Yangon, where we begin our two-week tour of Myanmar, is not for the faint of heart. And ‘faint’ is exactly how I feel when our plane touches down sometime after ten pm. For the past day and a half I’ve battled a bout of food poisoning – most likely contracted during our farmhouse stay in Bhutan – and I’m ill-prepared for Yangon’s relentless humidity.
On the first morning I sit bleary-eyed at the breakfast table and say to David, “I don’t actually know where we are,” which is an accurate statement almost every way you slice it. It takes a full day before we think to check our malaria maps.
Yes, it appears we should have begun our proactive dose of Malarone 48 hours ago.
We spend two days in Yangon and, since I’m being honest, this is two days too many. I’ve found that I struggle with cities of the third-world variety, finding them indecipherable in their chaos. Charmless in their dilapidation. Exhausting in their constantly unpredictable state of motion. It is in Yangon where I come to terms with the fact that I am not as easygoing and adventurous as I want to be. I have illustrious visions of myself sampling unidentifiable fried items from street vendors and hopping onto the back of taxi-trucks, letting them take me wherever it is they happen to be going. Perhaps in another life. In this one, I am impatient. Squeamish. Easily exasperated when surrounded by things that could operate so much better than they do. In this way, Yangon is a humbling experience.
On the second night we visit the Shwedagon Pagoda, a sort of mecca for Burmese Buddhists. After nearly two weeks in Bhutan, whose temples more closely resemble Swiss ski lodges, I feel I have stepped into Las Vegas. The place is a garish concoction of gold and mirrors and multicolored LEDs. I want to laugh at the absurdity of the scene except I seem to be the only one who does not take it seriously. The tourists are vastly outnumbered by the Burmese who kneel with pleading expressions on their faces in front of various Buddhas.
As I stroll clockwise, as per Buddhist tradition, around the pagoda I am obsessed with the ground, which is a white marble-like surface that is anything but spotless. Bare feet are mandatory in or around a temple, just as are covered knees and shoulders. I give myself a moment of acknowledgment for the leaps and bounds I’ve made with regard to my concept of hygiene.
Filthy feet, it turns out, will not kill you.
We exit the Pagoda directly into a dark street lined with vendors frying and grilling and slicing and skewering all sorts of ostensibly edible things. People sit on child-sized plastic chairs beside child-sized plastic tables and devour their dinners. Monks walk with one bare shoulder among parents and children for whom the scene is entirely normal. It is all they will ever know. We slow at various food stands and scrutinize the food, taking turns guessing the meat presented like lollypops on the ends of bamboo sticks.
My stomach turns.
Here is where I should mention the motivation for ever visiting Myanmar in the first place. There is a Burmese restaurant called Mandalay in San Francisco, which I enjoy very much. Naturally, this means I will also love the country.
Maybe it is the lingering effects of the food poisoning. Maybe it is the absence of my dear San Francisco friends with whom I’d shared all of those Burmese meals. Maybe it is the heat. The disorientation. But if I am to sum up Burmese cuisine I must liken it to poor Chinese food. Their motto seems to be ‘everything tastes better with oil,’ and so they use it with reckless abandon. I’ll admit I limited myself to vegetarian options, unable to make myself order meat that was formerly the meal of a swarm of black flies at the open-air market. Maybe this makes the difference; I will never know.
Two days later, a propeller plane delivers us to Inle Lake, about 440 miles northeast of Yangon.
I step out onto the tarmac and I am immediately overcome with a profound peacefulness. Not only am I pleased to have survived the flight (never a given, as I detail in my previous post), the air is noticeably cooler than Yangon. It is quiet. In the waning daylight I can see mountains.
The following morning at breakfast we meet a woman named Laura, from North Carolina. Travel has made me indiscriminate about new friends. I find myself enthusiastically adopting a ‘more the merrier’ mentality whenever the opportunity arises. And so Laura (who, it turns out, I would gladly be friends with, travel or not), joins us for the day-trip out onto Inle Lake. We sit resembling my favorite childhood snack of ‘ants on a log,’ in a banana-shaped boat whose engine kicks up water like a tail of white feathers. It is a full, exhausting day, and decidedly one of the very best I’ve had on this trip.
We see men fishing off the tips of small canoes with massive cone-shaped nets. We visit a market where salted fish and heaps of chili peppers are hawked by smiling women sitting cross-legged on straw mats and a man at the barber-booth asks if he can give David a shave with his machete. I snap pictures as our boat motors slowly through neighborhoods of stilted huts that squat over the silvery lake. We float along crops of tomatoes that grow on mud mounds while farmers squatting in their canoes turn to us and wave. I’m once again in a state of awe, observing this lifestyle that differs so drastically from anything I’ve ever seen. I’ve long since lost count of the things I didn’t know about this world, and today that number grows.
Thanksgiving comes and goes at Inle Lake.
I’ve been bracing myself for this holiday – arguably my favorite day of the year. There has been very little that I’ve missed about home, but this one day would surface all of them. In an attempt to console our cravings, we eat at the ‘nicest’ restaurant in town, and what the meal lacks in turkey and cranberry sauce so does it in greasy vermicelli noodles. I am as content as I can possibly be. We sit there in the open-air restaurant, a cool breeze blowing in from the sopping marsh to our right, and we recount the things we are thankful for, hopscotching from the big and the serious (Health. Family. Financial security.) to the obvious (that we’re having this conversation in the midst of such extended travel) to the not-to-be-overlooked (the bottle of wine sitting between us comes from Australia and does not taste like a melted popsicle). Even before we’ve finished the meal I know I’ll never forget it. For many Thanksgivings to come, I will recall the year we spent it in Myanmar, grilling skewers of meat over a table-side barbecue. I will bore my children with the story, which isn’t even a story at all, while they turn up their little noses at whatever is offending their underdeveloped palate that year.
This is the thing I’m learning about travel: In the end, I will have only words. Fortunately, I am quite fond of those.
Myanmar’s tourism industry is said to be in its infancy – whatever that can possibly mean in this day and age. Whether the things I observe are a result of its stage in the lifecycle of destruction-by-foreigners, I don’t want to make any assumptions. But I am struck by the peddlers. Not their existence (I’ve come to accept this as part of the well-worn tourist circuit) but the sheer number of them. And their persistence, which is more prevalent in Bagan than any other place I’ve been (though, by the end of South East Asia I promise to share a more-educated perspective on this matter).
Thanks to its 2,000 (give or take) Buddhist temples and stupas, Bagan is a tourism hot spot still heating up. As well they should, the Burmese are clamoring to capitalize on this development. At every noteworthy temple you visit, the walkways are lined with blankets upon which jewelry and knick knacks are carefully arranged. As if they’ve been waiting all day for you and you alone, they pick you out of the crowd. While you stoop to take of your sandals at the temple door you half-heartedly promise to visit their ‘shop’ on your way out. They say kindly “I’ll remember you,” and they do.
“Beautiful,” you say as you sweep your eyes over the tiny lacquered boxes that are identical to everything you’ve already seen and not purchased at the half-dozen temples you’ve visited that morning. The woman describes the miniature stone elephants and the silver bracelets and you wonder if she thinks you are blind.
Next comes the apology. You shrug and smile and frown and for whatever reason bring your hands together in prayer. And then you walk away while the woman is still talking to you. Pleading.
I suppose I could term this in the positive. These men and women are determined. Tenacious! Steadfast! But I’m afraid the word is actually desperate. Which introduces an element of guilt that has me hating their lacquered boxes with a vengeance.
You’re closing in on your waiting bicycle now, a real clunker that triples your workout as you peddle the dirt roads of Bagan. And that’s when the children run toward you.
They clamor around you waving clear plastic accordions of postcards like proud grandmothers showing off their brood. You try to be patient with them; you smile enthusiastically and extract a faux laugh while you wave your hands like windshield wipers. But they are relentless and so numerous that you begin to feel like the contents that have just dropped from a broken piñata. When you think you’re at your wits end, you turn toward another child’s voice and are stopped midway through ’no thank you,’ because standing there is a three-year-old boy. In his clear plastic accordion are colorful scribbles on small white pieces of paper, identical to the kind that grace so many refrigerator doors in America.
Not only will you want to buy up his entire collection of artwork, you’ll want to take him home with you – give him a childhood of popsicles and swimming lessons and Dora the Explorer. Send him to college.
And then a feeling of hopelessness dominates anything else you might have been feeling before.
David and I spend a lot of time discussing the level of responsibility that tourists have toward the local people whose towns they inundate. We play out our emotions of frustration and exhaustion and remorse, ultimately ending up exactly where we began. Should we be allowed to breeze in and out of towns, snap pictures of their homes and their horse-drawn-carts, and leave nothing behind but empty plastic water bottles? I believe we are obligated to buy and give, but I don’t know where it begins and I don’t know where it ends. Does it do more harm than good? Does it breed a generation of beggars? Or does it simply feed them?
It is not simple. That’s about all I know for sure.
We take a boat to Mandalay, slogging up the murky Ayeyarwady River. From a brown wicker chair I watch the sun rise as we crawl past fishermen and riverside huts made of woven grass. The journey takes all day, and that’s perfectly fine with me. Even as we slide beneath the bridges of Mandalay, which glows gorgeously in the setting sun, I am not quite ready to return to solid ground. I think I could live like the people of Inle Lake – trade my Suburu for a wooden canoe.
With a jolt I am returned to the chaos I was happy to have left behind in Yangon. Mandalay is relatively smaller, but this makes no difference when you’re standing at an intersection in the center of it. We share a ride from the docks with a young Estonian couple and a Swedish man. Nobody has a place to stay that night, ourselves included, so we ask to be dropped off at a hotel David plucked from his 2006 edition of Lonely Planet, which has so far provided us relatively accurate guidance throughout Myanmar.
Remarkably, the hotel is still in business and we are promptly lead to a room that costs us very little. We set down our packs and survey the AC unit, which is really the only thing that matters, feeling for maybe the first time like the ‘backpackers’ we want to be. The type who arrive in a confusing city with little more than a confidence that we’ll figure out a place to stay. Of course this feeling of adventurousness is fleeting. Later that evening we run into the Estonian couple in the hotel lobby. They have just returned from dinner and are eager to recommend the place to us.
“Just eat whatever the chef serves you,” the man tells me in heavily accented english. I nod and tell him that I sure will, meanwhile knowing I could never relinquish control of something as important as dinner.
The following morning I sit sweating at the breakfast table on the 4th floor of our hotel. Sipping a cup of muddy Nescafe, I study the ants that are entombed in a giant glob of crystalized honey that has been set out as a proposed condiment for my toast. Outside the horns honk incessantly, punctuated by the occasional squeal of a large truck. It is the start of our one and only full day in Mandalay and I’m ready to get the hell out of the city. Within ten minutes I’ve hired a driver who will help us accomplish that very thing.
Slowly we make our way through unregulated intersections that pump motorbikes and cars with shocking fluidity. We turn down narrow streets and drive through thick clouds of white dust emitting from electric sanders smoothing the profiles of life-sized stone Buddhas. Women walk on the shoulder carrying round platters of fruit on their heads and motorbikes dash around us ferrying mothers clutching infants.
Gradually the traffic thins. We pass a lake. Crops of watermelons. Roadside stands selling old plastic water bottles full of motor oil. We are out of Mandalay and once again the country formerly known as Burma astounds me with its tranquil beauty. Its simplicity.
Several hours later, after covering considerable ground outside of the city and watching the sun sink like a perfectly intact egg yoke behind the famous U Bein teak bridge, we share a meal of exceptional Thai food – a foreshadowing of our next destination. A man delivers us to our hotel on the back of his motorbike. I am sandwiched between David and this man, whose narrow ribcage I cling to for my life, and from this seat I watch a darker, calmer, Mandalay blur past me, much like the entirety of Myanmar now seems to have done.
For some frozen-in-time snapshots, see all Myanmar photos here.
And for a full collection of photos from this unadventurous adventure, click here.
Somewhere Seeking 