Mayanmar Part 2

We began our trip to Kalaw with front row seats on a bus driven by a man who had, to put it bluntly, the most horrible voice we have ever heard.  It was a loud, deep, sandpapery, crackle that became even less intelligible when, halfway though the bus ride, he starting eating huge quantities of betel that took up half the open space in his mouth.  He had us alternately grimacing and cracking up the entire 7 hour ride. (It should be noted that, whatever his voice sounded like to us, he was a HUGE HIT with the rest of the bus crew. They seemed to be hurting they were laughing so much at what he was saying. For 7 hours.)

Kalaw is yet another place we wish we could have stayed longer.  Set high in the mountains, it felt like a quiet Alpine village, part Colorado, part Colombia, part Nepal (though this last comparison might have been due to the tons o' Nepalese food we ate due to the tons o' Nepalese immigrants who came in with the British).  It was a welcome break from the (literal) desert of Bagan.

Through sheer chance, we booked ourselves a room at the most charming hotel ever, about 5 minutes outside of the city.  We stepped out of our taxi to three women running towards us at full speed to take our bags.  The service stayed this attentive for the entirety of our one night stay.  All we had to do at breakfast the next morning was glance up from our eggs, toast, fruit, cake, crepes and coffee and there were, again, at least three people running towards us to discover what we needed.

One of the best parts about the hotel was its proximity to a pagoda that, in addition to being over the top gaudi, also boasted a cave with 800+ Buddhas.  Obviously we didn't know any of this when we set out, the hotel just suggested we visit and we blindly wandered over.  It was an incredible surprise.  The Buddhas were never ending, and we left after over an hour with parts still unexplored (the sun was setting, the caves were damp and our feet were going numb...also Jess found a drowned rat in a puddle so that was that.).

After the cave we headed into town to book ourselves a trek that would take us the 77 kilometers from Kalaw to Inle Lake.  We were ambivalent about the trek.  It sounded pretty touristed out and it's hard to know how many people will be in your group and who your guide will be.  There isn't a ton of oversight, and we had read stories of guides not speaking the entire three day trip, setting you up in resentful home-stays, and providing awful food.  Thankfully, we got a recommendation for a good guide from a couple staying at the hotel and were able to book some of the last spots on a tour leaving the next morning.  We showed up at nine to be sorted, and our group ended up being fantastic!  We're still in awe over how lucky we got (especially because the original group we were placed in consisted mostly of a rowdy group of boys on a gap year who already seemed drunk and only got drunker).  There were nine of us in total, the three of us, another group of three traveling together, two of whom were living in Beijing (a reporter for Reuters and a researcher), a couple from San Francisco, and a girl who was teaching in Korea. Everyone was curious, well traveled, friendly and super dorky - a wonderful combination.  Our guide was (and we mean this in the least patronizing way possible) adorable.

She was also 17 and had been leading tours since she was 11 (again there is very little oversight.)  In addition to knowing the way well enough to steer us clear of other tour groups, she was also eager to chat about school (lots of high stakes tests and memorization), boys (Jess and I were treated to a text message SAGA between her and a German boy...still a better love story than Twilight), and growing up in Myanmar - (mom doesn't let her do anything, dad died from eating bad meat, she had to go into hiding last year when Buddhists began murdering Muslims in her town, you know, the usual growing pains).

 

The homestays were interesting.  Aside form a quick hello, we never met the people we stayed with (probably more accurate to say displaced) for the night.  I had imagined that we would learn about the villages we hiked through, and was disappointed on this front. One of our group members described the experience well by calling it a sort of "poverty tourism," or voyeurism.  The experience was a good one, but also felt a little unsettling as there were so few interactions--and the ones we had we very very brief.  We didn't learn much about what we were seeing and the only thing we left behind was money.   We (as tourists) are so common place - a source of income and candy (if you're a child) and they (the inhabitants) remained an unexplained novelty to us.

 

I had a professor once define development as the ability to control your natural environment.  To me that always made sense to me as the degree of sterility within a country - not necessarily it's cleanliness but rather its vitality or lack thereof.  Can the country impose order on the life in and around it, or does it seethe and teem?

Myanmar is not a sterile place.  Life begets life and its growth (at least with regards to tourism) outstrips the order even a stable government could impose.  The changes that are taking place are so palpable that throughout the whole trip we wondered "for how long will it be this way?"  We loved being there, but that enjoyment was a little tinged with guilt.  We were part of a wave of backpackers and fancy tour groups crashing against a very heterogeneous (and contentious) wall of traditions.  Open borders, like all things, are probably a mixed blessing.  Traditions with commercial value are more likely to be preserved and change, regardless of how much it is resisted, is inevitable.  That being said, we saw so much industry devoted to foreigners.  In a country struggling to develop itself and unify, tourism seems like an unceasing diversion rather than a sustainable source of industry.

As a result of the more discomforting aspects of the trek, we tended to focus more on the nature, which was abundant and phenomenal.  

 

The last day of our hike ended with an hour long boat ride across the largest lake in Myanmar, Inle Lake, which is 22km long.  Our boat took us directly to the pier of the luxury hotel that Matt and I had splurged on for our last two days of vacation.  More or less as soon as we put our bags down, we proceeded to be so sick that we left the hotel grounds for about 2 hours total the entire time we were there (anytime we were more than 5 minutes away from a bathroom there was serious danger of pants pooping). 

Two days of hotel party later, we took the overnight bus back to Yangon to catch our flight home. Having ridden on a fair share of bat shit insane buses, we feel confident in saying this was the worst. Literally five minutes in we started wanting to vomit, and the car sickness didn't abate for at least 4 hours.  Luckily they had T.V.s so we turned on movies (to block out the sound of everyone else booting), closed our eyes (to block out the sight of everyone else booting), and buckled down.  Thankfully we hadn't eaten in two days so we were set.  We learned two things on that bus ride:  Wall-e is a terrible movie without visuals, while Independence Day, on the other hand, is awesome.   

We arrived at the airport the next morning about six hours early for check in, somehow passed the time, and arrived in Vietnam about 5 pounds lighter and happy to be home.

Myanmar Part 1

 We welcomed in the Lunar New Year (Tet) with my good friend and freshman year roommate Jessica...in Myanmar.  And let's get this out of the way first: we got sick in Myanmar.  Really really sick.  Sick enough that we googled symptoms for cholera and dysentery because they seemed like reasonable searches.  And, we were sick multiple times.  These were the low points of the trip.  But the trip, which was a brief 12 days (with only 3 given up to our lady of gastric maladies), was full of wonderful high points too.  Too short to get but a tiny taste of the country, we made the circuit almost everyone does - Yangon to Bagan, to Kalaw, to Inle Lake.


Landing in Yangon we were immediately struck by the silence of the airport (which also smelled of cigarettes and had carpet that couldn't have been changed since the 70s) and the flatness of everything.   The colors were matted - arriving at noon in the beginning of the dry season bleaches out tones.  The buildings were low and the terrain itself was without hills.   That changed as we made our way into the city and life, with all its noise and pigment, crept back into the picture.

There are a lot of things we would change if we were doing this trip over again (going to Myanmar?  we have lots of suggestions!) and staying longer an Yangon is high on that list. Yangon seemed like a fascinating city, one we could have easily spent a week in.  The colonial architecture is crumbling, but provided endless entertainment as we strolled down random streets.

While the streets were our favorite part, we also stopped by the Shwedagon Pagoda, an incredible gold-plated reliquary containing goodies from the four Buddhas that have attained enlightenment:  4 hairs of the OB (original Buddha), a staff, a water filter, and piece(s) of robe.  We're still a bit confused on the particulars.  It's a pretty insane place -  huge, shimmering, and crawling with people who wanted to take our picture.

 

We hired a guide in an effort to get even a little background information on what we were seeing, and we realized two things very quickly - one, we were not going to be able to understand a word he said, and two we were very, very hungry.  We made it 15 minutes into our hour tour before we told him - thinking this would effectively end the tour - that we hadn't eaten.  He, with kindness that still blows my mind, immediately declared that we needed food and offered to take us to a nearby lunch place, saying we could resume the tour after.

It should be noted at this point that you can not wear shoes or socks in temples or pagodas.  We spent most of our time barefoot, which lead to some relatively sketchy situations like barefoot cave explorations, and, less exciting, barefoot bathroom explorations. Obviously we didn't think this would pose a problem when we agreed to lunch.  It did.  He led us out the back of the temple - original shoe lockers nowhere in sight - and into the busy(ish) streets of Yangon - our bare feet burning on the asphalt.  We dodged glass and other debris all the way to his favorite spot, only to realize upon getting there that there was no way we could eat this food.  It was a buffet dishing up meat and fish that had clearly been sitting out for a while.  Ordinarily, this would have been our jam, but we had been warned about how easy it was to get sick in Myanmar, and we didn't want to take our chances.  We tried to explain as nicely as possible that we were afraid his lunch spot would likely poison us, so maybe there was some other place?  Luckily he didn't take offense and he led us back through the temple to collect our shoes, so that he could take us to another lunch spot that offered soups.  By the time we sat down for lunch (which he had already eaten!) we had been with him for well over an hour, but he happily chatted with us we stuffed our faces.  We never did finish our tour. By the time we finished lunch, we needed to head back to our hotel to make our way to our next destination. But our time with him was definitely time well spent.  His over the top kindness and willingness to help was emblematic of almost all the people we encountered in Yangon.

 

From Yangon we took a surprisingly easy overnight bus to Bagan, home to over 2000 temples, pagodas, and stupas (though for simplicity's sake - and because who needs cultural sensitivity/accuracy? - we'll just call them all temples).

Bagan is a former capita which was at it's height between the 9th and 13th century, when most of the temples were built.  Kings, or other people of means, constructed them as a way of ensuring good karma and a better reincarnation in their next life.  As a result  (so we heard) temples often represented hopes and desires for their future selves - e.g. gold for a life full of riches - and more recently, white plaster for a life as part of a more privileged race.  In addition to reflecting future hopes, the temples have also enshrined the mixing of cultures that could be found in Myanmar at the time. There are strong Indian, Chinese and even Egyptian elements of architecture, art and design.  The style of the Buddhas themselves change depending on the temple.

We tooled around the temples in a combo of electric bikes, normal bikes, and feet.

Many of the temples were destroyed in a major Earthquake in the 1975 (we were told 2500 were destroyed).  They've been rebuilt without much attention paid to historical methods or preservation.  As a result it's not currently a UNESCO World Heritage site.  As Myanmar gets more accustomed to tourism and once it gets the world heritage designation, I imagine restrictions will become more and more....well, restrictive.  But right now, there's not an opening or closing time to most temples, and you can climb on plenty of them.  As a result, our favorite parts of the day were sunrise and sunset, which was spent on top of temples and away from (most of) the crowds - though crowds were never were that bad.

 

In Bagan we did one of the more indulgent things of our lives- dropped a stupid amount of money for a hot air balloon ride over the temples at dawn!

For a while we were not sure if it was going to happen.  Work (and our inability to do anything with forethought) kept us from making reservations until the night before our trip.  We didn't want to book through the balloon company as their tickets generally added about 80 bucks per person.  So Friday found us frantically and indiscriminately e-mailing travel agencies.  

One e-mailed us back - Young Tycoons Tourism - offering a great deal on tickets...and telling us that they would meet us at the airport to pay in cash so they could go buy them.  (Actually this is what was said: "Thank you indeed for your kind cooperstion.  And how tall you are! and you seem look like someone i hav seen. And that's great and we try to negotiate with the Oriental and we do hope that they are flexible and let us have a chance. One of our colleague will be welcoming you at airport with a banner in your name but if the Oriental give a favor. Let's try to think of positively and we do believe that we willwin this situation." We considered paraphrasing this e-mail but just can't figure out how to cut it down.  It's too good.)

Sure enough, when we arrived at Yangon, someone was waiting, and in broken English demanded our $900 in cash so that they could make the reservations.  He was not able to communicate when we would get the tickets, who would bring the tickets to us, or why we had to give all the money right then.  But we really wanted to go on the hot air balloon, and competitive to a fault, we really really did want to win the situation.  

So we trusted him, forked over almost a grand to a stranger (we did get a receipt) and then refused to acknowledge that we might have just made a huge mistake.

Thankfully, we did not.  We were greeted at our hotel by the manager of the tour company - who didn't have tickets yet - he had just dropped by "to release our worry" and explain why they needed the cash.  Turns out because our flight was delayed, they had to put their own money down on the tickets (yep... they put down 900 bucks to save us spots on the off chance we would show up at the airport, still need tickets for the balloon, and would agree to give them our money) and they were racing to put down the rest before the agency closed for the day.  Later that night, we had tickets delivered to our room, and three days later, we were in the basket of a balloon getting ready to launch.

The ride was too quick and too difficult to fully describe.  So we'll just say this: hot air balloons are awesome.  The views were wonderful, it was incredibly smooth and peaceful and they give you champagne afterwards (and orange juice  - which I'm 100% positive was  just tang with pulp put in it.).   While I'm not sure we would do it again, mostly because we'd be broke, the whole experience - from the e-mails to the final toast - were absolutely worth it.

Our time in Bagan, like the balloon ride itself was over way too fast and before we knew it, we were once again on a bus to Kalaw for some trekking.