Yangon

What the hell…? #4

/ ckoukkos / Leave a comment

I’m going to run through the rest of Myanmar quickly, or else I’ll never catch up. 

We spent 3 days in Nyaungshwe, mostly resting and recovering from the trek. We did hire a longboat for one day, to tour the villages and handicraft shops scattered around Lake Inle. In town we met a local man who worked at one of the monasteries. He invited us for tea at his house, where we also met his wife, children and a few of his sisters-in-law. His wife insisted that we come back for dinner the next day. “No pay! Real Myanmar food!” We accepted. We feared that they’d want something – to hire the man for a tour, to buy some nice local stuff, etc – but instead we had a nice chat in broken English, with their two-year-old jumping around and being very cute. After dinner the eldest sister-in-law came over with a huge bag of clothes and cloth bags. She promptly dumped everything on the floor next to me and started sorting through it, saying she was going to a market to sell them tomorrow. “See this bag? Very nice! I sell one today nice woman just 2000 kyat!” Etc. It was clear who the entrepreneur in the family was. 

Overall, our time at Inle was a nice. We were relaxing while you guys were frantically calling the US embassy, etc. Oops!

On the 7th we took the bus to Mandalay. And from then on, I can honestly say that the aftermath of the typhoon kinda took over our trip – not because of infrastructure, etc., but because a good portion of our attention ws diverted to the question of staying or going, and making alternative plans, etc. We did manage to tour a few pagodas and see the Moustache Brothers show. We also took a day trip to see the nearby ancient cities of Sagaing, Innwa and Amarapura including U Bein’s Bridge, at 1.2 km the longest teak bridge in the world.

On the 11th we got up at 4:30 am to take the 15-hour slow boat down the Ayerwaddy River to Bagan.

Ahh, Bagan. After days upon days of pagoda-hopping in Thailand and Myanmar, I was secretly dreading this vast area of ancient temples. But boy, was that stupid. Whereas most temples I had seen had been “renovated” within an inch of their lives with whitewash and ugly gold leaf, Bagan was different. First, the temples weren’t these dinky, tacky things. Many were the size of cathdrals and featured thousand-year-old murals. Some were crowded with children trying to sell us postcards, laquerware, sand paintings and various trinkets, but most were empty except for the odd keymaster/guide. In some temples you could climb up to higher platforms, where we were treated to lovely views of the stupa-studded plains and the river in the distance. The Lonely Planet says to picture Bagan like this: Take all the churches in Europe and place them on the island of Manhattan. And it’s not too far from the truth!

Unfortunately, we were treated to more unseasonably rainy weather in Bagan, so only 1-1/2 of our 3 days there were good for sightseeing. And as there was no internet…I read all of George Orwell’s Burmese Days, whose descriptions of Burma (and government corruption) are still remarkably accurate.

Finally, we took the overnight bus back down to Yangon, and then flew out the next day.

There’s more, of course – plenty of odd and/or annoying characters and situtions, but there are just too many. For instance: Myanmar-language covers of western pop songs; the tag line for the thuggish and corrupt Myanmar police force is “How may I help you?”; some vehicles have the steering wheel on the left, and others on the right, but at least everyone drives on the same side of the road; being charged 700 kyat (about $0.70) for “air conditioning” at a local restaurant….

 

 

Back in Yangon

/ ckoukkos / 1 Comment

Well, we made it back to Yangon in one piece, despite another brutal bus trip. The road from Bagan to Yangon is one of the main thoroughfares in Myanmar, yet it’s barely wide enough for two busses or trucks to pass going in opposite directions (they both have to slow down and at least one vehicle must drive half in the shoulder), at least 3/4 of it is unpaved, and it’s filled with dangerous crater-like holes that the drivers inch must their way around. Best of all, last night’s bus would periodically start making duck-like noises (!) requiring the driver to pull over and allow a cadre of flashlight-weilding men to crawl beneath the engine and shout at each other for a while. Needless to say, the 15-hour bus trip actually took 18 hours. Christ amighty.

As for Yangon itself, if you didn’t know a typhoon had hit the city, you’d have trouble guessing. Sure, there are a fair share of trees knocked down – even some giant 3-meter thick oak-like trees, ripped from the ground by their very roots. And a lot of electricity poles have been bent in half or thrown quite a distance, trailing their wires behind them to be tangled in the branches of the trees along the side of the road. But we’ve seen very little damage to buildings, and life here seems to have gotten back to normal…in full force. There are Myanmar and Indian women cooking street food on every corner. The sidewalks – where they’re fairly even –  are filled with tea shops, fruit stands, parked trucks, the occasional beggar, etc., so we have to walk in the street. The old male money-changers and young ragged postcard-sellers still follow us around and harass us to trade their goods for dollars (in a non-threatening way). It’s pretty much what you’d expect.

One interesting note is that, upon crossing into Yangon county, we had to go through some sort of passport-control-like inspection. Our bus had to pull over and everyone was instructed to get out. A skeletal old man dressed in an MP-like uniform that was 2 sizes too big demanded our IDs/passports, which he examined with an extraodinarily unpracticed eye. He looked at the *Ghana* visa on my passport, the Myanmar visa on Marjan’s, and only at the photo page for the man from Hong Kong (the only other foreigner on our bus). Clearly he had been deputized out of retirement from some other business. Anyway, we had to go through the whole rigamarole: walk about 50 meters down the road while some inspector dude checked out the bus and its luggage, and then wait for the driver to pull the bus up to us so we could get back on. It would have been amusing, if I hadn’t just suffered through (at the time) 16 hours on the bus with no end in sight.

To be quite honest, I’ll be relieved to get out of here. As I mentioned before, the people are *lovely*. But it’s extremely hard to travel here, and other than interacting with the Burmans themselves there’s very little payoff for all the work: the food pretty much sucks, there are only so many pagodas you can stomach, and…how shall I put this: Nothing’s beautiful about the country (again, excluding the people). The grey weather isn’t helping matters, nor did all the excitement and distraction with the typhoon. The trip has devolved into “how to get out.” Anyway, I had been expecting to love it here, but I can say that I’m leaving with mixed feelings.

All that said, I feel like I’ve posted practically nothing about my time here. So (having found a decent internet cafe, and since it’s raining outside, and since I’ve got a long wait at Bangkok airport tomorrow) I’m going to write a series of posts entitled: What the hell have you been doing?

 

 

Should I stay…?

/ ckoukkos / 1 Comment

The Big Question that’s been percolating in our minds over the past day, as we hear more news from y’all, the internet, and by asking questions of locals here: Should we get the hell outta Dodge? My first inclination was (of course) to stay – to finish most of my trip, and then to try to help if I can. Then I read a lot of alarming (and possibly alarmist?) news & advisories, and started to consider leaving immediately. Then I spoke with quite a few people here, and calmed down a bit.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to do. I know many of you are extremely concerned, especially after seeing the Katrina-like conditions in the delta region that was hardest hit. But up north here there seems to have been *no* effect whatsoever, other than taxi drivers blaming the higher cost of petrol and food on their inability to give us a lower price. People are rather blithely going about their daily lives as if tens of thousands of their countrymen hadn’t died, and as if tens of thousands more weren’t in danger of dying of disease and starvation. To compare (roughly) with Katrina: Fearing for our safety up north here is like a New Yorker fearing Katrina looters.

On the other hand, 99% of the exits from the country require that we go via Yangon, where there *are* food and water shortages. The only other two ways to get out of the country are to either fly from Mandalay to Chiang Mai, Thailand, or to fly to a border town and cross by land to Mai Sai, Thailand. Neither are appealing options, and both are rather complicated to arrange. Right now, Marjan has a ticket from Yangon to Bangkok on Air Asia the morning of the 17th. I’ve got the same flight booked three days later, on the 20th. So yesterday Marjan and I went to a travel agent to explore our options. The extremely helpful agent made reservations for each of us to fly directly from Bagan to Yangon the day before our respective flights to Bangkok, thereby avoiding overland travel. He gave us the name of a reliable hotel near the airport, so that we wouldn’t even have to go into the city at all – we just arrive in the evening, sleep in the hotel for a few hours, and then fly out at like 8 am the next morning. So Marjan is scheduled on that Air Bagan flight from Bagan/Yangon on the 16th and I’m on the 19th. If either of us choose to not use the tickets, we get a full refund.

All that said, the travel agent assured us that things would be fine in Yangon by the 17th. “There are many rich men in Yangon,” he said. “They are already paying to bring water, electricity and food.” He assured us that we would be perfectly safe. In fact, he seemed amused at our concern. For my part, I just don’t want to be in the way in Yangon, eating food and drinking water that could go to someone who really needs it.

Obviously, we’ve also spoken with the few other travelers we’ve met, to see what they’re doing. Everyone else seems either as conflicted as we are, or completely unconcerned. No one is making a panicked run for the border. In fact, yesterday we met 4 people (two Americans and two French people) to actually flew *in* to Mandalay on the 5th, after their flight had been delayed by the storm. One of American guys has been here 6 times, and doesn’t seem at all concerned.

Another consideration, of course, is all of you. I don’t want to torture you with worry for 10 days while I wander around some dusty ancient pagodas. I know that we are safe right now, and I haven’t seen any indications that the situation will change in the next 10 days or so. Yes, I know about the forecast for rain down south next week, but that’s pretty normal – the rainy season starts in May. I feel like as long as I don’t go to the delta region, I’ll be fine. (A few of you have sent me email intimating that flights out of the country could get canceled or something. Can you please send details of where/from whom you heard this info? I can’t find anything about it on the net.)

Marjan and I will make our final decision on what to do when we get to Bagan. Right now we’re leaning towards spending our last few days in Bagan, and then each taking the flights I described above. (This means I would be alone for 3 days in Bagan, rather than Yangon, for 3 days. I’m now thinking I might change my flight to Marjan’s, if there’s room, as I just read that Air Asia is not only NOT canceling flights, but letting people change flights for free.) We want to see what it’s like on the boat we’re going to take there (it’s perfectly safe – a huge slow ship going down the Ayerwaddy River hundreds of kilometers north of the typhoon region). We leave tomorrow (Sunday) morning at 5:30 am and it’s scheduled to arrive around 3 pm local time. Note that local time is 11.5 hours ahead of NYC time.

I *had* wanted to write a post about what we’ve actually been *doing* here. But your worried emails prompted this post instead. Please rest assured that I am completely safe and easily continuing my trip as planned. The internet cafe I’m in is filled – half with tourists and half with locals playing games or looking at photos or chatting on Google Talk. It’s strangely and completely normal.

I may post again later.

Safe & hot w/aching butt in Mandalay

/ ckoukkos / 1 Comment

Here we are in Mandalay after a long (9-hour), bumpy bus ride on painfully hard seats. For the people here, it’s as if there was no cyclone/typhoon. It’s hot and sunny and there’s electricity and (painfully slow yet working) internet.

As I mentioned in my brief post yesterday, we really had no idea how big the cyclone was until yesterday morning. Saturday night was the last night of our trek – we stayed in a Buddhist monastery. The head monk told us that he had heard on the radio that there was a large storm in Yangon, and that about 300 people had died. I figured such a small incident wouldn’t even make the news in the US. To be honest, at the time we were much more interested in the storm’s effect on the rest of our trek. Saturday had been an unseasonably wet day, which meant we had to walk 24 kilometers in huge ponchos with heavy sticky clay mud collecting like concrete blocks to our Tevas. In fact, I did the last few kms barefoot like the locals. Squishy and slippery, but at least I didn’t have 5-kilo weights attached to my feet.

On Sunday we arrived at Inle Lake and stayed at the friendly Remember Inn in Nyangshwe. There we found that the typhoon had knocked out electricity in the area, and this time the casualty count was 3000. Again, we were more concerned with its effect on our much-needed hot shower…though of course we were also sad and curious about the extent of the damage. Of course, no electric and no internet meant no info. And there’s no English-language paper for sale in Myanmar outside of Yangon and Mandalay. So we were informed only by the rumors we heard from locals. We didn’t know if their source of info was the unreliable Myanmar media or the BBC. So we took the growing numbers with a large grain of salt.

Monday we spent the day mostly in our room, recovering from the exhausting trek and the nasty diarrhea Marjan (we had it much worse) and I had been suffering since Friday. (Yes mom I’m drinking plenty of fluids.) By Tuesday the news of casualties had risen to 9000, so we started to worry that y’all were worried. But again, we had no way to get in touch. Then yesterday morning we heard almost 100K dead, so we were eager to get to Mandalay and send word that we were fine. But we managed to luck out – I poked my head into a “Cyber Cafe” in Nyangshwe and saw a woman using the internet. I asked if we could use it, but she said “it’s on a shared generator that they will turn off right now.” I begged her for just 10 minutes, she agreed, and that’s the story.

As for the typhoon itself, I’m still going to try to read up on it on the internet – the newspaper I bought today is from the 5th, before the extent of things was really known. We know the elections scheduled for the 10th were postponed (at least down south) so we’ll keep an ear to the ground about that. Marjan’s leaving a few days before me, so I might try to spend my last few days in Bago, near Yangon, because I hear UNICEF is looking for volunteers. But of course I’ll make sure it’s safe first.

As of right now, here’s our itinerary:

Thursday – Mandalay

Friday – day trip to ancient cities around Mandalay

Saturday – either Mandalay or the nearby town of Pyin U Lwin

Sunday – boat to Bagan

Monday – Wed – Bagan

Thursday – Marjan takes the bus back to Yangon, arriving Friday, to fly out Saturday. I may take the bus to Bago and stay there until I leave on Tuesday the 20th. But that bit is still up in the air. I don’t know how safe it is down south, and if I’d have access to safe water and food. So I’ll get more info before making that decision. If it’s really unsafe, I can always stay up north here and then just fly from Mandalay to Yangon and then out to Bangkok. But I don’t think it’ll come to that.

In any event, it seems that the internet is working up north here, and that most internet cafes have various solutions to getting around the govt’s attempt to limit access to email, etc. So I won’t be as cut off as I feared. So I’ll keep everyone informed about my plans as they come together.