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.