Part Far East, part India. The Burma that revealed itself to Rudyard Kipling was the Shwedagon Pagoda heaving over the horizon as he approached Rangoon on a steamer from Calcutta. His three day stay in the country resulted in one of the most famous poems in the English language, with the most interesting titbit being that of course he never actually visited Mandalay. All his knowledge of the country was gleaned during his time as a journalist in the Punjab and his trip there came four years after the third Burmese war which had made it a province of India. This Indian context no doubt informed his reflection that the mighty golden pagoda that marked his arrival was neither a Muslim dome nor a Hindu temple spire, the two religions the British had so far encountered more than any other in Asia.
My first time in Burma was even shorter than Kipling’s, a few day trips to Shan State, an autonomous region over the border from Chiang Rai in the north of Thailand, spaced out over several months. My first time to Rangoon was again from Thailand but this time by plane and I was expecting to see something familiar to the continental Southeast Asia that I had grown to know. Unlike Kipling, I had a plethora of knowledge going in, not just scraps of information from the wire service about the derring-do of British soldiers. It was all about Burma back then, endless reams of content of spurious value extolling the new day that was dawning with the release of Aung San Suu Kyii. ‘Burma watchers’ the internet over had waited years to publish all their ‘opening up’ articles and context was the buzz word with the same quotes and faces popping up on every shared link. As a committed contrarian I was more interested in the history, the lustre, the poetry of this country that was decidedly South Asian, but now politically Southeast Asian.
It’s hard not to fall foul of orientalism when writing about Burma, but I’ll try to avoid the trite observations you so often see about Bangkok. I’ll admit I did once see two monks and a financial-advisor-type man in a suit ‘rubbing shoulders’ on the skytrain in Bangkok, but as you may have guessed the whole world and his dog had already written a blog about that. I was expecting to have no such issue in Rangoon, sure, I noticed there were very few motorcycles on the streets and read in a blog somewhere that they were illegal, but the ubiquity of online content hasn’t hastened the speed at which observations become hackneyed. Describing traffic in Hanoi as a river that flows around crossing pedestrians like a stream round rocks is still acceptable even if lots of people have written that exact same sentence. There were a lot of tourists though, a gaggle of lazy-haired gangly teens were queuing up at the exchange booth whilst having an ill informed discussion about how much money they might need. One thing I knew was that all ATMs relied on the internet to work and internet in Burma was spotty at the best of times. I had changed dollars back in Thailand and, as I was staying with a friend at the Inya Lake Hotel, I fancied I had enough.
The airport was a lot like the domestic airport in Bangkok, and the airports of Indochina, built for the wars of the early 20th century and since modernized in late 90s grey and brown. Like Vientiane, Yangon International was cavernous without being particularly spacious. Another similarity was the taxi chain of command which involved handing money to someone behind a desk, receiving a piece of paper with details on it, handing the piece of paper to someone stood next to the desk who received the money from the person behind the desk, following the person stood next to the desk out the door to the street, standing next to the street waiting for the taxi who arrives and takes the money and piece of paper from the person who was stood next to the desk. Finally getting into the taxi and watching the person who was stood next to the desk go back to stand by the desk. I noticed two curiosities about the taxi; firstly there was no A/C, which is the main reason for taking taxi really. Secondly, though the wheel was on the correct side, we were driving on the wrong side of the road. He seemed to have a handle of it though. I enquired and apparently all cars in the country were imported from Thailand where they drive on the left hand side. One thing that made it easy, I supposed, was the lack of motorcycles gumming up the works. They can be bothersome, scooters and small motorbikes, especially if you’re walking on the pavement minding your own business and feel the rubbery nudge of a wheel on your heel, requesting you step aside. That being said the lack of motorcycle taxis and no mass transit system meant over reliance on taxis, which is never good for your garden variety budget traveller. In Singapore I had arranged to meet a friend somewhere I couldn’t find and foolishly took a taxi under the assumption simply saying the name would get me there. It didn’t. And the whole thing ended up taking twice the time and costing four times as much, I finally made it back to an MRT station and spent the remaining few days using nothing but. The motorcycle taxi is a cheap and speedy way of getting somewhere odd that you can’t quite pinpoint. Whenever I see a ripped out row of seats or a discarded sofa with a polypropylene board of destinations and prices resting against an electricity pylon next to the top of a street I feel comfortable knowing I can get back to more familiar territory without too much trouble. I had no such luxury in Singapore, and apparently even less in Rangoon.
The driver deposited me in downtown Yangon; my host would be at work until the afternoon so I had the remainder of the morning to loaf around until lunch and then whatever the next part was after that. I’d agreed on Sule Pagoda with the driver and that seemed like a good idea as we pitched up to a semi-circular road that wrapped around a high walled structure. Later it would reveal itself to be the famous pagoda and the road a fully grown roundabout. Just from the few seconds I had to scour the scene outside the plane window as we came in to land I saw dozens of pagodas scattered all around, but there were two that were famous; the Shwedagon and this one. I struck up a convo with a curly haired fellow who was milling around the apparently well trafficked drop off point. We talked biznay and discovered that we were both headed for the Sule pagoda, so off we went. He had the unlikely profession of professional poker player, but had recently discovered Buddhism and intended to travel across the subcontinent by bike. He had it in mind to volunteer at a temple, washing dishes in the kitchens or cleaning up around the place. I could see how years of making money through playing poker could make you dream of a simple life in a quiet temple, although I could only imagine it myself if confronted with some stunning building like Wat Chedi Luang in Chiang Mai or Wat Pa Tak Sua that overlooks the Mekong river. We walked up the steps and paid several thousand kyat and received some square purple stickers, like the ones they give backpackers on minibuses. There was a certain level of interactivity to the Sule Pagoda, lines of string connected the outside edge of the octagon to the central spire and an automatic pulley system ferried a boat full of golden dancing dolls along the string above you. Each time you placed some money in a slot the boat would glide along the string and play a little tune. This Pagoda was central to the various protests and revolutions that eventually caused the capital to be moved to a funny little legoland town 365 kilometres north. Now it’s largely unimportant as the reporters and politicians have to be based in the capital Naypyidaw. Although protests seemed to now be few and far between, the general mood of the city and the attitude of the people seemed to suggest this was peacetime for Myanmar. For me, at least, it was lunchtime.
We left the pagoda and wandered down a wide street, apparently the Nepalese quarter of town. Every shop seemed to be a wholesaler, everything was in giant boxes, and there were no shelves or much presentation of anything to speak of. It was rather like Vientiane, although there was a post-communism vibe to that terribly dull city which I hadn’t felt yet. It was more a sort of post-incremental-change vibe. The people of Nepal Street, as we’ll call it, seemed happy enough with the setup. They all looked young and lean and apparently far enough removed from their Ghurkha forbears to not have an opinion either way about the ‘opening up’ blogs that were filling up social media feeds. We ate at a place where you need to eat with your hands, they provided cutlery, but my poker playing companion insisted eating with your hands was the best way. A circular tray holding several silvery bowls was placed in front of me, orange and yellow coloured vegetables mixed in with lentils and rice, it all tasted of curry. I washed it down with some slippery tea and some naan bread that had a different name. It was tasty enough; curries are usually a safe bet. We paid in kyat and returned to the street, I needed some refreshment and caught site of a blue mechanical contraption surrounded by some stools on the side of the road next to a park. It had two metallic wheels either side of a central grinding system, a woman stood next to it was feeding sugar cane into the machine and squeezing the resultant juice out into what looked like glass tankards you might find in a Bohemian pub. The poker player and I sat down on the stools and quenched our thirst, so far the city had been one of those hot and dusty ones, which always make you thirstier than somewhere hot and shiny like Bangkok or Singapore. He was doing the couch surfing thing and needed to get across town, I checked my phone and saw that it was time to get over to Inya Lake. We both headed for the terminus which apparently was a prime spot for picking up a taxi. Upon parting company I promised to follow his bike ride across the continent so long as he shared the relevant links with me or tagged me in his social media postings, it was the least I could do. The taxi drove north away from the roundabout, looking back at the walls I could see the pagoda rising up above the octagon, now there was some distance between us it was a golden spear cutting into the blue sky, visible and in stark contrast to the grey metal of the surrounding buildings. As we drove further away it held the pose like a monolith alone in the skyline before being consumed by high rises and smoky air.