YANGON, OR, OFF TO MYANMAR!

Four days ago...

As for the immediate only slightly out-of-date update, Nicole and I are in Laos. We've been here eight twelve days so far, and are enjoying enjoyed the charming little city of Luang Prabang. It's full of cafe lattes, croissants, old French colonial buildings, an alluring night market, and these internet cafes, so I keep on writing while I have access to a keyboard. Heaven knows I've tried tapping out my blog on my mini-tablet, but it's just not the same. (Oh, my first-world problems in a third-world country!)

As for the truly immediate update (because I clearly didn't finish the blog post before leaving Luang Prabang) we are in Vang Vieng, where there are few charming little cafes but instead a bunch of bars, restaurants, and inner tube rental places. But, like Luang Prabang, it has internet cafes, so I'm back at it again, continuing and adding on to our first few days in Myanmar...

We left Jakarta on an Air France flight to Singapore, where we were pampered with entertainment screens and an in-flight meal that contained a wedge of Camembert large enough to satisfy even the hungriest Gallic cheese lover. I ate mine and half of Nicole's before it seemed only prudent to stop. We spent the night at our friend Mildred's house. Mildred usually puts us up when we're in Singapore and is one of the most hospitable and courteous people I know. She'll go out of her way to make sure everything's okay for us. (Mildred, you're awesome!) The next morning it was off to Yangon on a Jet Star flight. We arrived on August 1st and stayed in the country for 26 days.

Coming to Myanmar I had no expectations. Not low expectations, just a blank slate. We had prearranged the paperwork for our visas, similar to what we had done for Vietnam. In Vietnam there were lines and waiting time; not so in Myanmar. The travel agency that arranged our visas must have been a good one because we got out visas immediately, after which we breezed through immigration, picked up our bags, and exited the airport all in about 30 minutes! Without a doubt it was the easiest airport experience I've ever had. And it's not as if the airport was eerily quiet and clearly underused (the way I imagine a visit to North Korea might be.) It was a normal and sophisticated-looking airport, typical of an international terminal, if a little on the small side.

We got a taxi into town and right away the thing that struck me was the appearance of our taxi driver. He was a good symbol for Myanmar in some ways. He wore a crisp, bleach-white linen shirt, starched to professional perfection. On his lower half he sported a traditional longyi and sandals. A longyi is a floor-length tube of cloth that Myanmar men and women both wear. Men bunch the extra material in the front and tie it, women fold them tightly across their midrifts, the way you would wrap a towel around yourself after a shower. This particular outfit, collared shirt, longyi and sandals was the typical outfit for a Burmese man. Some three days after arriving in Myanmar, we were at a Buddhist site called the Golden Rock. (All of this coming up in the next blog.) We had met a German guy, Flo, at our hotel and decided to take the truck together up to this particular site / sight. As we were waiting for the truck to be filled to capacity, Flo asked what we thought of the ubiquitous longyi. My opinion? I said it was great, as if the entire country had collectively said, "No; you can't make us wear pants. We refuse." I think it shows a combination of cultural pride and an attachment to tradition. Of course, people wear pants too, but the longyi are far more common. That's how Myanmar is: this odd and beguiling mixing of traditions with 21st century life. People say that Myanmar is like an untouched land, perhaps reminiscent of Old Asia and the Mystic Orient. I think it's true to a degree. It's not frozen in time - I don't think you can find a place these days that truly is - but it cherishes tradition, leaves its relics in the open for all to enjoy, and treats visitors with great hospitality, just as a matter of course. One day I believe I'm going to say I was really lucky to visit the place in 2014, when the impact of tourists was only slight. It certainly did have the feel of a place that hasn't become Westernized and holds on tightly to its roots.

But let's move on to the real purpose of this post, without me waxing poetic about the Mystic Orient any longer. We had a quick and hassle free arrival, and our longyi-clad taxi driver delivered us at our hotel: an unpolished but decent place called Sleep In, in the Chinatown district of town. After finally tracking down a money changer (an entirely respectable place found up an entirely shady-looking stairwell in a non-descript city building,) we set off to find Shewdagon Pagoda, Yangon's most famous and spectacular landmark.

We set off walking using a city map I had downloaded to my tablet. We actually started walking the right way, but the road we were supposed to take changed names and we turned around, thinking we were on the wrong road when we saw the other name. Of course, asking for directions just got us more mixed up. We were pointed in three completely different directions at different points, none of them the way we actually needed to go. Sometimes getting directions is ridiculously hard: A) We don't speak the language, and that's our problem, but B) People tend to give you the most vague hand waves ever to show you the way to go. They don't draw a little sketch showing to turn here and then turn there, they give a lazy flick of the wrist and mutter something that doesn't really answer your question. This is a known and documented phenomenon. Eventually we did figure it out though and began the long walk... only to find ourselves too hungry and impatient by 2 PM to keep it up. We hailed a taxi to bring us to the lunch spot I had picked out.

And quite a lunch spot it was. I had chosen it from Lonely Planet because it was touted to be full of good, traditional Burmese food, but nobody spoke English there and there were no labels (of course) over the pick-and-choose curries, meats and assorted unrecognizable dishes. So we had to pick blindly and ended up with chicken, fish, fish soup, and some mystery meat that turned out to be mutton. Perhaps a bit intense for our first meal in a new country. None of it was bad, per se, it was just the whole not knowing what we were eating aspect. Nicole said she was going to double-check anytime I said I had a suggestion for lunch in the future. 

From lunch we wandered back to our main attraction: Shewdagon Pagoda. We paid the entrance fee and deposited our shoes before taking an escalator up to the pagoda. We learned that they are very particular about the no-shoes thing in Myanmar. Even outside a temple or pagoda you had to take off your shoes well before reaching holy ground. (Or at least what I perceived to be holy ground; holy ground in the Theravada Buddhism of Myanmar seems to include a super-wide holy radius around all areas of interest.)

Despite it being a cloudy day and a bit drizzly, the site couldn't fail to be spectacular. Shewdagon Pagoda is a massive, thoroughly gilt, structure of intense Buddhist devotion. (Actually, it's hard to find anything religious that's not an object of intense Buddhist devotion; the Burmese are very devout and never give up an opportunity for merit-making.) It's not a pagoda in the sense of a multi-tiered flare-roofed Chinese building, but more resembles an upside down bell. The parts of the pagoda include terraces, turban band, upside-down alms bowl, bell, lotus petals, banana bud, umbrella crown, vane and a huge, sparkly diamond at the very top. The thing about almost all Burmese pagodas (Shewdagon being Exhibit A here) is that they containso much gold! Nicole and I think that Myanmar would probably be as rich as Arab sultanate if they gathered all that gold together and sold it. Of course, this would be sacrilege of the highest order. If applying a tiny sheet of gold leaf gives you good merit as a devout Buddhist practitioner, removing and selling it would probably send you straight to hell for your next thousand rebirths. In any case, all that gold makes for an impressive and imposing scene. You can't help but stare in wonderment as you walk around the base of the structure, past each station set up in honour of each of the eight days of the week. (No, that's not a typo; in the Buddhist tradition there is Wednesday morning and Wednesday evening and they're two separate days.)

Within minutes of arriving at the pagoda, a strange little monk came up and began chatting with us. Our experience with monks up until this point in time came from our 2012 visit to Thailand. The image of a public announcement poster that read, "Ladies, don't touch the monks," from the Reclining Buddha in Bangkok is still etched clearly in my mind. We were operating under the assumption that we shouldn't approach monks at all and in general, stay out of their way. The chatty little monk made us nervous, so we replied to him in as short and polite of phrases as we could until he went away. We began our walk around the pagoda and drank in the sight of it, impressed and humbled. When we had gone about halfway around the whole thing (and we were going slowly,) it began to rain and we quickly ducked into a pavilion off to the side to shelter there. A tour guide of sorts began talking to us, but we got him to go away through the same teenager-ish method of short, non-committal responses. We didn't really want a tour, and we didn't want to pay anybody for information either. Then, another monk started talking to us. Since it was raining, there was no escape. However, a few minutes into the conversation it became clear that it would be okay to talk to him. He initiated it, after all, and a genuine friendly feeling came across. He wanted to practice his English, but he also just wanted to share information about his beloved pagoda that he visits everyday. He asked us questions, we asked him questions, and before you knew it, he had his phone out (yes, monks can have smartphones!) to see if we could find each other on Facebook. More than one surreal look passed between Nicole and me as we tried to fathom the fact that a monk was trying to find us on Facebook... on his smartphone. (Unfortunately, even though we thought the friend request went through, we never did find him online.)

After the rain stopped, Anya, for that was his name, began to show us around the pagoda to many interesting spots we might not have found on our own. He showed us a photo gallery with black-and-white pictures of Shewdagon in the olden days, a walking photography tour of the important places in the Buddha's life in India (upon completion of which we were both given a Buddha image by the photographer himself), the imported Bodhi trees around the perimeter, and the secret spots to see the diamond glow at night. In certain spots (that seemed to be largely unknown to everyone else) you can see the diamond glow red at the night. Take three steps forward and it glows orange. Another three steps brings you to yellow. Someone had written it in scraggly white-out letter on the tiles, but you'd hardly notice it if you didn't know where to look.

Eventually Anya had to leave and bid us goodbye. We had become rather attached to our monk friend. We got a photo with him before he left. We were careful to to touch him though. Friendly and gracious as he was, he was a monk, and we are ladies, and ladies just don't touch monks.

Remarking how awesome the entire day had been, we took a final look around Shewdagon and headed for dinner before going back to Sleep In.

The next day it was more pagodas and Buddhist sites. We saw Sule Paya, which is, in fact, a roundabout with a golden pagoda in the middle of it. It was here that I saw one of - if not my favourite - Buddha images in all of Myanmar. This one wasn't particularly splendid or golden or ancient, but it looked loved in a way, as if the prayers directed were genuine and heartfelt, and that this made it more alive and more special than the unreachably high, impossibly big, grand Buddhas we saw everywhere else. It was one of those inexplicable things that hits you immediately and powerfully. I fell in love with that tiny, little Buddha statue and looked on at it reverently for a quite a while while devotees came to pour little cups of water over it, as is traditional.

We also visited Botataung Pagoda, originally built to hold eight sacred Buddha hairs, transported from India. (Sacred Buddha-hair relics are everywhere. And it's easy to see why. You can only get so many relics out of finger bones and so on, but Buddha hairs, like Buddha footprints, are inexhaustible.) An interesting and unique thing about that particular pagoda is that you can walk inside of it and of course, as you would imagine, the entire thing is gilt: the only thing that's not golden is the floor. So much, so much, so much gold! Dare I say it...? Maybe... too much gold? The idea doesn't exist in Burmese thinking. Gold = good. Gold = devotion. Gold = spare no expense for the most splendid ornamentation. Gold = fast road to easy merit-making. Gold = the best there is.


We went off in search of lunch after that - a pleasantly achievable task as the streets of Yangon are in a logical grid! It was a luxury to be able to navigate by ourselves as we could never do this in Indonesia. Even Singapore isn't that grid-like. We didn't find the Indian biryani shop we were looking for, but ended up at option #2: a Shan noodle shop that turned out to be cheap, delicious, and a perfect place to wait out the rain that began in earnest soon after we sat down. (It was always raining when we first got to Myanmar. We weren't dry for at least three days.)

After checking out the main market in town - an overwhelming sprawling mass of jade shops, fringed by other souvenir stalls - we headed back down the street. We bought rambutans as a snack from a street-side fruit stand and promptly ended up giving them away to woman who was begging. Rambutan-less, we continued on and this time did find the biryani shop in time for dinner, where we sketched out a plan for the rest of our 25 days in Myanmar. (It was at the biryani place I learned that in Myanmar they use party streamers for toilet paper. No joke. Their tissue really, truly looks like party streamers. Weird, yes, but I guess it works.)

That night I bought snacks at the grocery store for our bus ride the next day. I always like grocery
shopping in foreign countries because it interests me to see what sort of things they stock on the shelves. Mundane, yes, but interesting all the same. Nicole would say it was mundane, period, so I enjoyed my humble little grocery shopping trip alone.

All in all, Yangon was a great, if slightly damp, introduction to Myanmar. Not only did I enjoy seeing the splendid, golden pagodas, but the mundane things were also highly interesting to me as well. There were the market and grocery store, as I already mentioned. There was also a unique technology available on the streets: roadside telephone booths that are actually just a few land-line telephones set up at a folding table with chairs. Sure, everyone's got their mobiles, but I like the fact that you can still call from an ordinary telephone on the side of the road. It's old-fashioned things thriving in the modern world again. There were also many run-down buildings that showed that oddly alluring combination of entropy and beauty. Something about the concrete or, I don't really know what, seems to make the buildings rot and decay. Not good, of course, but it made for some arresting sights.

The next day we left early for our next destination: the Golden Rock of Kyaiktiyo in nearby Mon State, which also contains a sacred Buddha hair relic (or so they say...) It would prove to be a interesting, if entirely wet, experience.