PeterUK
June 7th, 2009, 16:08
тАШYou want to change money? I have shop.тАЩ
тАШPlease, I would like to speak English with you.тАЩ
тАШYou want postcard? I have very cheap.тАЩ
If you take a holiday in Burma your conscience may or may not bother you, but the hordes of people desperate to relieve you of your US dollars and kyats certainly will. They will home in on you from all directions and pursue you with a volubility and persistence born of the direst economic need. On a recent trip my American companion and I, accustomed to the rather more genteel ways of ThailandтАЩs poor, found ourselves ill-prepared. After our first half-hour on the streets of Yangon (Rangoon as was) we were both in a state of irritated befuddlement. тАШWhere are all the other tourists?тАЩ I asked petulantly (we hadnтАЩt seen a single one up to then), eager for reinforcements to share the burden of attention. тАШProbably all hiding in their hotel rooms,тАЩ replied my companion.
One adjusts, of course, and our two days in Yangon brought many pleasures. Despite a generally rundown, grubby appearance, there is a faded colonial charm to many of the tree-lined streets and everywhere a bustle of activity which is wholly Asian. The traffic is loud and chaotic; one notices with surprise after a while the absence of motorbikes which are banned in Yangon though not elsewhere. The locals go purposefully about their business without for the most part the downtrodden, glum expressions which I had mentally assigned them in advance. We did the usual touristy things: the Shwedagon Pagoda, Bogokye Aung San market, high tea at the Strand Hotel. In the evenings we liked to stroll about observing people as they shopped and ate and relaxed. Small generators whirred noisily outside many shops and eating places. There was plenty of evidence of straitened circumstances and I would glance at steep, dark stairways leading directly off the streets and imagine the grim living conditions above.
On our second day we paid a dollar each (much cheaper for the locals) to take a three-hour train journey round the city: a good way to get an overall impression if time is limited. For part of the journey we were in open countryside; Yangon is relatively compact. Our compartment was very basic with nothing so hi-tech as doors or glass in the windows. We got a bit more local colour than we had bargained for when some market traders came on board filling every available space with their sacks and baskets of produce; at least we were spared squawking chickens. A couple of youngish guys in ordinary clothes in a roped-off section of the compartment next to where we were sitting тАУ transport police we surmised тАУ looked at us casually from time to time, perhaps under orders to keep an eye on these suspicious Westerners from the ticket-issuer who had muttered something to them when we first got in.
From Yangon we flew to Bagan and spent three days there. It lies in a bend of the Irrawaddy river in central Burma on a big plain which is seriously parched at this time of year; it is dotted with more than three thousand temples ranging from small shrines to soaring pagodas. They were built mainly between the 11th and 13th centuries and are fully as magnificent a sight as the contemporaneous Khmer temples around Siem Reap. We hired a horse-and-buggy driver for fifteen dollars a day and went bumping along from temple to temple, gawping, climbing, clicking. The vendors gathered at the main ones lose nothing in pestering ability to their Yangon cousins. At night our driver took us to nearby restaurants. As we clip-clopped along quiet country lanes I sat with my legs dangling out the back of the cart and looked up at the so-starry sky imagining all manner of romantic antebellum tosh. Unless youтАЩre a fanatical temple explorer, two days is plenty for sight-seeing in Bagan and that includes an indispensable break for three or four hours each day from the fierce midday heat. There is a museum in Old Bagan which is well worth a visit; apart from giving a good impression of everyday life in the area in the period of its glory, the museum building itself is a rather wonderful example of military-dictatorship grandiosity.
After Bagan we spent three days in Mandalay, a little further north. It somewhat resembles Chiang Mai in that it is very tree-friendly, is full of maroon-robed monks and has a walled-and-moated fort in the middle. This fort feels much more forbidding than Chiang MaiтАЩs old city, however, and has large notices at its main gate extolling the virtues of the military government and inviting citizens to root out тАШstoogesтАЩ and other evil influences. Inside we saw almost the only soldiers we came across in Burma (elsewhere the army of informers is presumably considered adequate for control purposes), not surprisingly since many have their barracks there. We paid ten dollars each to view the royal palace in the middle of the fort and agreed that it was an underwhelming experience тАУ just a recently-built copy of the original, which burned down during World War Two, with a forlorn, neglected air and a distinct absence of furnishings or other visitors.
Nearby Mandalay Hill is worth the climb up hundreds of stone steps for the view. The local markets are great sources of bargain prices on Burmese handicrafts. Teashops are an institution in Burma and Mandalay has many of them. The one we went to was alive with noisy activity: young boys in blue lungis running from table to table shouting out orders, counter assistants pouring out tea with showy flourishes and swoops, customers chatting animatedly. My companion and I played тАШspot the informerтАЩ. The tea was sickly sweet. On our second morning we made a one-hour boat-trip to one of the nearby old royal cities, Mingun. The law of diminishing returns had well and truly set in as far as temple-viewing was concerned, but it was interesting just to observe modern-day life along the low but still wide river and life in sleepy Mingun itself. There was much anticipatory excitement among the local youths regarding that nightтАЩs European ChampionsтАЩ Cup Final between Manchester United and Barcelona.
The traffic in Mandalay makes that of Yangon look almost sedate. Cars, pushbikes and motorbikes weave in and out, tooting merrily, almost without pause; indeed, I came to the conclusion that to pause was to invite disaster. It all seemed to work satisfactorily, though I suspect that road accident figures might not bear this out. We got about either by rickshaw or a miniature fume-spewing version of the songthaew. On one rickshaw journey my young driver went over one of many bumps in the road; the bike lurched to the right where I was quietly minding my own business in the sidecar and inexorable physical laws then carried us the rest of the way over. I was deposited in a muddy puddle with driver and bike on top of me. The other rickshaw came to a halt and I thought my American companion did well to preserve a straight, even concerned face. My poor driver was too stricken with remorse even to apologise. Fortunately (?) there was a horse trough nearby and the two drivers washed me down; as I examined a small graze on my right elbow fears of water-borne disease compounded my woes. A small crowd had gathered to watch and I couldnтАЩt help reflecting that had this happened under British rule I would have been obliged, regardless of my personal feelings, to give my driver a good thrashing in order to save face. As it was, we finished the journey and, very reasonably I thought, I paid him the agreed fare. Ashen-faced, he couldnтАЩt wait to pedal away. The other driver had the beginnings of a wicked, pensive smile and I presume that ahead of my driver lies a future of merciless ribbing by his colleagues.
We returned for one more night in Yangon in readiness for our early-morning Air Asia flight back to Bangkok (a mere 3500B total fare each, there and back). On our last evening stroll we were accosted by a friendly student who, despite our initial misgivings, turned out to be just that тАУ friendly. He was a Thai studying economics at Yangon University, paranoid about his lack of the correct paperwork. In his good English he told us how nearly all the Burmese students were anti-government. This was the first overt political statement I had heard on the trip. I had decided never to raise the matter myself in case of causing people embarrassment or worse and, despite the fact that Suu KyiтАЩs trial on trumped-up charges had just begun when we arrived, no one else ever did talk politics, not that we were exactly moving in intellectual circles. The nearest we got to comments were wistful looks from taxi drivers, hotel workers and others and an admission that the tourist situation could be much better given the right conditions. Only too true: we never did see many other tourists.
We were certainly impressed by the tourist infrastructure, if not the tourist numbers. There were no long waits or hitches with any of our flights (we used Yangon Air for internal flights) and the hotels where we stayed were all friendly, clean and well-appointed. The Thamada Hotel in Yangon was the least luxurious, about two stars, and cost us twenty-seven dollars each per room per night. For only one dollar more we stayed at the Bagan Thande Hotel in Old Bagan in clean cabins set in a lovely garden on the bank of the Irrawaddy. The only drawback was the endless тАУ and I mean endless тАУ daytime cawing of crows in the big spreading trees. I quite like crows, solemn, ecclesiastical creatures, but thereтАЩs definitely such a thing as too much cawing in my opinion. In Mandalay, due to circumstances too complicated to explain, we ended up sharing a room in the most luxurious hotel of all, The Red Canal, at a discounted price of thirty dollars each. The hotel, a teak-lined little palace, takes its name from an adjacent canal which looked quite as muddy and pestilent as you might imagine. Each evening at about six oтАЩclock locals arrived to bathe, their toiletries neatly packed in Tupperware boxes. Somewhat to my surprise, normal (if very slow) internet access was available by proxy server on the hotelтАЩs free-to-use laptops and the huge range of satellite TV channels included BBC World with uncensored comments on the Suu Kyi trial. A bit of high-level behind-the-scenes string-pulling there, methinks. The food at The Red Canal was mainly goodish Indian food and everywhere we went the Indian influence on Burmese cooking was evident. I wasnтАЩt overly keen on the local food, despite the easy availability of vegetarian options. The best Burmese meal we had, by common consent, was at the posh but not expensive Green Elephant restaurant near Yangon University. Money is probably best changed at the hotels, where you get a slightly worse rate than on the street but total security.
I canтАЩt really end this account without reference to the boy situation. No gay bars or clubs exist in anything like the Western or Thai sense (as far as I am aware), but the combination of great economic necessity and a not particularly hostile national attitude to homosexuality ensures that rendezvous are quite easily arranged. My companion, a genial and crafty sex maniac, was in the sack with a young man met near the Bogokye Aung San market within six hours of our arrival in Yangon (no bitchiness intended on my part, of course). After that we both contented ourselves with much ogling and touchy-feely stuff. The tightly-wrapped lungis which most Burmese males wear accentuate their oh-so-slender waists and melon-shaped derrieres beautifully. DonтАЩt even get me started on their eyes like shiny deep-brown pools of emotional intensity... We saw an obvious gay meeting-point at a pedestrian overpass in Yangon and no doubt there were others. On a cautionary note, in Bagan I saw posters pinned to tree trunks warning against under-age sex. I had no particular desire to make sexual adventures a goal of such a relatively short trip, but, as I say, they are there for people who must have them.
We both thoroughly enjoyed our trip. Not much of the money we spent went to government sources; most of it went to ordinary people who crave more tourists. IтАЩm not saying we were right or wrong to go; everyone must decide for himself. We were lucky to have good weather throughout. Now I see that the monsoon has arrived.
тАШPlease, I would like to speak English with you.тАЩ
тАШYou want postcard? I have very cheap.тАЩ
If you take a holiday in Burma your conscience may or may not bother you, but the hordes of people desperate to relieve you of your US dollars and kyats certainly will. They will home in on you from all directions and pursue you with a volubility and persistence born of the direst economic need. On a recent trip my American companion and I, accustomed to the rather more genteel ways of ThailandтАЩs poor, found ourselves ill-prepared. After our first half-hour on the streets of Yangon (Rangoon as was) we were both in a state of irritated befuddlement. тАШWhere are all the other tourists?тАЩ I asked petulantly (we hadnтАЩt seen a single one up to then), eager for reinforcements to share the burden of attention. тАШProbably all hiding in their hotel rooms,тАЩ replied my companion.
One adjusts, of course, and our two days in Yangon brought many pleasures. Despite a generally rundown, grubby appearance, there is a faded colonial charm to many of the tree-lined streets and everywhere a bustle of activity which is wholly Asian. The traffic is loud and chaotic; one notices with surprise after a while the absence of motorbikes which are banned in Yangon though not elsewhere. The locals go purposefully about their business without for the most part the downtrodden, glum expressions which I had mentally assigned them in advance. We did the usual touristy things: the Shwedagon Pagoda, Bogokye Aung San market, high tea at the Strand Hotel. In the evenings we liked to stroll about observing people as they shopped and ate and relaxed. Small generators whirred noisily outside many shops and eating places. There was plenty of evidence of straitened circumstances and I would glance at steep, dark stairways leading directly off the streets and imagine the grim living conditions above.
On our second day we paid a dollar each (much cheaper for the locals) to take a three-hour train journey round the city: a good way to get an overall impression if time is limited. For part of the journey we were in open countryside; Yangon is relatively compact. Our compartment was very basic with nothing so hi-tech as doors or glass in the windows. We got a bit more local colour than we had bargained for when some market traders came on board filling every available space with their sacks and baskets of produce; at least we were spared squawking chickens. A couple of youngish guys in ordinary clothes in a roped-off section of the compartment next to where we were sitting тАУ transport police we surmised тАУ looked at us casually from time to time, perhaps under orders to keep an eye on these suspicious Westerners from the ticket-issuer who had muttered something to them when we first got in.
From Yangon we flew to Bagan and spent three days there. It lies in a bend of the Irrawaddy river in central Burma on a big plain which is seriously parched at this time of year; it is dotted with more than three thousand temples ranging from small shrines to soaring pagodas. They were built mainly between the 11th and 13th centuries and are fully as magnificent a sight as the contemporaneous Khmer temples around Siem Reap. We hired a horse-and-buggy driver for fifteen dollars a day and went bumping along from temple to temple, gawping, climbing, clicking. The vendors gathered at the main ones lose nothing in pestering ability to their Yangon cousins. At night our driver took us to nearby restaurants. As we clip-clopped along quiet country lanes I sat with my legs dangling out the back of the cart and looked up at the so-starry sky imagining all manner of romantic antebellum tosh. Unless youтАЩre a fanatical temple explorer, two days is plenty for sight-seeing in Bagan and that includes an indispensable break for three or four hours each day from the fierce midday heat. There is a museum in Old Bagan which is well worth a visit; apart from giving a good impression of everyday life in the area in the period of its glory, the museum building itself is a rather wonderful example of military-dictatorship grandiosity.
After Bagan we spent three days in Mandalay, a little further north. It somewhat resembles Chiang Mai in that it is very tree-friendly, is full of maroon-robed monks and has a walled-and-moated fort in the middle. This fort feels much more forbidding than Chiang MaiтАЩs old city, however, and has large notices at its main gate extolling the virtues of the military government and inviting citizens to root out тАШstoogesтАЩ and other evil influences. Inside we saw almost the only soldiers we came across in Burma (elsewhere the army of informers is presumably considered adequate for control purposes), not surprisingly since many have their barracks there. We paid ten dollars each to view the royal palace in the middle of the fort and agreed that it was an underwhelming experience тАУ just a recently-built copy of the original, which burned down during World War Two, with a forlorn, neglected air and a distinct absence of furnishings or other visitors.
Nearby Mandalay Hill is worth the climb up hundreds of stone steps for the view. The local markets are great sources of bargain prices on Burmese handicrafts. Teashops are an institution in Burma and Mandalay has many of them. The one we went to was alive with noisy activity: young boys in blue lungis running from table to table shouting out orders, counter assistants pouring out tea with showy flourishes and swoops, customers chatting animatedly. My companion and I played тАШspot the informerтАЩ. The tea was sickly sweet. On our second morning we made a one-hour boat-trip to one of the nearby old royal cities, Mingun. The law of diminishing returns had well and truly set in as far as temple-viewing was concerned, but it was interesting just to observe modern-day life along the low but still wide river and life in sleepy Mingun itself. There was much anticipatory excitement among the local youths regarding that nightтАЩs European ChampionsтАЩ Cup Final between Manchester United and Barcelona.
The traffic in Mandalay makes that of Yangon look almost sedate. Cars, pushbikes and motorbikes weave in and out, tooting merrily, almost without pause; indeed, I came to the conclusion that to pause was to invite disaster. It all seemed to work satisfactorily, though I suspect that road accident figures might not bear this out. We got about either by rickshaw or a miniature fume-spewing version of the songthaew. On one rickshaw journey my young driver went over one of many bumps in the road; the bike lurched to the right where I was quietly minding my own business in the sidecar and inexorable physical laws then carried us the rest of the way over. I was deposited in a muddy puddle with driver and bike on top of me. The other rickshaw came to a halt and I thought my American companion did well to preserve a straight, even concerned face. My poor driver was too stricken with remorse even to apologise. Fortunately (?) there was a horse trough nearby and the two drivers washed me down; as I examined a small graze on my right elbow fears of water-borne disease compounded my woes. A small crowd had gathered to watch and I couldnтАЩt help reflecting that had this happened under British rule I would have been obliged, regardless of my personal feelings, to give my driver a good thrashing in order to save face. As it was, we finished the journey and, very reasonably I thought, I paid him the agreed fare. Ashen-faced, he couldnтАЩt wait to pedal away. The other driver had the beginnings of a wicked, pensive smile and I presume that ahead of my driver lies a future of merciless ribbing by his colleagues.
We returned for one more night in Yangon in readiness for our early-morning Air Asia flight back to Bangkok (a mere 3500B total fare each, there and back). On our last evening stroll we were accosted by a friendly student who, despite our initial misgivings, turned out to be just that тАУ friendly. He was a Thai studying economics at Yangon University, paranoid about his lack of the correct paperwork. In his good English he told us how nearly all the Burmese students were anti-government. This was the first overt political statement I had heard on the trip. I had decided never to raise the matter myself in case of causing people embarrassment or worse and, despite the fact that Suu KyiтАЩs trial on trumped-up charges had just begun when we arrived, no one else ever did talk politics, not that we were exactly moving in intellectual circles. The nearest we got to comments were wistful looks from taxi drivers, hotel workers and others and an admission that the tourist situation could be much better given the right conditions. Only too true: we never did see many other tourists.
We were certainly impressed by the tourist infrastructure, if not the tourist numbers. There were no long waits or hitches with any of our flights (we used Yangon Air for internal flights) and the hotels where we stayed were all friendly, clean and well-appointed. The Thamada Hotel in Yangon was the least luxurious, about two stars, and cost us twenty-seven dollars each per room per night. For only one dollar more we stayed at the Bagan Thande Hotel in Old Bagan in clean cabins set in a lovely garden on the bank of the Irrawaddy. The only drawback was the endless тАУ and I mean endless тАУ daytime cawing of crows in the big spreading trees. I quite like crows, solemn, ecclesiastical creatures, but thereтАЩs definitely such a thing as too much cawing in my opinion. In Mandalay, due to circumstances too complicated to explain, we ended up sharing a room in the most luxurious hotel of all, The Red Canal, at a discounted price of thirty dollars each. The hotel, a teak-lined little palace, takes its name from an adjacent canal which looked quite as muddy and pestilent as you might imagine. Each evening at about six oтАЩclock locals arrived to bathe, their toiletries neatly packed in Tupperware boxes. Somewhat to my surprise, normal (if very slow) internet access was available by proxy server on the hotelтАЩs free-to-use laptops and the huge range of satellite TV channels included BBC World with uncensored comments on the Suu Kyi trial. A bit of high-level behind-the-scenes string-pulling there, methinks. The food at The Red Canal was mainly goodish Indian food and everywhere we went the Indian influence on Burmese cooking was evident. I wasnтАЩt overly keen on the local food, despite the easy availability of vegetarian options. The best Burmese meal we had, by common consent, was at the posh but not expensive Green Elephant restaurant near Yangon University. Money is probably best changed at the hotels, where you get a slightly worse rate than on the street but total security.
I canтАЩt really end this account without reference to the boy situation. No gay bars or clubs exist in anything like the Western or Thai sense (as far as I am aware), but the combination of great economic necessity and a not particularly hostile national attitude to homosexuality ensures that rendezvous are quite easily arranged. My companion, a genial and crafty sex maniac, was in the sack with a young man met near the Bogokye Aung San market within six hours of our arrival in Yangon (no bitchiness intended on my part, of course). After that we both contented ourselves with much ogling and touchy-feely stuff. The tightly-wrapped lungis which most Burmese males wear accentuate their oh-so-slender waists and melon-shaped derrieres beautifully. DonтАЩt even get me started on their eyes like shiny deep-brown pools of emotional intensity... We saw an obvious gay meeting-point at a pedestrian overpass in Yangon and no doubt there were others. On a cautionary note, in Bagan I saw posters pinned to tree trunks warning against under-age sex. I had no particular desire to make sexual adventures a goal of such a relatively short trip, but, as I say, they are there for people who must have them.
We both thoroughly enjoyed our trip. Not much of the money we spent went to government sources; most of it went to ordinary people who crave more tourists. IтАЩm not saying we were right or wrong to go; everyone must decide for himself. We were lucky to have good weather throughout. Now I see that the monsoon has arrived.