A VISIT TO THE GOLDEN ROCK, OR, CRAMMED INTO A TRUCK IN THE POURING RAIN

When Nicole and I left Yangon to see the Golden Rock at Kyaiktiyo (we can't pronounce it either, that's why we just refer to this part of the journey as Golden Rock,) we learnt of the Burmese penchant for playing melodramatic music videos during the entirety of a long bus ride. From this experience, I can only strongly advise against falling in love in Myanmar because it inevitably leads to lingering, forlorn looks, rolling around on beds and staring at photographs, melancholy gazing across park ponds, and general misery. Your partner will leave you and you will despair. This particular ride featured the same artist in video after video and I came to really pity the poor woman whose fifteen separate lovers left her every single time.

We arrived at our destination in the pouring rain, and it just never let up. With no language skills and the thick, soft Burmese accent to contend with, I tried to double check we were at the Golden Rock by pointing to a small, felt poster of said rock that was hanging in the bus window. Yes, they confirmed, we were at the Golden Rock. We were quickly shuffled across the street and from one songthaew to another (the trucks with two benches on either side of the bed and a covering on top.) Fortunately it turned out that a guy from our hotel was there so he could bring us directly to where we were going, along with some others. He was a very pleasant young man with a bloody red betel nut smile. He was the one who informed us that at the moment it was only raining cats and dogs here in Mon State, but that a few days ago it had been even worse: it was raining cats and pigs.

Driving through the driving rain we were soon soaked from head to toe. A mere covering over the top of a truck doesn't really keep you dry. The young man with the red teeth (I want to say his name was Ko Ko) didn't have a place to sit so he balanced on the tailgate and got the full force of the rainstorm. I watched rivers of water run down his shirt and across his face, and yet, he remained stubbornly cheerful. The Burmese people were incredibly good-natured we learned. (I would swear we also saw people up a pole fixing an electrical wire in the rain. It went by so fast, yet I'm sure I saw it. One of those things that make you scratch your head and say, Hmmm... What exactly did we just see?)

We got to the hotel and futilely set out our things to dry. The rain just increased its pummeling of the earth and we were effectively stranded. (Forcing me to blog as it happened.) We also met a fellow stranded traveler, the German guy I mentioned in my previous post. Flo (short for Florian) had only one week in Myanmar and was going through at turbo speed before meeting up with his friend in Bali. Naturally he wasn't happy about losing a day to rain. The three of us got on well from the get-go so we spent that night and the next day together. (Flo also asked me for my blog site, which I gave him, telling him he might feature in an upcoming post. Well, just over five weeks later, it's true. Flo, if you're reading this, just want to say hi and hope your time in Bali was relaxing!)

The next day the rain let up a wee bit. We could walk around and feel merely damp instead of soaking wet, so we decided it was now or never to visit the famous Golden Rock. The rain jacket I have with me would be more accurately described as a "mist jacket", just the thing to keep you dry when you suddenly find yourself in a fierce morning mist or fog. So, basically it's crap for actual rain of any sort. I bought a $1 "Convenience Rain Jacket" from a girl who must have spotted the moment we walked into view as a tourist in need of a plastic poncho. It worked though; I just put it over my mist jacket. And when I say it worked, I mean it kept me a little bit dry in the torrential downpour.

Nicole, Flo and I got into the tourist transport truck, which had seven rows of benches, each of which was supposed to fit at least six people. Of course, it wasn't possible with people such of ourselves of Caucasian-sized limbs. Sitting down, my knees went right into the back of the person in front of me, much as someone else's knees dug into my back. Turns out having half a foot of space between rows makes it rather cramped. Flo, whose legs couldn't manage that level of contortionist folding up, ended up straddling his knees around the two Burmese ladies in front of him, which of course we had to give him a hard time about. The lady in front of Nicole found that using her legs as a backrest was much preferable to actually supporting herself, so she just slumped back and let Nicole do the work of holding her up.

Before we could leave, the grumpy truck-master (for lack of a better term) decided we didn't have enough people in our row. As is often the case, they don't get going until they've maximized their profits and overstuffed the vehicle beyond all reasonable capacity. He frowned at us and muttered something in Burmese like: "Scoot over! Go! Do it now!" We were costing him money, after all. We had to demonstrate that we literally could make about six more inches of room, and that another human body was simply not going to fit in our row. This made him very unhappy, as if he expected us to just shrink and fold in our limbs. The idea of getting 42 slight-of-frame Southeast Asians into the truck was laughable to begin with; reaching that number with big-boned Westerners thrown in was just impossible. Once we got going up the mountain road, however, I found that being so tightly wedged between so many people somewhat lessened the shocks and bumps. Only if we remained in place, however. At one point my butt slid off the seat and I had to hang on for dear life; it took me quite a while to regain the bench.

Halfway up the mountain, we stopped at a small crossroads with a scattering of buildings in order to... Well, we never found out. We stopped for about 10-15 minutes. The driver got out, went somewhere, a few buses came down the mountain road past us... It seems to be a rule in Asian transportation that you can never go directly from A to B. There is always an unexplained stop in which nothing seems to happen before you're allowed to go on. So there we were in the open-air bed of the truck, uncomfortably stuffed like sardines in a tin can, when of course it started to rain, and hard. The only thing to do was pull up our hoods and huddle. Cold, wet, but not totally miserable. We were still laughing at the absurdity of the situation.

By the time we got to the top, the rain was really coming down. We sheltered under a covered section of souvenir stalls for a while before saying, "Screw it! We can't possible get any more wet than we already are." We bought an over-priced entrance ticket, deposited our shoes at the beginning of the designated holy area and gingerly climbed the slick marble stairs up. There were only a few tourists about, seeing how awful the weather was, but there were a lot of workers there: women carrying loads of brick, and men carrying sacks of what I guessed to be concrete through the main walkway of the large holy area. (It wasn't a temple, nor a pagoda, but it was holy because we couldn't wear shoes. Calling it a "holy area" is about the best phrase I can use.) The no-shoes (or "foot-wearing" as one sign said) is a rule. Doing construction, or moving an incredibly heavy statue (as we saw a large team of men doing as we left) does not warrant an exception.

As for the rock itself? Well, let's just say that later on, Nicole joked that she felt she couldn't send her grandparents a postcard of it and have it be an accurate representation of what she saw. The postcard contained a bright, gleaming, golden photograph, and if she wanted to send something more true to life, she would have to smear it with whiteout first. It was misty, windy, wet, and generally miserable. The real kicker was that Nicole and I couldn't even go up to the rock because women are not allowed to approach it. Only men may apply the gold leaf that covers the entire thing. (The reason being that women are not on the same level of holiness as men. Where did I put those Cultural Relativity spectacles that I had to use in Tana Toraja? Ah, there they are.Thank goodness the lenses are especially thick and waterproof, or wouldn't have been able to appreciate a thing on top of that mountain.) Nicole and I waited as Flo went to have a closer look, but there was such poor visibility that he only took a minute or two. We didn't let it get us down however; we enjoyed it for what it was: a ridiculous journey up a steep mountainside, crammed into a truck with

about three dozen other people, all to see a mist-enshrouded rock sitting above some truly majestic scenery which we couldn't see, all in the pouring rain and howling wind. After about 10 minutes we left the rock to explore the rest of the area. As we were leaving, my feet flew out from under me on the wet marble (in about as cartoonish a way you can imagine,) and I fell flat on my butt. It didn't hurt (my amply-sized derrière cushioned the fall,) but it did manage to get my hitherto dry underwear soaking wet. And once your underwear are wet on a rainy day, well, there's no point in holding on to hope for warmth and comfort any longer. We spent about another 10 minutes walking to the end of the compound but literally didn't see much of anything. We headed back the way we came and got some hot tea in cups about the size of shot glasses, which only could warm us a tiny bit.

We waited with some other tourists for the truck to head back down the mountain and made friends for the day with a British guy and French girl who were fun to chat with. We waited and waited and waited, chatting to pass the time. Everyone had finished their visit within half and hour and it was a full-on monsoon by now outside the shelter of the truck pavilion. Still, no one came to drive back down for what seemed like ages. Eventually a few more people came and we were hopeful and got into the truck. However, whoever was in charge told us that we couldn't go until the truck was full. We knew that they would once again insist on getting half a hundred bodies into the truck and that it would probably take another two hours before we could fill all the seats to their satisfaction. A deal was proposed: everyone had to pay extra and we could leave sooner. And to whom was this proposition directed? The tourists of course. I really don't think they said the same thing to the locals at all. I asked if everyone would pay, and the guy said something vaguely affirmative but mostly non-committal. It was pretty obvious that it would just be the tourists who paid extra. Being white in Southeast Asia is one long chain of instances of people trying to rip you off. I don't even say that with much bile, it's just true, a fact of tourist life. We waited it out a bit longer and eventually did not end up having to pay any extra, for which I was glad. You can't stand to get ripped off all the time after all.

So, we headed back down the hill, made the same mysterious and seemingly pointless stop halfway down again, changed our clothes at the hotel, and the five of us ate lunch together (British man and French woman included). That evening we all ended up on the same bus out of town before we had to disembark in the town of Bago to catch an overnight bus to Mandalay.

So, was it worth the time, money, and wet underwear just to see a big golden rock? No, not really. Meeting Flo, chatting with our new friends while sheltering from the monsoon, laughing at ourselves crammed into truck? Yes. The journey - and the struggle - trumped the end-goal in this case.