Bagan

Along the way, while traveling here in Myanmar, I have bounced my question off a number of travelers and expats. "How come the people of this country seem so well adjusted considering their economic and political conditions?" Although unemployment and poverty rates are very high, crime rates are ultra low. Why?

The most popular answer has been Buddhism.

Buddhism was introduced to this region sometime around the 11th century. A series of kings made Theravada Buddhism a kind of state religion and put the country's resources to work along the Irrawaddy River in west central Myanmar, building what was to become Bagan, a grand center of Buddhist studies over the next two centuries.

Bagan, now a protected archaeological site about the size of Manhattan, contains over two thousand monument temples built during this period. Almost every temple is made of bricks and concrete and, after a thousand years, are still standing tall and strong. Some are the size of a one car garage - others the size of a basketball arena. Each is an operating temple open to the public to worship or explore. Many have stairs to the rooftops to check out the breathtaking views of the incredible landscape. Temple spires sprout from the plain off into the horizon like a vast sculpture garden.

It's a large area to explore. The two most popular ways to do it are by bicycle or horse drawn cart. They both have their advantages.

The first day, I shared a horse cart with Nadine, a Swiss traveler I met on the bus ride from Inle Lake. So for K6,000 we got our own personal driver for the day.

Though charming, soon after giddy up, we realized how slow this thing was going to be. An older guy on a bicycle passed us on the road with ease.

Oh well. At least we have shade.

The Bagan plain is a mostly flat area with mild weather, low lying brush, and a big blue sky. A zig zag of dirt trails connects all of the temples, the Burmese call payas.

As we rolled up to the first one, we were greeted by a friendly local man who showed us all around the temple and gave us some history.

I thought to myself. Well this is a really nice tour, and I know we paid a small fee for entrance to this place. But, there are about two thousand of these temples, and a private tour of each one just can't be provided for nothing. I wonder if he is going to ask for money. Will this happen at every paya?

Sure enough, on our way out, he asked us to look at some paintings his family did, many in the style of the ancient paintings found in the temples. They were actually pretty nice.

I remembered the lesson I learned at Inle Lake with the cigars. If I like them, I should buy them now. Otherwise I may lose the opportunity.

I negotiated what seemed like a fair price for a couple of paintings and then jumped in the horse cart to head to the next stop.

I said to Nadine, "You know, at the next stop I bet they'll have these same paintings."

Sure enough, the next stop had a bunch of people selling local art. And guess what, I saw the same paintings. Tons of them. Priced about 20% of what I had just paid.

So much for lessons learned.

As it turns out, Bagan is chock full of artists. Locals have realized there is money in selling swag to tourists. Many of them are quite talented. But it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Way too much.

It is difficult to get a moment of peace at some of the stops. Some vendors will follow you around the temples and are extraordinarily persistent.

I did buy a fair number of art pieces, but I had to disappoint scores of people who seemed desperate for a sale.

The next day, I rented a bicycle and, even though I had to battle sand drifts and direct sun, I got to see a much quieter side of Bagan. Lonely dirt paths branched off in every direction each one leading to another temple. Some are maintained by families that live on the grounds, but many are completely deserted. It was refreshing after the first day to be completely alone in such a special place.

I don't think I have ever seen so much ancient history packed with such density into one place. I kept thinking that any one of these temples would be a central tourist attraction in any other city. But this place has thousands of them.

It's nearly impossible to visit them all... but fun to try.

Inle

On the day I was to leave for Inle Lake, I met up with Michael, a German traveler now living in India, who was taking the same trip.

We shared a cab to the bus station outside Yangon that the travel agent had written down for me. When we arrived, it wasn't exactly what I was expecting. I thought it would either be

a simple bus stop on the side of the road, or a proper station with parking stalls and attendants. This was a chaotic dirt lot randomly lined with about a hundred buses, none having any kind of markings I could read. We had to depend on our taxi driver to drive up and down the rows looking for the bus that matched our tickets which were written only in Burmese.

Once we found it, we realized this wasn't a tourist bus. We were the lone Westerners. The driver was busy packing the seats in the back of the bus with cargo which eventually included a couple of motorcycles. The other passengers were friendly.

"Mingalaba!", they'd say. This is like "hello" in Burmese, but literally means "it's a blessing."

We noticed some clear plastic bags they provided at each seat. I wondered if these were for garbage? Motion sickness? Then it became crystal clear. They were for spitting out betel nut juice. Many Myanmar people chew betel nut, mostly men. It stains their teeth dark red, as if they had just feasted on a pomegranate and hadn't taken a sip of water yet. But their teeth stay like that all the time.

We headed out in the late afternoon for the overnight journey.

Even though Nyaungshwe, the main town on Inle Lake, is less than 400 miles from Yangon (about the distance from San Francisco to Los Angeles), the journey would take about fourteen hours.

The modern concrete highway leaving Yangon soon downgraded into a bumpy asphault road, and then further into windy rocky dirt roads.

The bus had to stop frequently to pay tolls to groups of people sitting by campfires. I'm not sure if these were hill tribes that had to be paid off for safe passage, or if it's just that each town paved their own road and so collected their own tolls. I saw regular people from villages working on paving roads all around Myanmar.

By the time we reached the peaks of the mountain range, the temperature had dropped further than I had planned for, maybe about 40F. Never did I imagine it would be that cold while I was still in Southeast Asia. I bundled up the best I could.

Around 5 am, the bus dropped us on the side of the highway and we took a taxi to Nyaungshwe.

We had to pay a $5 USD government fee to enter the lake area as tourists. During my trip, I have tried to minimize any spending that goes to the oppressive government whether directly or indirectly. But there are certain things like the Myanmar entry visa and fees like this that are tough to avoid.

Before I left Yangon, I had asked the hotel clerk if he could help me make a hotel reservation. He did make a half-hearted attempt, but wasn't able to get it done for me. So here I was again. Rolling into an unfamiliar town at 5:30 am with no reservation anywhere. I didn't know if any guesthouses would even have their doors open this early. I'd hate to have to wander the freezing cold streets for several hours waiting for signs of life.

Luckily we shared a cab with some Swiss folks who did have a reservation at Nanda Wunn Hotel, which had attendants waiting for their arrival. I asked if they had any other free rooms, and as luck would have it, they had one left. So I plopped down and slept a few more hours.

Later that day, once everyone was open for business, I made arrangements to move to Teakwood Inn, a slightly cheaper and better located family-operated guesthouse.

Outside Teakwood, I was approached by a sweet-natured, older man named Nah Se who asked me if I'd like to take a boat tour of the lake tomorrow. He said he could give me a longer tour and for less money than booking it through an agent.

I try whenever possible to spend money directly with individuals and family businesses. Also, having an opportunity to speak with him beforehand meant that I knew how his English was and knew I'd be able to ask questions along the way. So I committed to a trip the following day. Nah Se would be my private guide and his son would drive the boat.

I hadn't read all that much about Inle Lake before I came. In fact, most of what I knew about it came from a novel I had been reading, Saving Fish from Drowning, which is set here at the lake.

I knew that people lived "on" the lake and that there were some homes on stilts in the water. What I didn't realize until Nah Se toured me around, was that the local Intha people, don't just live around the lake. They have entire floating villages in the middle of the lake. Complete with streets and intersections, these villages are built on bamboo or teak posts in the relatively shallow water. Homes, stores, and farms are arranged together the same as they would be on land. Except they aren't. You have to take a canoe from place to place.

The floating farms are legendary. The farmers collect seaweed from the lake floor and create a type of floating soil that they plant crops in. Everything from tomatoes, to beans, to cauliflower, to corn. The variety of vegetables along with the fish from the lake make for some very tasty local cuisine.

As they harvest, they take their crops to markets, some floating with shoppers browsing from canoe to canoe, and some land-based which are a little easier to navigate. The land markets also allow participation by the hill tribes, such as the Pa-Oh, that grow other crops up in the surrounding mountains.

Nah Se proceeded to motor me around to some of the favorite spots with tourists.

If I had known beforehand that the "tour" was going to have scheduled stops at places where I could buy stuff and the boat driver may benefit somehow from stopping there, I would have been cynical about it. But as it turned out, even if that was true, the sights and the stops were all very interesting and enjoyable.

One stop was at a weaving shop in a floating village where they spun thread from local cotton, silk, and lotus root, and then dyed the thread and weaved lovely clothing using hand made wooden looms. It was really very charming and impressive.

Another stop was at another floating home

where they were rolling cheroots, the local mini cigars that are very popular with the locals and visitors alike. They showed me how they made natural filters and glue to bind the wrapped leaves. They let me taste one of their mixtures of tobacco, banana, tamarind, and brown sugar. It was delicious, and so pleasant smoking it on the floating porch with my boat driver, that I couldn't help but buy a little hand carved wooden box of them.

After some other stops for lunch, and some mid-lake temples and monasteries, we called it a day.

Later after returning to town, I was wishing I had bought more of those lovely cheroots. I walked around town looking for more of those little wooden boxes of sweet cigars. But I couldn't find any.

When I ran into Nah Se on the road, I asked him if there is some place in town I can get more. He said. "No. Lake only."

I took that as a lesson. If you want it, buy it now. Because you may not have another opportunity.

The next day I was reading through the guidebook for other points of interest around the lake and I noticed there was a hot springs a few miles out of town. Anyone who knows me knows that I have a hard time saying no to naturally hot water. So I rented a bike and pedaled off into the countryside.

This was a great excuse to get out of the touristy area and see some everyday life out here.

I am hesitant to make the life of the local folks here sound too idilic. I know that these people struggle every day to make a living and stay out of the way of some of the very real political dangers around them.

But I have to say, riding through the country, the everyday life here seems peaceful and simple and downright pleasant. I know that's not true for everyone. But children laughing and playing in their school yard. A boy out for a walk with his flock of water buffalo. Kids flying kites after school.

It could be that the extra money this area receives from tourism just makes life a little easier around here than in other parts of Myanmar.

But it was nice to be able to look around and say, "everything is not broken here."

Myanmar

I really only became aware of Myanmar when I traveled to northwest Thailand several years ago.

I was taking a bus toward Pai one day, and as the bus got closer to the Myanmar border, it became clear to me that there was some tension there. Just as there are heightened patrols near the Southwestern US border with Mexico, it appeared that Thai authorities had to keep Burmese people from entering the country.

But there were Burmese in Thailand. In fact, some of my favorite local people I met in Thailand actually turned out to be Burmese.

The more I learned about the severe economic and political conditions in Myanmar, the more I wondered how such universally wonderful people could be the products of such a difficult existence.

It made me curious enough to see for myself.

It takes some preparation to visit Myanmar. You need to arrange a visa before arriving there; You can only enter the country via air travel; and you must bring pristine, unblemished, US currency. Due to international economic sanctions, there are no ATMs here. They don't take credit cards. All the money you'll have access to is what you carry in.

As my plane descended toward Yangon International Airport, I got my first look at the countryside. It was sunset and the air seemed smokey. I could see some piles of trash burning on some of the farms which were arranged near the river in a kind of organic hodge podge rather than grids. The population even around the outskirts of the capitol did not seem dense at all.

I had heard that Burmese are somewhat thirsty for information about world news since their media are censored by the government. I expected them to be somewhat ignorant of the outside world.

But my 60-something taxi driver took great pleasure in showing me just how much he knew about my home when I told him I'm from San Francisco.

"You have very tall trees that grow just outside the city boundary. You can drive a car through some of them." (of our famous California Redwoods including Muir Woods)

"California has many Jennifers and Jessicas!" (Ha! That's true!)

His English was fabulous. I later learned that older folks tend to speak English far better than younger people because they stopped teaching English in schools after the new government took over. In fact, for some generations, there was no public school at all.

I didn't have a reservation at my first hotel choice, Okinawa Guesthouse . In retrospect, it probably wasn't a great idea to show up in Yangon without a reservation. There are no legible street signs to try and follow any guide book maps, especially at night. But I lucked out, and they had a room available.

I checked in and asked the desk clerk if he could change some currency for me. He said no. When I asked where I could get some local currency, he said "A bank." I thought this was a cruel joke because my understanding was that banks offered the international exchange rate for Kyat, the Myanmar currency. But since there is no market for Kyat (pronounced like chat) outside Myanmar, the international exchange rate is about 1/100 the actual local market value. Which would make $500 USD worth about $5. That's bad.

But he wasn't joking.

I asked some other hotel guests how they got their Kyats. They said that indeed, within the past month, the banks have been allowed to exchange currency at the local street rates. But it was night time, the banks were closed, and I was hungry. So one of them was nice enough to lend me two thousand Kyats (about $2.60), enough to buy an all-you-can-eat indian food meal around the corner and still have a thousand Kyats left over.

It used to be that you had to exchange your money for Kyat on the streets even though it was illegal. There are still plenty of folks willing to do so on the street promising better rates than the banks, but I heard story after story of visitors getting swindled by them.

Bottom, line: Use the banks. If I had used the exchange at the airport, I wouldn't have had to borrow.

I walked around the downtown area looking for the restaurant I heard about.

Life takes place on the street here. Markets spill out of storefronts onto the sidewalk outside. Many people are eating in alleys on little plastic stools while someone cooks them food on a pan over an open fire. Hardly restaurants. More like street camping. I hoped this wasn't what they had pointed me to.

It also just hit me as I'm walking around, that the folks here are kind of half Asian and half Indian. That shouldn't have come as a surprise to me seeing as the Western side of the country borders Bangladesh and India.

After awhile I thought I had found the place - a dirty little hole in the wall with people watching soccer on TV. The owner beckoned me in and confirmed his K1000 menu. I told him I only wanted vegetables, and he served me some good rice and dahl with some nice little veggie side dishes. It wasn't bad.

The next day, I got a much better look at the city in the hot sunlight.

My impression as I was walked around was "This is a city that used to be."

You see, Myanmar wasn't always poor. While it was under Britain, it was one of Asia's healthiest economies. Yangon was built up as any other Asian capitol would have been at that time. But after the 1960's when everything changed, it's clear that no other investment has gone into this place. No maintenance. No painting. No building. Nothing.

The sidewalks have giant holes that you'll fall into if you're not careful. People just walk in the street instead.

Some other travelers who had been down South awhile in Mawlamyine had adopted the slogan, "Everything's broken."

One day I watched while some firemen pushed one of their broken down firefighting vehicles back into the firehouse. It seemed kind of symbolic.

But the people walking in the streets. They aren't broken.

They smile and laugh. They are clean and well groomed. They dress nicely. They seem to have a sense of pride.

To me they looked like you or I would look like if our city was broken. We'd do our best. And that's what they're doing.

I found a bank and changed some money. I had to decide how much to change. For some reason, hotels here prefer to be paid in US dollars, while every other business wants Kyats.

To make things more complicated, some travelers were telling me it is tougher to change money outside the capitol. It's kind of now or never.

So after having $250 worth of my brand new US dollars rejected by the bank tellers for not being flawless enough, I left there with a plastic sack of K225,000 in small bills, rubber banded together. I felt like a drug lord.

I'll just have to hope I have the right mix of local and US currency.

Later that day, a Buddhist monk stopped me in the street and asked if he could talk to me for a little while. I know that in the past, it was dangerous for locals to talk publicly with visitors. They could easily be arrested for it. So even though I have heard it's not quite as bad these days, I was a little bit apprehensive about conducting an extensive conversation on a busy sidewalk. So we went and sat down for some tea in a room above a restaurant.

He seemed to know English fairly well, but his pronunciation was so terrible that I had a really hard time following what he was saying. I knew that monks were among the leaders of political change in Myanmar and have been persecuted endlessly for it by the government. He wanted to teach me about the Arakan people from the Rakhine State where he is from. They are one of the many ethnic minorities that complain of mistreatment by the Burmese majority.

He asked me to follow him to a certain area downtown with a concentration of Arakan people. I thought he wanted me to see their shops so maybe I'd purchase something from them. But I should have known better. Commerce and money are really the last things on the mind of any practicing monk. He refused every offer of anything I made to him.

He asked me to come upstairs above one of the stores to what turned out to be a sweatshop full of Arakan men making fine jewelry using crude tools and foot operated blast torches. I got the picture. He wanted me to understand that while the Burmese folks were operating the jewelry shops below, his friends were kept in hot, crowded conditions producing their merchandise.

It was a great experience talking with him. His goal was to bring some awareness to me and to practice English at the same time - and it worked.

I left his name out of this post for his sake.

A few words on the name of the country.

During the weeks leading up to this trip, I had been telling people that I was going to "Burma."

I said Burma for two reasons. First, because from what little history I knew, the current government had renamed the country Myanmar after having taken control back from Great Britain. I thought the citizens might still refer to their own country as Burma in defiance of their government. The US State Department still does. Second, more people know the name Burma. When you say Myanmar, people sort of squint and say "Where?"

But as it turns out, everyone in Myanmar says "Myanmar". So now I do too. From what I'm told, it's only folks outside the country that sometimes still use the fifty year old name.

After a day of walking around the hot, congested city, my throat is feeling kind of scratchy. At first I thought I was catching a cold, but now I think it's the smokey air.

I go to a travel agent with a nice clean air conditioned office. Seven identically dressed young employees who don't seem to have much to do, all look at me as I walk in. "I'd like to buy an overnight bus ticket to Inle Lake for tomorrow." Three of them help me simultaneously.

Hopefully this first class agency will put me in a nice comfortable bus.

I'll head out tomorrow.