None Shall Know Me: "Burmese Days."

After the islands I made my way back to Bangkok for another night. I hit up the giant maze of shops at the weekend market and savored mango shakes and mango sticky rice. I still miss those delicious treats. All the cheap mango shakes and smoothies were among my favorite things of Southeast Asia. I took a bus to the airport at night and slept on the cement floor there at the Bangkok airport. I had an early morning flight to Myanmar, formerly Burma, arriving in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, formerly the nation’s capital. The government changed everything in order to cast off their colonial and imperial past. I grabbed a room with an Ozzy guy I met in line at Immigration and began to explore the city and visit the big market. I’ll say more about Yangon later. I left the next day, but returned a few weeks later.

Myanmar was a different place. Not as many tourists come here, and as it is low season as well, I am usually the only foreigner wherever I may go. Many people think Myanmar is off limits and unable to be traveled to. The country does have a harsh government, and much of the country is completely off limits to foreigners. The rest of the country can easily enough be traveled, as long as you don’t work for any form of media. You are frequently asked for your passport and profession, and I was even asked to write down my parents’ names. The people are friendly and often say hello or stop for a brief conversation. The beggars are persistent, annoying, and in large numbers. This is one of the poorer countries in the world, with an exorbitantly wealthy and massively corrupt government run by a military dictator who seemingly thinks himself a Burmese king of a thousand years ago. The power is almost always out in the cities, and it is non-existent in much of the countryside. Restaurants, hotels, and street vendors all run of personal generators, and are often with no power at all. The streets are usually dark at night, as street lamps seldom work and the roads are pot-hole filled and bumpy, making walking at night an ankle-breaking obstacle course in the dark.

Most of the population wear longye, a type of long cloth wrapped around the waist, similar to a sarong, but noticeably different. Many of the women are adorned in “Myanmar Make-up,” a concoction made from tree bark paste and resembling a thin lite toned mud. Some of the men even sport the look, and most wear the longye. It is a deeply Buddhist country, though other religions are present in small numbers. Buddhist temples abound everywhere, but nowhere in the whole of Myanmar are they as numerous as they are in Bagan, perhaps nowhere in the world are temples as numerous as in Bagan.

Bagan was a 12 hour bus ride at night from Yangon, arriving at 4:00 a.m. and then I took a horse cart ride to a guest house to sleep for a few hours before breakfast. Then I hopped in to another horse-drawn cart and spent the day carting around amongst the 4500 temples and pagodas. When your vantage point is high enough, you can look out and see stupa upon stupa rising from the dry and dusty ground, the brush, and the trees. The temples are upside down sugar cones, turned to stone and blessed by the spirits of ancient kings. Though I was usually the only visitor at each of the temples, most had vendors dutifully trying to sell their goods, often by modes of guilt, and the temples were often napping grounds for locals, offering shade and cool breezes that tunneled through the hallways. Other than the temples, it was a lot of walking, a lot of nothing. I spent only a couple days in Bagan. It was hot there, horribly hot, and I spent much of my time sitting on top of the balcony at my guest house drinking half-frozen bottles of water purchased from the one shop I could find that sold cold water. Few things in life seem as enjoyable as truly cold water on a truly hot day, and I drank liter after liter, completely unable to fill myself.

Along with Machu Pichu and Angkor Wat, Bagan is considered to be one of the greatest religious archeology sites in the world, because of the astounding number of temples in such a small space of land.

I am going to skip over a few weeks of the journey and return to it later. Now, I am going to get back to Yangon. My second trip to Yangon was after an 18 hour bus ride, not nearly as painful as some of the other bus rides, and I remember how wonderfully grateful I was thinking it would be my last long distance bus ride in Asia. Traveling is not made for tall people. Traveling in Asia is definitely not made for tall people. The journey to Yangon was inspiringly pretty. We climbed up the tall mountains surrounding the lake region I left from on a very windy and very bumpy dirt road, stopping regularly to pull off to the side or back up to let other vehicles pass on the narrow lane. The mountains were green with rain, and rich with farms and rivers and trees and fields and vistas and views, and at the summit a glorious site of endless ranges and an even more endless sky, azure and calm dawned into view. The two few days I spent in Yangon were mainly for visiting Shwedagon Paya and spending the last of the Kyat, a currency impossible to trade back. There was little in the country I wanted to buy, and I preferred eating cheap.

I was glad I visited Shwedagon, the most sacred and glorious Buddhist temple in the country, and among the most spectacular religious structures in the world, built to house the eight hairs of the Buddha himself. Some say the pagodas are clothed in more gold than lies in all the vaults of England, and the domes of the pagodas are peppered in rubies and diamonds and various gems. I rested and gazed and watched the Burmese people fervent in worship at near every corner. I met a monk who showed me around and explained the rituals and processes and blessings and good luck the temple poured forth. Then I walked alone in the peace of the evening with the threat of rain that always hovered over the city, intermittently striking throughout the day.

I have seen many temples in my life, and by now, few temples hold an appeal for me, but there are a few out there in this great wide world that I will be ever grateful I made the journey to. Shwedagon is such a place, a decadent and costly temple in a land of utter poverty, revered, worshipped, and protected by the loyal and faithful millions of the country.

I know these aren’t such exciting posts, but I am writing rather quickly in an attempt to get caught up. I dislike this feeling of being so far behind. I should either quit entirely and write no more, or be more valiant in my efforts. While it would certainly make more sense to quit, I’ll tarry on a little longer.