The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma - Thant Myint-U

The author of this book is an American writer of Burmese descent. His grandfather was a colleague and close friend of the heroes of Burmese independence and the Secretary-general of the UN from 1962 to 1971. Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was a frequent guest at his family's house in New York, before the 1988 uprising.

Burma in a bulleted list (with photos)

Spilled tea and spare cigarettes at a teahouse

Tea and coffee cups are filled to the brim. While they are being taken to the tables the liquid is spilled on the saucer. It happens all the time, as if it was done on purpose.

In the teahouses besides drinking tea you can also eat some food, very good stuff by the way.

Betel nut vendors, teahouses and other shops normally sell spare cigarettes. 

There are mobile phone shops everywhere. They are really a lot, too many maybe. In fact most of them are often empty.

In some teahouses lighters hang from retractable cables connected to the ceiling. They can be pulled down and used by the customers at will.

Elusive information - Mandalay, Burma

Three bonzes looking cool with icecreams at Maymyo botanical gardens

We're done with Mandalay. We've visited it our own way of course: no monuments, castles, old capitals, things that I already saw many years ago, for which you have to pay a fee in dollars, brand new bills, of course. Just lots of walks, bicycle rides, getting lost in dirty and noisy quarters, taking photos, looking around, talking with someone, sipping liquified sugar served in a teacup. 

It's time to move on. Next step: Maymyo, also know as Pin Oo Lwin. We've read in a guidebook that those nice pick-ups with two benches in the back, to be shared with a dozen people, bags, rice sacks, chickens and pigs, leave from the clock tower crossroads. Just to be sure we ask the girls who work at our hotel. They are confident: "You need to take one of the buses leaving from 83rd road." We don't want to take the bus though, as it's too slow. We decide to go for the pick-ups anyway. At the clock tower we enter a bank to change some dollars and we ask the clerks where the stand is. They are very confident as well: "From 84 and 23!" Which is not here. Out of the bank we ask a motorbike taxi driver. "Maymyo? You need to take a bus..." Same advice we got at the hotel. Only the station seem to have changed address: according to him sometime in the last two hours is was moved to 79th street. We decide to follow the bank clerks' advice and we walk to 23rd street. The pick ups don't seem to be leaving from here either. It's quite hot and we start to feel tired. We sit at a teahouse table and we talk with the waiters. "Maymyo? No, no...you took the wrong way, you need to go back to 28th street..." Which is before the clock tower. This is already the fifth version of the story, and god knows for how long it might go on. 

Politically incorrect and probably a little pessimist on development, globalization, rich and poor countries, etc. - Burma

Some kind of "energy saving" traffic light in Thibaw

Burma is an opportunity. An opportunity with a blurred expiration date printed on. A chance, a model, a concrete example to reflect on matters such as development, globalization and international relations that in a few years we might not have anymore. Getting out of Rangoon airport means entering a world that in the last sixty years has developed very little, almost nothing at all actually. A system that for some aspects has even gone back in time. A place where people move on foot, by bicycle or with run-down cars on dusty roads that cut through expanses of trash, get on the bus with a sack of rice and two chickens, don't complain if the train travels at twenty kilometers per hour bumping on undulated and badly connected rails, cook their dinner on a wood fired stove, if a tooth is aching because of a cavity just pull it out, are not much interested in fashion and the latest technological devices (actually, nowadays this last statement is true only in part). Yet, they seem to be little stressed and moderately happy, they smile a lot and live with optimism. 

Still, if one looks carefully around, it is not possible not to take notice of the first signs of a wave of development that in a few years will probably wipe all this out. And every time something like this happens you can hear some foreign visitors mutter their usual trite comments.

After a lot of honey, a little mudslinging as well (with photos) - Burma

An inspiring panoramic view of the room

After pouring jars of honey on it, it's finally time to mudsling Burma a little as well. I do it both because I am an asshole and I can't help it and because I think that highlighting the pros of something and covering up its cons is not gonna help promoting it. Whatever that thing is.
As you have already noticed if you've read the previous posts this nice and charming country also has its flaws. First of all Burma is not a clean place. Trash is piled up anywhere, next to the roads, on the hills and the riverbanks: if a Burmese is left with an empty plastic bag in his hand he will throw it away, no matter where he is. However, after all the years spent traveling in Asia, I am quite used to it. You might say I'm a bit nuts but a little rubbish, decaying and colorful confusion rather than depress me often tend to put me in a good mood. The taxi drivers racket at the bus or train stations and the airports though is definitely annoying. Especially when you find out that, after having negotiated the price like a money lender to be ripped off anyway, a few hundred meters away there are a lot of honest guys who are obviously not allowed to ambush the travelers who have just arrived. Solution: look for those honest ones and negotiate a price, with firmness, alright, but a little comprehension as well. The chances to get food poisoning are also high, due the the bad hygienic conditions: you need to be careful but not paranoid, otherwise you will miss lots of the fun the country has to offer. In the worst case scenario you will be pissing a little shit-velouté out of your ass. After a while there won't be anything else to piss and everything will shortly get back to the good old solid state.
For the time being though, the worst aspect of the country for those who visit it is the accommodation scene.

After lots of rascals, here are two gentlemen - Mandalay, Burma

The train to Hsipaw

Basing it on my memories from ten years ago we've decided to travel by train from Mandalay to Thibaw (Hsipaw). The trip is very uncomfortable, slow and bumpy, onboard some ancient cars equipped with wooden benches that travel on narrow-gauge tracks. We have already booked two moto-taxis that for a little sum will take us to the station at three-thirty in the morning. 

As I'm looking for some guest houses on the web I come across a page with some information about the same journey. And I realize that I got it all wrong. What we actually want to do is reaching Maymyo (Pin oo Lwin) via road, visit the town and catch the train there. The interesting part of the trip, the one which includes the Gokteik viaduct, is beyond that place and by doing like that we are gonna be spared a few hours on that Burmese roller coaster.

Internet in Burma, accessibility and navigation freedom

Teahouse in Mandalay with free internet access

The first time I came to Burma, at the end of 2002, using the internet was basically impossible all over the country. The best thing one could hope for was sending an email, not from one's own account but from the private address of the owners of a couple of shops in Rangoon, and only from there. 

At the beginning of 2013 the situation is very different. The new laws regarding press freedom and censorship have affected the web as well. Now in the big cities it is possible to find a wifi hotspot in pretty much every hotel and cafe. At Mandalay and Pagan I happened to go to some teahouses (places that, as far as the level of sophistication is concerned, can be compared to the Italian "osterie" of the '50s) that offer free wifi access. Some friends who came here a couple of years back told me that the connections were terribly slow. Now even that barrier has been torn down, at least in part and in some places. 

However, the nicest aspect of the matter is the navigation freedom.

Reporters, girls and Facebook - Rangoon, Burma

Another photo by my friend IZ

It's almost dinner time, We've been in Burma for few days and we haven't got tired of exploring and be surprised, even if only by a heap of trash on a riverbank. This is true for food as well. So far we've tested the probability to get food poisoning by always trying a different place and for tonight's dinner we've already narrowed down our choices to a couple of burmese-indian restaurants. We had a late lunch though, and we also ate some cookies at tea time: we still haven't got enough appetite to fully enjoy our meal. We stop for a beer at a fancy (for Burmese standards) pub: Japanese name, menu in English, international cuisine, rich local customers and some expats. 

We've almost finished our beers and we're about to leave when my friend IZ and a Burmese guy sitting in front of us - both equipped with professional cameras - look at, observe, understand each other and then start a conversation. For a while they only talk about photography. I listen to them in reverent silence. Then they switch to general topics, I get hold of the rope dangling from their hot-air ballon, I let myself be lifted up and soon catch up with them. The Burmese guy is a photo reporter who works for a local English language paper.

The Rangoon (Yangon) train station slum children, with photo gallery - Burma

A father kissing his child at Rangoon central station

We are not interested in the majority of Yangon monuments and museums: the entrance fees are exorbitant and you never know exactly who is pocketing them and what they are used for. Besides, for a westerner who is not a Buddhist art expert after a while those pagodas tend to look all the same. Every day in the late morning we go out with our cameras, we have lunch and then we stroll around, with a vague idea of where to go for the first half hour, and totally aimlessly after that. We come across curious corners, scenes, people, buildings, and our afternoons pass so fast.
One day we walk into an alley near the railway station, we pass a heap of rubbish where two scrawny dogs are having a feast, we proceed between two rows of wooden restaurants, barber shops, grocery stores and teahouses - the further into the alley we walk the more run down the structures become - then we turn right, we cross a narrow bridge over a canal whose radioactive water flows around isles of trash and we finally find ourselves in the main square of a slum.
The adults look curiously at us, some of them smile, others don't. The children draw near with shy little steps and then, after we've shown them the pictures we've just taken, they pounce on us, invite us to take more photos of them, bring there their friends or little brothers and sisters, tug at our t-shirts to see themselves in the pictures and make fun of one another. Their clothes are dirty and their hair infested: I normally suffer of numerous imaginary dermatitises and already start to feel itchy, but they soon make me forget about that. They fall over the stained ground, their flip flops slip on the gutters, they get covered in dust and grime, they keep laughing, embarrassed or amused, who knows. Someone opens the gate to the railroads for us: people are sitting, walking, peddling among the parked or slowly moving trains. There is even a shepherd with three goats.
Here are a few photos (they were taken with a point and shoot camera and I don't know much about photography, but I think that the subject is what matters here):

What a country can tell you in just a few hours - Rangoon (Yangon), Burma

Photo by my friend IZ

If you haven't planned your trip too thoroughly, you are relaxed, you have a tendency to see the funny side of things and you are in good company, what happens in the first few hours can tell you a lot about the place where you've just arrived. Let's see...I NEVER plan too much, actually sometimes I don't plan anything at all, I'm always relaxed, I notice the funny side of things also when I shouldn't and I am traveling with my friend IZ, excellent company I dare say. And in fact Rangoon (or Yangon), and Burma in general for that matter, tell me a lot in just few hours. And they do it straight away, on the very first evening.
We left our bags at the hotel that we booked online before boarding our flight in Bangkok (it was IZ's idea, as a traveler he is less messy than me). We're not happy with it: it's very expensive, old and pretentious, it's good for a night but we have to find another one for tomorrow right away. We have a name without address and a vague landmark. Information that the taxi driver gave us on the way from the airport to our hotel. We start our quest in the web of unlighted Rangoon roads.

Not even a waiter - Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Photo by Keven Law (CC)

If one looks carefully and keeps the antennas of his sensitivity tuned in, it's possible to pick up some interesting details even in a scene of apparently little importance. I have an example of that right in front of me, at this open air restaurant. That usual sequence of moves of his, studied but carelessly and hastily executed, by instinct, as if he was a hare chased by a pack of wolves: shaking the stool, bowing his head, rolling his eyes, wiping with a wet cloth a corner of the plastic table. It's his coded message for the undecided customer, only weakly encrypted: "eat at our place, sit down here, don't keep on searching, walking past us towards the next restaurant of the huge line that stretches out for the whole length of Jalan Alor. Stay, can't you see how I'm arranging this stool for you and making sure that your table is clean?"
A message that could well be misunderstood, as the customer might spot the grease stains on the cloth and think "if you need to clean that table now it means that it was dirty one second ago, and how about the rest of the surface (the bigger part of it) that you have not wiped yet: will it be dirty because you haven't cleaned it or clean because that filthy rag hasn't touched it yet?" And perhaps he will decide to move on, only to find out that the next restaurant is not better than this one. Actually, all in all, the fact that it is located at the beginning of the street probably makes a better choice of it, if only because stopping here one is spared useless meters of chaos and nuisances, and that's exactly the reason why whenever I am in Kuala Lumpur and I come to eat around here, I choose this place without really thinking about it.
But this baby-doll, this teddy-bear, this racoon cub is absolutely irresistible: so sweet, moving, touching, almost pitiful. With his dark face, the darting, almost terrified look that pours out of those hunted deer eyes, the swift movements and the imploring pout.
You can't even call him a waiter because...well, because he isn't one. He's here just to do what he's doing right now, and that he does every day: the part of a net that the restaurant owner throws on the street to catch the highest possible number of passers-by that are looking for a place where they can eat something simple, genuine and cheap. And maybe to top that up with a beer in the fresh air. He's here to pretend that he's arranging the table and to open a menu with plastic-coated, greased pages in front of the customers. Only to run away soon after that, before someone asks him a question that he wouldn't be able to answer, letting the waiters, the real ones, who can speak English, Malay, Mandarin and two or three other Chinese dialects, take care of that.
Because he's only a poor immigrant, most likely Burmese, one of many who come here and to other countries of the region looking for a better life and that, for a few years at least, will spend thirty days a month shaking stools and wiping tables, cleaning toilets, carrying buckets, breaking roads, rummaging through rubbish. Some of them will be succesful, because they have the money to start some business or the skills required to shoulder their way through the fronds of that jungle of opportunities, corruption, organized anarchy, energy, optimism and inertial thrust that the majority of the Far East is nowadays. Others will go back home, not empty handed though, because the little nest-egg that they have managed to put aside will be worth a minor treasure in their country. This is a win-win situation after all. Especially for one who started from scratch.

Aung San Suu Kyi, I'm begging you: don't sneeze in public!

Photo by Breff (CC)

Like thousands of other people around the world I was also moved when I saw Aung San Suu Kyi walking out of the house where she has lived as a prisoner for so many years, finally free.

I don't trust those old rogues of the Burmese military junta though. In the past they found the most grotesque excuses to jail her. I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to put her back under house arrest the first time she catches a cold, for the sake of her own health.

Aung San Suu Kyi, I beg you: don't sneeze in public!

The tap - Burma

Photo by malla_mi (CC)

The last supper in Pagan took place at a restaurant facing a dirt road, in the tourist district. Few customers, no apostles, just some fellow travelers that I recently met. But a Burmese Judas hidden somewhere in the kitchen had already betrayed me.

Fortunately the coach stops at a rudimentary filling station, a few more kilometers and I wouldn't have made it. The passengers are slowly getting off, they light up their cigarettes, stretch their backs, buy something at the small shop. In a downhill position I slide towards the toilet in the back. I shut the door with haste, nervously fiddling with the rusty bolt. I tear my pants away, rip up my boxers and squat over the toilet. I look at the wood of the door in front of me, its wide grains and its ruts polished by the years. It looks like the doors of the stables that I used to see when I was a child, during the weeks of summer holidays at the Southern Apennines. Impromptu thoughts of an uncomfortable position. This state of absent-mindedness is interrupted by a sound: like water gushing out of a tap and falling into a capacious or very deep container, causing an echoing sound. Actually there is a tap: it's supposed to be used to fill the bucket for the flush. But it's tightly closed right now: not even a drop is pouring out of it. How strange. I quickly look around but I cannot spot any other ones: then a very light sensation located somewhere near my lower back raises a surprising doubt. What the hell...the tap is me! This diarrhea is so watery and smooth that I can hardly feel it. The flow keeps going for a while, giving me the impression that I've become a full goatskin and that someone has just opened the nozzle. Then - all of a sudden, without reducing its speed first - it stops. When I stand up I look at the china and I cannot see any trace of the stuff. 

When I go out the drivers have just finished fixing some technical problem (there will be many more later on, and all the foreign passengers will get mad about it, except me, of course, for obvious reasons).

We stop two more times because of some other damage and I punctually open the tap and let go the pressure that is swelling my guts. 

Unfortunately the next attack doesn't match a mechanical failure. I hold on, clench my teeth, as the unwritten traveler's textbook says, but after a while I cannot stand it anymore. I ask the driver if he can stop the bus. He cannot speak English but an old monk helps me out. In a country of devote Buddhists like this, his words sound like an incontrovertible order and the driver stops the bus at the edge of the road. The crowd disperse over a large field, under the shade of some huge tropical trees. While everybody is looking for a trunk or a bush to pee, I find a hidden corner and re-open my valve. 

I've become a celebrity among the passengers, who have seen me talking with the monk. Back on the bus he recommends me to be careful when I choose where and what to eat. I am also approached by a Thai businessman who starts to whispers because he doesn't want to be recognized - the Siamese, even though a few centuries have passed since the devastating Burmese invasions, are still very suspicious - and tells me that some Burmese restaurants can be extremely unhygienic, as if this was actually a secret.

Halfway through the trip - which will last almost ten hours more than expected - all of a sudden I feel well again. I even manage to sleep, waking up in the middle of the night when the bus is parked once again and the driver is hitting some piece of metal with a hammer. The Burmese endure it in religious silence, the other tourists wake up and swear. Finally I can focus on this kind of details without having my attention jerked by my guts every five minutes: I turn towards the window, I look at the moon that light up the rice fields, the palm trees and the desolation of this service station, I lean my greasy forehead against the glass, I mist it up by breathing out a long sigh and then, without being noticed, I start to giggle with extreme pleasure.

Burma, September 2002

This post is part of the of the Saga of the runs, the other episodes can be found here

Those highly-decorated paranoids

Aung San Suu Kyi was banned from running in the upcoming elections. 

Elections? They've got to be kidding...she isn't even allowed to take a walk in a city park! 
What would you expect from those highly-decorated paranoids?

8-8-88!

Photo Aung San Suu Kyi by U.S Department of State (PD)

A fruit shake in Rangoon

In a papaya science finds antioxidants and vitamins. I see the flag of a tropical country: the external stripe is yellow, with green engravings, the center is orange-red, mushy, almost rotten. And close to the pole the black of the seeds, dozens of pearls, rubbery and shiny.

Downtown in Rangoon, in the shade of the palm trees, in front of the mirrors and the fans of a teahouse, a phlegmatic Burmese is making a fruit shake. The blade slides slowly, peeling without waste. The pulp gives in without any effort: the weight of the knife seems to be enough. He throws it into a mortar, with a block of ice, and without using blades, plastic or current, he grinds it with patience, with pestle blows. 

A fruit shake in Rangoon is like the quiet street, the shade of the foliage, the colonial teahouse. It's more than a drink, of a cool spray on the afternoon: it's a throbbing atmosphere, a complete experience.

Rangoon, Burma, autumn 2002

Photo "Papaya" by Flowery Luza (CC), from flickr