Thursday, January 07, 2010
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
The Land of 1,000 Temples
The ancient city of Bagan, former capital of Burma, is an arid, dusty plain covering about 16 square miles. The ruins of over 2,000 temples and stupas, most dating from the 11th to 13th centuries, dot the landscape. It is a surreal and breathtakingly beautiful place.
Many tourists - myself included - choose to travel around Bagan in one of the hundreds of traditional horse carts. Most of the roads are unpaved, so it is a convenient and inexpensive way to get around. As long as you're not in a hurry. And if you are in a hurry, what the heck are you doing in Bagan anyway???
These horse carts are pretty and quaint, but after about an hour of clomping up and down I was like, "Can we stop at the nearest chiropractor???" It was incredibly uncomfortable no matter which position I shifted myself into.
We stopped in Old Bagan for lunch. At a local market, a young girl was making a toffee-colored candy that she was kneading in rice flour like bread. I decided to buy some, which she weighed using an old-fashioned scale & counterweight system. The girl spoke no English and she giggled constantly through the whole transaction - I don't think many foreigners made purchases from her! I saw these same counterweight scales used everywhere; only at one Yangon market I noticed a woman who had a digital scale, which suddenly looked so...strangely modern! She must have been the envy of the market with her flashy new scale.I later stopped at a tea shop for some hot sweet tea with milk. I went to use the restroom, and a young boy in the kitchen pointed to a lopsided wooden shed in their backyard. A real outhouse! Except the ceiling was so low I couldn't fit inside... Oh yeah, all the guys in the kitchen found this incredibly amusing. And then I went back and took my seat at the tiny 16-inch high plastic stool. There's a giant in the tea shop!
Trucks and buses were coming into the town that were jam-packed, with people literally hanging out the windows. My horse cart driver explained that they were coming to the full moon festival at Ananda Temple, one of the largest and most famous temples in Bagan. All around the temple a mini-encampment had been set up: families were pitching makeshift tents, cooking, eating and sleeping for 3 or 4 days in anticipation of the upcoming festival.
I really enjoyed the three days I spent in Bagan (although my spine might answer otherwise...). In fact, it was one of my favorite places anywhere.Before I left home for Myanmar I imagined that the temples of Bagan would be the highlight of my trip. And though they were amazing to see, it was actually the people I encountered that were the highlight of my trip: the three generations of women who followed me around the morning market determined to get me to buy some tanaka, the natural sunscreen women and children wear on their faces... the young man with dark, sad eyes who explained the murals inside a temple, showed me his own paintings, and then sat and drank tea with me... the group of kids selling postcards (does anyone send postcards anymore??) who followed me around a temple, more interested in practicing English than whether or not I bought their postcards... the ancient monk in red robes who I was surprised to find at the top of a crumbling 1,000-year old staircase who twirled a £1 coin in his hand. "Do you know how many dollar for one Pound?" he asked. [People everywhere seemed to have collections of coins from around the world in their pockets, and were always asking if I knew how many dollars a particular coin was worth]. I told the monk I wasn't sure how much. Then he handed me a worn leather journal and asked me to write "what I though about Myanmar."
What I thought about Myanmar? Broken, but beautiful. The people held together by tradition and Buddhism. And hope. I wonder how long that can last?
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
The Country Formerly Known as Burma
Here I was, all geared up to be sure I called the country "Burma" and not "Myanmar." But every person, every sign, every THING I saw there that used the name called it "Myanmar." Continuing to call it Burma, when even the people who live there do not, seemed a little bit silly.
Arrived from Bangkok in the evening, checked into Traders Hotel, and decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. It was only around 8:00 but virtually everything was closed. Even so, the streets - which were very dark, I don't think there was any street lighting at all - were full of people, especially younger kids. A group of them latched on to me and asked if I wanted a place to eat good local food. I was hungry, and they were friendly and trying to practice English ("where you from?" "America." "Oh, very big country."), so I followed them for a few blocks to a large restaurant with 4 or 5 giant covered pots in front. All of them contained the same rice with chicken pieces that looked totally unappetizing. I sat at a table and as the waiter came over, he shooed a large rat away from under it.
First night: dinner at the hotel.
I tried to eat mostly Burmese (ok, Myanmar) food, particularly the "curries," which all had almost no taste of curry, and were not at all spicy. The food was good but lacked the complexity of Thai or Indian foods. I was very careful about where and what I ate, and in retrospect am glad I didn't eat that chicken and rice the first night, it probably had been sitting in those pots all day.
In many ways, being in Yangon felt like walking through a bombed out city that had been repopulated, but not rebuilt. Many buildings are partially collapsed, or have no doors or windows. The sidewalks were in pieces, with huge gaping holes in them. There seems to be a thick layer of black grime all over just about everything (except the temples). It all gave me the feeling that people were left to pretty much fend for themselves, without much help from the government. And all things considered, it's amazing to see how well they manage.
I especially loved the "telephone booths" - a woman at a table on the sidewalk with 4 or 5 circa 1985 desktop phones patched into the telephone lines. People stop and pick up a phone to make a call. You notice right away that almost no one has a cell phone, which apparently are extremely expensive. Women walk while balancing huge bundles on their heads. Men sit along the roadsides with 40 or 50-year old sewing machines: these are tailor shops, I guess. When the internet worked at the hotel (almost never), most of the sites I was interested in - Gmail, Facebook, and Blogger were all blocked. Oddly, though, The New York Times was not. Apparently in Myanmar it's okay to get news but not okay to report news.
I spent several hours in the evening at Shwedagon Paya, the largest and most important Buddhist site in the country. The temples and pagodas are extraordinary, but watching the hundreds of people come and go was way more interesting. Dusk was beautiful as everyone started lighting candles around the circumference of the giant stupa. But it wasn't the "mind blowing" experience the Lonely Planet guidebook describes. Maybe because it felt very familiar to me - a bit like Boudnath in Kathmandu....or sort of like Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai on steroids. (and here's a tip: You must remove your shoes AND socks before entering any Myanmar temple. if you're going to spend several hours at dusk walking around in bare feet, be sure you put insect repellent on your feet. Trust me...)
Arrived from Bangkok in the evening, checked into Traders Hotel, and decided to take a walk around the neighborhood. It was only around 8:00 but virtually everything was closed. Even so, the streets - which were very dark, I don't think there was any street lighting at all - were full of people, especially younger kids. A group of them latched on to me and asked if I wanted a place to eat good local food. I was hungry, and they were friendly and trying to practice English ("where you from?" "America." "Oh, very big country."), so I followed them for a few blocks to a large restaurant with 4 or 5 giant covered pots in front. All of them contained the same rice with chicken pieces that looked totally unappetizing. I sat at a table and as the waiter came over, he shooed a large rat away from under it.
First night: dinner at the hotel.
I tried to eat mostly Burmese (ok, Myanmar) food, particularly the "curries," which all had almost no taste of curry, and were not at all spicy. The food was good but lacked the complexity of Thai or Indian foods. I was very careful about where and what I ate, and in retrospect am glad I didn't eat that chicken and rice the first night, it probably had been sitting in those pots all day.
In many ways, being in Yangon felt like walking through a bombed out city that had been repopulated, but not rebuilt. Many buildings are partially collapsed, or have no doors or windows. The sidewalks were in pieces, with huge gaping holes in them. There seems to be a thick layer of black grime all over just about everything (except the temples). It all gave me the feeling that people were left to pretty much fend for themselves, without much help from the government. And all things considered, it's amazing to see how well they manage.I especially loved the "telephone booths" - a woman at a table on the sidewalk with 4 or 5 circa 1985 desktop phones patched into the telephone lines. People stop and pick up a phone to make a call. You notice right away that almost no one has a cell phone, which apparently are extremely expensive. Women walk while balancing huge bundles on their heads. Men sit along the roadsides with 40 or 50-year old sewing machines: these are tailor shops, I guess. When the internet worked at the hotel (almost never), most of the sites I was interested in - Gmail, Facebook, and Blogger were all blocked. Oddly, though, The New York Times was not. Apparently in Myanmar it's okay to get news but not okay to report news.
I spent several hours in the evening at Shwedagon Paya, the largest and most important Buddhist site in the country. The temples and pagodas are extraordinary, but watching the hundreds of people come and go was way more interesting. Dusk was beautiful as everyone started lighting candles around the circumference of the giant stupa. But it wasn't the "mind blowing" experience the Lonely Planet guidebook describes. Maybe because it felt very familiar to me - a bit like Boudnath in Kathmandu....or sort of like Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai on steroids. (and here's a tip: You must remove your shoes AND socks before entering any Myanmar temple. if you're going to spend several hours at dusk walking around in bare feet, be sure you put insect repellent on your feet. Trust me...)
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