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.