench seemed like a forgotten dream.

“What country?” Train Mama asked later, once we were on our way. When I told her, she was ecstatic.

“America!” and she gave a thumbs up. “President Bush!” Another thumb. “Jesus!” Two thumbs.

“Yes, Bush and Jesus. I’m not sure if there’s actually anything more to say on the matter,” I said.

“You Jesus?”

“Me no Jesus. You Jesus?”

“Me Jesus.” She rummaged in her purse and pulled out a rumpled looking notebook, flipping through with a serious look. She found a page near the back and held it out to me. It was in English. “Read,” she commanded.

I read out loud.

USA a wise and wealthiest country They reach till the moon and showed cobrigedo. I knew, I understand of my life. They show their pride of Ego Life. They canceled the word of god falsely, a great world trade center was drawn. Hi jet they could not a leiod.

                       

People come with repentant heart again. All live are found only by grace. U.S. Presidence Bush is save a life. He saw the world sleepless and helpless. There’s no more sneering and quit criticism. He is the shield of the world and he is called real God’s son Mr. Bush. God use with you and Jesus’s love.

Then she began singing. She clasped her hands together under her chin, closed her eyes and pointed her head up. I recognized the hymnal quality of the melody, but the words were in Burmese. She didn’t stop, and it was loud, but no one else seemed to mind the commotion. Just more background noise in the sweaty crowd.

Like most things in Myanmar, the train was late. It left four hours after it was scheduled, and made frequent stops. I had hoped to watch the sunset over the plains of central Myanmar that first night, but by the time we left the station, it was already black. The bright fluorescent overheads were the only source of light, a blinding spray of white hedged by a cloud of mosquitoes and gnats. Sweaty slapping of appendages filled the compartment as people began to drift to sleep at nine o’clock.

It’s perfectly acceptable on Burmese trains to spread out and sleep on any available horizontal surface. The standing area between carriages was the first to get claimed. People spread out along the aisle, under fellow passengers’ feet, outside the jostling door to the rank toilet. Rattan mats were spread out, and as people rolled in their sleep and the train jostled back and forth, the yellow fibers would shred and split and scatter across the wooden floor. By morning, the aisle looked like a barn stall. It was somewhat fitting, because the floorboards looked like they belonged in a barn. Twisty, fragrant, with wide space between that let light and air from under the train peek its way through, the dark, dusty wood rumbled and groaned as the train shuddered north. The boards rubbed against each other in protest, literally screaming back and forth as the train swayed and pounded its wheels.

I wrapped a bandana around my eyes to block out the naked light and tried to curl up into a ball. The monk and I had our backs pressed to each other, giving into the communal aspect of the shared green leather. But with so much movement, sleep was impossible. I found my medicine bag and pulled out my book, My Name is Red, which I started reading when we boarded and ended up finishing by the time we docked in Myitkyina

I popped an Ambien.

The great thing about Ambien is that it makes you sleep. It guarantees eight unconscious hours. The bad thing about Ambien is that it makes you sleep. The drug is a short-acting hypnotic; it basically hypnotizes you to sleep within fifteen minutes. Like with regular hypnotism, you can fight the effects, and this becomes even easier when you’re on a noisy, brightly lit train from the forties that feels like it’s having a seizure and your swollen, injured knee is bashing into the metal armrest. But unlike a human hypnotist, Ambien is a chemical, and chemical hypnosis is much harder to fight. It will work. People that fight the sleep can end up a hypnotic semi-awake trance. Some people will drive for hours and have no recollection of it, or cook elaborate seven-course meals in a blackout state. It’s like the worst kind of sleepwalking, and can be dangerous.

It can also make you hallucinate. And since it’s a form of hypnotism, you might not know that you’re hallucinating.

It made me hallucinate.

I lifted my bandana to a bewildering new reality. The Canadian woman across from me was still asleep, but her clothes were now nefariously awake. The zippers on her zip-off pants were un-securing themselves. The metal coiled over on itself and gripped its own arm in the little circular mouth, peeling back the layer separating pants from shorts. The disembodied green metal strands flung out and attached themselves to the window, anchoring the woman’s legs there, cinching her tight.

I wanted to tell my monk neighbor, but when I turned to warn him, his voluminous maroon robes were unfurling themselves into the face of an ancient, wrinkly-faced dragon with a stringy, Mephistophelian goatee. The dragon stared into my eyes. His gaze was accusatory, eerie in its silence. The head and face were stationary but the body continued to coil and slink through the air, light and puffy and ineffably textured. The maroon folds seemed to somehow inhale and silence the background clatter of the train. Beyond frightened, but somehow calm, I pulled the bandana over my eyes as consciousness fluttered away.

I woke up puffily, took off my eye cover, and saw a mother holding her toddler son up to the window to let him pee out onto the tracks. The train was crawling through the early morning mist, spiraling up a woody hillside that looked like a New England forest that had been subjected to fifty years of slash and burn. Dead, brown, dry season leaves covered the ground. They reminded me, along with the heat, of Indian summers back home. A beggar with enormous yellow eyes had crawled on at the last station and was limping up and down the aisle, holding an arm that looked dislocated. “Please sir, help me,” he said to me.  I found my book on the ground and walked to the dining car.

To keep from going completely insane staring at the same six people for thirty straight hours, for most of the journey I made my refuge in the dining car. I’d order beer and water, and when we stopped at little village stations, I’d lean out the window and buy oranges from pretty local girls. The car had its own regularity, which pleased me. The same three monks were always sitting together at the same table, chain smoking and playing rap music on their cell phones. The staff, all wearing sarongs and white tank tops, would hover over my shoulder as I wrote notes and read. As soon as I drained the last sip of beer, the bottle would be whisked away and replaced. There were always two surly looking policemen in the corner who yelled a lot and bossed all the staff around, but would smile at me. And there was one man who sat alone, smoking cheroots, staring at the world from behind reflective yellow sunglasses.

 

The food in the dining car was shit – greasy and with weird temperature differentials. But the beer was cold, the windows wider, and the seats were mercifully of a different design. I’d still order food, just because I liked to see how the cook made it. We were jack rabbitng down the track constantly, everyone hopping in place in our seats as we labored forward.  The cook in the dining car used the bounce to his culinary advantage. Anticipating the vertical thrust of the carriage, he’d flip the wok, sending rice, chicken, veggies all flying through the air on the up. Then they’d collapse in an oily orgy of sizzle and pop as the car fell back into its springy crater. 

All throughout the day, we patiently ambled across the northern half of the country, puttering to a halt at the smallest villages. Four or five bamboo shacks, where all the women and little kids would hurry down the hill to hawk wares at the passengers. A common sight was a little girl with two buckets of water suspended from a bamboo yoke across her shoulders. She would drop the buckets to the ground and use a plastic bowl to take out a small scoop of water, which people could hang out the train window and use to wash their faces. Bottles of whisky and packets of sunflower seeds were put on platters and balanced on heads. Little boys held out bottles of beer larger than their torsos. Baskets overflowed with salted fish and sugarcane and rice that had been steamed in bamboo. Big hunks of pale, not-very-sweet watermelon were popular. Every stop had the look and feel of a country bazaar, and for twenty minutes the train would be surrounded by the sing-song chanting of rural Asian commercialism.

Then the train would start to crawl forward again, without a warning blast, and everyone that had piled out to stretch their legs would run to the nearest door and jump back on. People on board would hustle to shut the glass windows, a panic of jostling the pesky metal latch bolts and sliding wooden sashes. It was the beginning of the annual Thingyan water festival, which commemorates the beginning of the New Year and the hottest stretch of the dry season. People celebrate by throwing buckets of cold water on anyone and everyone, no exceptions. Trains make an easy target. Kids would line up along the tracks with buckets of water and small bowls, and hurl as much as possible at the passing carriages. Their laughing screams pealed through my window; they were so much fun to watch. But after a small wave careened into my lap, I learned to scramble and drop my window whenever the train started moving.

Northern Myanmar is an extensive sprawl of flat farmland and woody hills. Most of the rice paddies had been harvested and lay smoldering in various dun colors – a patchwork that extended forever into the horizon. Solitary huts were perched up proud in the middle of the fields, where old men sat slowly smoking on the porch. As we passed they would stare and wave and their children would run alongside, screaming at the white guy sticking his head out the window. At one village I bought a packet of sunflower seeds. It felt good to chew and spit the seeds for breakfast. When we started moving again and the shacks fell behind, I stared out the window and saw countless flat, yellow square miles devoted to sunflower farming: Local food.

Young, nubile woman kept coming to my window throughout the day, singing to me, selling to me. In every country I had been in so far, when I locked eyes with a pretty girl she would blush and quickly hide her face in her hands. The shyness was endearing, a sense of beauty that’s reticent but not diminished – I could always tell that something strong and sexual lay beneath the cultural reserve. But in Myanmar the girls exerted a far more determined exotic pull. Girls were quick to lock eyes, and I was happy to stare back. One of the most interesting things about Burmese women is the custom of thanakha, a paste made from the wood, bark and roots of a specific tree that’s been ground with a small amount of water. The beige putty is applied to the cheeks, and sometimes forehead and the bridge of the nose, as a moisturizer and sun block, and has a slight sandalwood perfume about it. The paste is a similar tone but significantly lighter than the typical Burmese skin, and at first I found the look conspicuous and gaudy, that it drew attention away from the women instead of adding something to it. But as I encountered face after face looking up at me through the train window, I began to recognize a subtlety of application. The facial designs were as variant as the women who wore them. The simplest and most common design was two rectangles on the cheeks. It’s a stately look. But there are endless alternatives, which I began to identify with differing aesthetic personalities. There were stripes, three or four fingers of color drawn laterally. Some were streaky and muddled, and covered most of the cheeks and foreheads like static, like a veil. Some girls preferred whiskery-looking designs, giving a catlike opulence to their eyes. Others were light and feathery – wispy and subtle. But my favorite was when girls would paint a single curving line around the cheekbones, just below the eyes. It was the most understated and powerful look. And when we inevitably stared into each other’s eyes and smiled, I felt like our expressions would blossom in front of each other. Now I was the one that was blushing, and I had to resist the temptation to grab my bag and leap out the train window and bend down on one knee. No one said that the world’s longest-lasting military government was hoarding a massive population of eminently marriage worthy women.

In the daylight, I could see that the entire five hundred mile stretch of rusty track was flanked by non-biodegradable waste. Cigarette packs, soda cans and water bottles; a spree of plastic bags in every conceivable color; opened, but resiliently unflattened Styrofoam take away containers were spread across the ground, revealing the ass-ends of discarded passenger meals. A yellowish oily skein, maybe a few uneaten long beans, a dried chili pepper or the vertebrae of a scrawny unfortunate fowl. Refuse and dregs piled up like little walls. Trash. It was the defining landscape of Myanmar. My monk neighbor kept leaning across to throw his garbage out the window, and once, when I placed an empty water bottle between my feet on the ground, he picket it up and chucked it too, then turned and gave me a thumbs up and a smile.

By the twentieth hour, it smelled like two things: dry, singed, post-harvest air seeping from the brown farms out the window, and concentrated uric acid steaming out form the impossible-to-close bathroom door. As night fell for the second time I had been on the train, we rolled past a stream where an entire village was bathing. In the purplish evening glow I could make out mothers scrubbing clothes, fathers scrubbing hair, and a dozen little naked boys splashing and throwing mud at each other. It was the happiest five-second scene I’d yet witnessed in this county.

With the government oppression and the rampant pollution and the overwhelming poverty, everything about Myanmar reeked of despair. The landscape of despondency out the window reflected my own fatigue. But within the hellish vistas were sights like this, of simple happiness. Of joy and life. And it seemed like everywhere I went in Myanmar I kept running into the most genuine, eager people. Everyone wanted to help and learn. Hardly anyone seemed sad, but many that I talked to felt aggravated. I was constantly being shown powerful examples of humanity. It gave the entire country a feeling of earnestness.

__________________________________________________________________________________

In the evenings, I sought out the local watering holes, known in Myanmar as Beer Stations. What sets them apart is that they have a keg on draught, and men can spend the night sipping cheap Myanmar Beer. The Beer Stations boast a typically masculine vibe; the only women I ever saw were foreigners in Mandalay. They are the type of place where smoke in the air makes it too hazy to see across the room, where you can fill up on peanuts and beer, where the soccer game is always on.

They also tend to attract more colorful personalities. During my first night in Myitkyina, I saw a man wearing a shirt that was designed to resemble the schedule board at an airport. In black and gold lettering it read:

Next Romance …………………delayed

New Job……………………….delayed

Good Luck…………………….delayed

Alcohol………………………boarding

Self-Improvement……………cancelled

Money ………………………cancelled

“That’s a nice shirt,” I told him.

“Thank you,” he said. “What is your name my friend?”

I told him, and told him why I was in Myitkyina. “I want to ride the ferry all the way down to Mandalay.”

“Oh, I am sorry my friend, but that is impossible now. By the way Daniel, you can call me Cho.”

“Are you sure about the boat Cho? People in Mandalay said it would be easy.”

“Cannot do from Myitkyina now. The water is low, and there is too much fighting still.”

I mentioned that a couple weeks ago I had seen something on TV about a cease-fire to the fighting in the north.

“No. No. Come on. That’s all propaganda. Government propaganda. They say there is reconciliation. They hold a meeting and people shake hands and they can broadcast it to the world. But there is still domestic fighting. There is still a civil war going on here in Kachin.”

“Why is there fighting in Kachin?” I asked. Kachin is one of the largest states in Myanmar, and the local ethnic group, the Kachin, began a military insurgency against the national government in 2011.

“We’re fighting for rights. For respect. Not Autonomy. We are proud to be part of Burma, but we are not Burmese. And we want the same rights as the majority.” He sipped his beer before continuing. “The government is letting China build a dam here, in the north, which will bring power from Kachin through Yunan state in China. The Burmese government says that they cancelled the project but there are still Chinese engineers up there working. China gives billions every year to Myanmar and the recourses go straight from Kachin to China. None of that money comes to Kachin.”

“So you are fighting for your land rights?” I asked him.

Cho sat back and stroked the hair on his chin. He was a younger man, with a premature beer-gut and long black hair. “Yes. For land rights. But it is more than that. There are now 100,000 internally-displaced people in Kachin. So many foreign people have come to Burma in the past few months. Your Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came. Your government gave the Burmese government one billion dollars. The UK gave two billion pounds. They say that now because there are reforms they will lift sanctions and we will see things get better. The outside world, everyone talks about change, change, change. But the reality is, inside Burma there is no change. It is still the same. For sixty years Kachin has been struggling. We need real change. We need concrete change. That is why KIA – Kachin Independent Army – started fighting again ten months ago. We want respect.

“It’s a domestic problem, not international, so people don’t know. You stay in your own area code, you know? But for us, the infrastructure, the transportation, it is all stopped now. There is no busses, no boats. It is impossible to go anywhere because of the fighting. It is OK though. We wait. Kachin has waited for sixty years. I know we will win.”

His conviction reminded me of something I had read in The Book,

Beware the fury of a patient man.

“Only four months ago, there were explosions every day in Myitkyina. The KIA, they blew up empty buildings, government buildings, maybe bridges built by government, to strike terror in the government forces.”

Maybe more fitting was actually,

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a barbarian.

Or,

Weakness on both sides is, as we know, the motto of all quarrels.

“Why would Kachin people blow up buildings in their own capitol?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that make people that live here angry at the KIA?”

“No. Everyone in Kachin supports the KIA. Every Kachin boy, when he turns eighteen, has to go north and train in the army for six months. So everyone has family in the army. Everyone supports KIA. And now we control the border near China, north of here. The Chinese told the Burmese government that the border needs to be cleared. So that’s where the fighting is now. There is no more fighting in Myitkyina.” 

We sat quietly for a while, both of us staring at the flickering light of the television and sipped our beers. I was astounded by the militancy of his speech. I had been told by numerous people in Myanmar that fighting in the north had ceased, that the minority groups here had signed a peace agreement.

“Look,” said Cho, pointing to the TV. Aung San Suu Kyi was giving a speech. “NLD won the election.”

“Yes, they won many seats in parliament, right?”

Cho drained the rest of his beer before dramatically slamming the glass back on the wooden table, causing the nearby bowl to jump and eject a swarm of peanuts in the air. “Yes, but it wont matter. The military automatically holds the majority, they don’t have to be voted in.”

“But if the NLD got enough seats to have some say, do you think things would change for the better?”

He made the kissing sound and a waiter zoomed over. Cho pointed to the two empty glasses and the young man whisked them away. We waited for the arrival of the new beers before continuing. “NLD is – they believe in democracy – but they are still not good for Kachin. We don’t care about that stuff. We just want freedom for Kachin.”

I asked him if Kachin would have its own government if they gained the freedom they wanted.

“Yes we would. Right now there is a minister from the Burmese government, but he is so stupid. He doesn’t know anything about Kachin. He doesn’t even know our language.”

We drank in silence for some time, until the TV began playing clips of military exercises – soldiers goose-stepping; naval officers firing ship-mounted cannons; a fleet of helicopters coursing over a patch of green farmland; soldiers crawling through mud on their elbows – all set to triumphant patriotic battle music.

“Is there a lot of this kind of stuff on TV?” I asked.

“They are always showing military propaganda on TV. They always show them helping people. Loving kindness, that kind of thing. All the soldiers have stars on their shirt to show that they are never injured. In the movies we see, the Burmese soldiers never die. Except for…” and he collapsed into a fit of giggles. “When Rambo 4 came out. You know Rambo 4? He has to save two Americans that get trapped in Burma, so he fights the Burmese army. And he kills so many of them. In that movie the soldiers are devastated. We had never seen anything like that. My niece and nephew, when they saw, their jaws dropped. Then, the government cut our satellite for six months. We could not watch TV, because the international movie channels were showing Rambo 4. Then after six months, like that, it just comes back on.”

We killed our beers and ordered two more.

“Do you want to go on a midnight ride?” asked Cho. “I have a Jeep Wrangler. We can drive up along the river.”

“Let’s do it.” We chugged our last two beers and paid the tab. Out on the street, the bugs were swarming under the two streetlights that lit up the block.

“Over there, see,” said Cho, pointing. “Jeep Wrangler.” He was swaggering a bit; his mental dick was growing bigger by the minute as we walked to the car.

What he thought was a Wrangler was actually a Willys Civilian Jeep. It looked like it was the CJ – like, from the 1950s. Everything about it looked like it had survived a war zone, which, I caught myself thinking, was completely possible. The dents in the passenger door could have been from KIA grenade shrapnel. 

We peeled out through the dirty streets of the town center and made our way north and east towards the river. Here on the northern reaches of the Ayeyarwady, the air was brisk and breathable. Without any doors or roof, we were soaked in wind. It filled my sinuses, rejuvenating the inside of my head in a cooling unscented bath. Then we came to the bank of the river. It was so much wider than I had expected, an abyss of black that had been poured out to the horizon, challenging the night sky in stature and absoluteness.

“Wow,” I hummed as Cho cut the engine. “That’s quite impressive.”

“Yes. We are very proud of the river.”

“Now it is my turn to ask you questions,” said Cho, smiling.

“Ok. That sounds fair.”

He cracked his knuckles and leaned his seat back. “First. Why did you come here?”

“It’s the end of the line. This is as far north as I can go.”

“No, no. Not Kachin. Myanmar. Why did you come to my country?”

“Because it’s there I guess. But also because most people in America no very little about Myanmar, myself included. I wanted to learn about what life is like here.”

“What other countries have you visited?”

I counted off on my fingers. “On this trip I’ve been to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.”

“Why do you visit so many?”

“Perspective.”

“Could you elaborate, please?”

“You know, you should consider becoming a journalist, man. You’re good at this interview stuff. I guess what I mean is that when I come to a place I do my best to try and understand how people there approach life. It’s difficult, impossible, really, because I never speak the language and I’m only ever passing through. But if I can even get a little glimpse, and can hopefully understand the different cultural perspectives I see, then I have one more tool for examining my own lifestyle and my own choices. How can you be critical of yourself if you only have one way of looking at the world? Travel is one way to learn about that.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Cho. “You make me want to travel. But I never leave Myanmar. I cannot afford, and my family needs me.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Where would you go if you had the choice?”

“Australia I think. Because there is so much open space. But I am not finished with asking questions.”

“Oh, sorry. Go for it.”

“You must have been gone a long time to have visited so many countries. What does your family in America say?”

“It has been a long time. About six months. Luckily my family is supportive. I try to talk to them when I can.”

“Do you get tired?”

“Yes. Sometimes it can be very exhausting. Sometimes I get afraid that I will keep going, keep spending money, and just be totally blank. Like I’m saturated, or a sponge that has already soaked everything up. I don’t want to keep looking at new things and not be able to process them.”

“So then why keep going?”

“I can’t really help myself.”

“That is a long time to be running.”

“Who said I was running?”

“You did. Just now.”

“Oh. Well I don’t have much of a life to go back to. No job or anything.”

“Then this is my last question: What are you running from?”

To achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought