Category: Southeast Asia

Kalaw: Cheap everything

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From Mandalay, Myoungsun and I made our way to Kalaw, a scruffy but likable mountain town that serves as a base for treks to Inle Lake. It was cold enough that by evening, wearing my sweatshirt and my new Burmese sweater and hat, I still felt the need to go to the marketplace and buy a heavy coat with a hood.

Everything in Kalaw was cheap. I got a haircut for less than a dollar, a bowl of delicious Shan noodle soup for less than 50 cents. Even trekking gear was cheap: a midsize knapsack for $10, a headlamp with batteries included for a buck. We went to a video game shop boasting a PlayStation 2, and we played the soccer game Winning Eleven because it was the only game they had, but hey, it was about 25 cents an hour.

Our trek, which we arranged at Uncle Sam’s — the place for treks, judging by the crowds there coordinating various groups and plans — was also cheap, at just $35 a head for three days, two nights, a guide, a chef, two homestays, seven meals, and the boat across Inle Lake to the town of Nyaungshwe. Myoungsun and I were joined by Leo, a young German jazz drummer; Sophie and Edouard, a finance guy and an animator from Belgium; and Jorg, a retired teacher from Switzerland who was avoiding his Filipina wife’s visit home to her mother. That Jorg was trekking at all was remarkable: some years earlier, he’d developed a fistula in his brain that led to extensive paralysis. He’d had to relearn how to walk, and now he was trekking in the Burmese mountains, keeping up with a group of people in their twenties and thirties (and, yes, one in his forties).

On our last night before the trek, we stopped in at Hi Snack & Drink, the best (only?) bar in Kalaw. It’s a warm, dark, inviting little hole in the wall, free of the usual Burmese fluorescent lighting, with groups of locals grabbing the available acoustic guitars and belting out local pop songs. Soon it drew a crowd of backpackers as well. I got to talking with the owner about the political changes in Myanmar, which he said would have been impossible just a few years before: there was a military security guy who used to come and sit in the bar to watch everyone.

I asked the barkeep the same question I’d been asking everyone, which is why the military government decided to relinquish absolute control, and he gave the best answer I heard. He explained that the generals, as they looted the country, tucked their money away in American and European bank accounts. Then came targeted sanctions, and they lost access to their money. The political opening has been designed so that the military maintains economic and some political control. There will be no trials for past wrongdoing, and there’s no state seizure of assets controlled by the generals: the banks, the mining companies, real estate holdings, etc. But the sanctions will be lifted, the bank accounts unfrozen, and Burmese generals will once again be able to send their children to the UK for school and their wives to Paris for shopping.

From Kalaw to Inle Lake: Village life

Photos: Trekking from Kalaw to Inle Lake, Inle Lake

Trekking has been good for the villages around Inle Lake. It brings in money and contact with the outside world, and we felt welcomed. There are lots of new brick houses, which are what people prefer over wood or bamboo-mat-sided houses, and almost all the thatched roofs have been replaced with corrugated metal. The villages were mostly off the electrical grid, but many people had solar panels that they used to charge LED lightbulbs — tricky in the monsoon, we were told, when the sun won’t shine for days — and a few had car batteries for the same purpose. In some ways, these villages were in better shape than some of the villages I saw in Northern Thailand. They also still had their populations of young adults, who haven’t gone to the cities to look for jobs because there are no jobs in the cities.

One shouldn’t glamorize the poverty and stresses of rural village life. On our first night, after dinner, we were taken to meet a family that was staying in a small house for a visit. There was a fire going in the middle of the room, with no stove, and a young child coughed quietly from her bedroll. The matriarch shocked us all when we asked her age and she said she was fifty-four (Khinkhin, our guide, translated); she looked older. Working in the rice and ginger and pepper fields every day is hard. Carrying water from the village tap is hard.

I was also reminded how little privacy there is in villages. Showers happen out in the open. Houses have one or two rooms, and everyone eats and sleeps together. Toilets are outside and shared. If you have a fight with your wife, or if you run to the bathroom too many times in the night, or if you sneak out to meet your boyfriend, everyone knows. Mirrors are not common. You look at yourself less and everyone else more. The whole concept of the self as I know it — as an American who had my own bedroom from the day I was born — is foreign to village life.

The cultural lines were striking when we arranged the beds on the first night. Khinkhin and Nanda, the chef, lined up some mats and blankets for us so that we’d be sleeping next to each other all in a row, two people to each mat. It would keep us close and add warmth, which made sense. The Westerners looked at this arrangement, thought better of it, found an extra mat, and spread things out so we’d each have our own personal space (except for the Belgian couple). As for Myoungsun, she’d confessed back in Mandalay that she actually preferred hostel dorm rooms to private hotel rooms. She’d grown up sleeping in the same room as the rest of her family, and she likes a certain amount of ambient noise. When we arranged our beds for the second night — no extra mats this time — she was happy to flop down somewhere in the middle, while the German and the American took the ends.

And it was cold at night. I woke up in the middle of the first night after dreaming that I was wandering Times Square on New Year’s Eve, looking for a place to warm up. I put on my coat and got back under the covers. Later, near dawn, I went out to the bathroom and was amazed by all the stars I could see. The moon had set, and the nearest electric lights were beyond the ridgeline.

The trek was mostly through villages and farmland rather than through wilderness and forest. It was the season for ripening pepper, and I was struck by just how much global effort goes into growing and picking and drying and grinding and packaging and shipping was is essentially just a flavor additive without much caloric value. People were also hard at work watering and washing their buffaloes, which are used for labor, and also as “buffalo banks,” places to store value for when you need it later. Once again, it was Myoungsun who had the bridging experience between the Burmese and the Western: she was the only one among us who’d ever done a day of labor on a pepper farm, as part of a youth volunteer program in Korea.

At last we came to Inle Lake and took the boat across to Nyaungshwe, where we said goodbye to our guides and went our separate ways, though we reconvened for dinner. The next day, Myoungsun and I joined the Belgians for a boat tour of the lake, which was both touristy and interesting. The lake is dotted with villages on stilts, and life is lived on the water. We visited a boat factory, a weaving shop, a silversmith, and a shop where women from the famous long-necked Karen tribe served as a kind of human zoo, which felt creepy. We also visited temples, because you always visit temples.

Next up: a night bus back to Yangon.

Bagan: Koreans in the sand

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I’d decided to fly to Bagan rather than attempt a 12-hour bus journey while sick, but even flying was hard in the state I was in. Hell, packing was hard. All I wanted to do was sleep. In Bagan, I finally had the good sense to ask for a doctor. He arrived, wearing a longyi, checked me out, and gave me antibiotics. Thank goodness for Cipro.

By morning I was well enough to head out into Bagan’s wondrous landscape of desert sands and old temples. There are thousands of temples and pagodas scattered across the area, some of them enormous and well populated with tourists, others abandoned and alone in the fields. I got around on a rented ebike, which is a scooter that runs on battery power.

As I cruised around, I noticed a surprising number of Koreans, and I fell into conversation with some ajummas on a group tour at one of the temples. Toward sunset, after abandoning a crowded temple just before the sun went down, I was scooting along on a sandy trail when I ran across three young Koreans who were struggling with a single ebike and looking for the famous sunset spot. We got to talking in Korean, and I gave one of them a lift back out of the Central Plain, and we all had dinner together. For the next couple of weeks, I would travel with Myoungsun, a journalist, and intermittently with Hyesun and Kihoon, two students who had come to Myanmar together.

Bagan really has a magic about it. You can go off by yourself and climb around a 900-year-old temple and climb up to see dozens more from the rooftop. There’s no one monument that stands out, but all of them together create a strange environment. At times, I would look out at the miles and miles of temples and think, what a colossal waste of government money. I suppose poor governance is nothing new in Burma.

Mandalay: A wall and a tour

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Mandalay is a dump. It’s a big, endless grid of wide streets, many of them crumbling to dust. I found no districts with distinctive character, except for a very small area that is Mandalay’s poshest mall — not that posh — plus some new apartments. There’s not a lot to see or do in Mandalay. The character of the city is summed up in its central monument, which is a very, very long wall that just repeats and repeats, enclosing a military base and a poor-quality reconstruction of the old royal palace.

What you do in Mandalay is leave Mandalay and go outside of it. Hyesun arranged a taxi tour for us, and we spent a day zipping from place to place: a giant heap of bricks that was supposed to be the world’s largest pagoda but never got finished; a hill with a bunch of temples; a town you see by horse cart. It was all mediocre. After Bagan, it was going to take more than a pile of bricks to impress. For sunset we went to U Bein Bridge, which is famous for being long, wooden, poorly built, and lacking in handrails (it looks rustic in photos). It was packed with tourists, of course, but it was pleasant enough to descend from the bridge and watch the sunset from a small island river, where there are bars set up for the tourists.

In some ways, though, the most interesting day in Mandalay was the one where we didn’t do anything much, other than go to the city palace and decide it was boring. Hyesun and Kihoon had gone ahead to Kalaw, while Myoungsun and I lingered for another day. We went to an optician to replace Myoungsun’s lost glasses, and we got to see the way that they used a case full of different lenses and a pair of test glasses to work out the prescription strength; we went to a mall, where I bought a sweater and a knit cap at the grocery store in preparation for the cold of Kalaw and trekking. It was a brief experience of Myanmar as a place to live in rather than tour across. It wasn’t appealing exactly — I have zero desire to live in Myanmar — but it was illuminating in its way.

Next up: Kalaw and the trek to Inle Lake.

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Myanmar is where Asian buses go when they die. You see them trundling down Yangon’s avenues, exposed engines belching, the Korean or Japanese or Chinese route destinations sometimes still visible. I began to think of Yangon as a sort of Buddhist hell realm for buses, like the bottom wedge of a Tibetan thanka painting, where they’re reincarnated as flayed beasts that have to pay for the sins of their past lives. At moments, too, I had the weird fleeting hope that I could hop on one of these buses and leave behind the dusty, crumbling chaos of Yangon for, say, Shinchon Station in downtown Seoul.

Myanmar was daunting. Internet connections were hinky and slow. There’s not yet much of a backpacker scene, travel options are limited, food can be terrible, roads are bad, English speakers are scarce. It was by far the most difficult place I’ve traveled on this trip, though I don’t want to exaggerate the hardship either: I stayed in hotels, rode in VIP buses, went to tourist sites where I met other travelers. Still, everything’s a little trickier and more arduous in Myanmar: getting on a VIP bus means riding for a half-hour in the back of an open truck to get to the VIP bus; staying in a hotel by the airport still results in a half-hour taxi ride over rough roads to get the airport four kilometers away.

And some of what made Myanmar feel like a slog was how I approached it. I was on the move more than I had been in other countries: before Myanmar, I was averaging close to four days per location; in Myanmar, it was more like two days. But also, the travel was physically harder: a three-day, two-night trek that meant a couple of freezing cold homestays on hard floors; an overnight bus; some very uncomfortable minivan rides. By the time I reached the end, I was exhausted and ready to leave.

Filipinos in the synagogue

The heart of Yangon, along the river, is a dense grid of mostly old colonial buildings from the turn of the 20th century. Like Cuba, Myanmar has spent a long time cut off from global capital, resulting in a kind of accidental preservationism, though the old buildings are mostly in terrible shape. There’s a dearth of basic modern conveniences like grocery stores. Done right, Yangon could transform itself into a UNESCO World Heritage city like Melaka and George Town in Malaysia or Hoi An in Vietnam, but on a grander scale. Done wrong, and in ten years Old Yangon will be nothing but cheap, shitty glass boxes and a faint memory of what was and what could have been.

You could feel, walking around, that Myanmar is changing. There are cell phone shops everywhere. Art galleries have sprung up, with explicitly political paintings; one artist cuts up old Myanmar money to make collage portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi. You see posters for Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy in shops, too, and books about her in the book stalls. I was in Myanmar after the election in which the NLD took about 80 percent of the vote, but before they took over parliament at the beginning of this month. You could feel that hopes were running high, though tempered by a long history of disappointment.

I went to the pagodas you’re supposed to go to, and they were OK, though not as beautiful as Thailand’s major temples. What was best in Yangon was the street life. On my second night in town, in one of the open-air barbecue restaurants on 19th Street, I met some expat Filipinos and one Burmese friend of theirs, and we had sort of a party at the table with whoever else happened to sit down beside us. The next night, I took the whole crew to the local synagogue, which has been kept open all through the years by the Samuels family. It was Friday night, and I ended up leading the prayer services for the few Jews there: a photographer, an Australian family, and a Samuels daughter. The Filipinos had never seen a Jewish ritual before, and they applauded after each bit that I sang.

We were all supposed to go out clubbing, but the stomach troubles that had been plaguing me since Malaysia now took a turn for the worse. My new local friends were kind and helpful, taking me to a pharmacy before sending me back to my hotel. It was a long night, and the next day’s trip to Bagan, I knew, wouldn’t be easy.