That would be on the road to Mandalay, according to the old song. Well, I'm here and I certainly haven't seen any fish flying at all, and as for fish playing, the only fish I have seen were in the fish market just down the road from my hotel, and they were playing dead. I flew up to Mandalay, got picked up at the airport by my guide, the sweetest little thing you've ever seen, her name is Nin. I'd guess about 25, five foot two, with a lovely smile and glasses like the bottom of coke bottles. And my driver. I didn't catch his name, he doesn't speak a word of English, but he keeps opening the car door for me, so he's ok too. We drove straight up to the hills behind Mandalay, a trip of about two hours, to the town of Pyin Oo Lwin. Yes, that's what its called. An old British Hill Station, like Simla in India. A place for the ruling elite to escape the scorching heat of the plains during the height of summer. I always found that concept amusing. If they wanted cool, they could have stayed in England.
However, they didn't. So they tried to reproduce it out here in the colonies. British trees, British churches, British architecture, British street layouts, British pastimes, you get the idea. So after a tour of the town to look at all the attractions, ie the old British stuff, I got dropped off at my hotel. It was about sundown, so I headed out for a walk, trying to find the nearest restaurant on a list given to me by Nin. It was called Feel. No jokes please. It was a bit of a hike, but I found it, and it was on the edge of a lake, quite scenic etc, just me, a few locals, and 50 million mosquitoes. Lucky I brought the Bushman. Not being familiar with Burmese cuisine, I opted for Thai, (mind you, cooked by a Burmese chef). It started out pretty bland, but about half way through, the heat began to build up something shocking, and soon I had tears running down my face uncontrollably, I was coughing and my nose was running like a tap. This is not a pretty picture, I know, but holey moley it was seriously bloody hot. And take note, the chillies were green !! So, a bowl of lava and two beers, all for $8, which included a tip. A small price to pay for malaria.
First thing next morning, we were off again. This time for a quick look around the town market, then to the botanical gardens. And I have to say, I was pretty impressed. Huge site, manicured landscape, and a whole lot of interesting foliage, local animals and birds, a museum of butterflies, and another full of fossilised (petrified) wood. Great stuff. Then we headed back down the mountains, into Mandalay proper. Not before grabbing a real bargain. A 700 ml bottle of Lynchburg's finest for a mere 25,500 kyat. It might sound pricey, but that's $17US folks. Do they sell Jack Daniels to Myanmar any cheaper than they sell it to Australia? No they damn well don't, so we are getting royally screwed. But I digress.
No rest for this tourist, it was straight into a visit to a few workshops, specifically wood carving, tapestry and then gold leaf production. All these were real artisans at work. God knows how hard it is to make a living doing this stuff, but it was impressive. Especially the gold leaf making. It is possible to take a piece of gold about the size of a postage stamp, and by various arduous and very physical processes, beat the sucker into a thin layer about the same area as a tennis court, but only about an atom or two thick. Freaking amazing. At lunchtime, Nin took me to a very busy restaurant for a table full of the real thing, Burmese food at last. There was plenty of it, but I have to say, I found it surprisingly bland. At best it could be described as of subtle taste. Hmmm. Maybe I'm just ordering the wrong stuff.
By about this stage, I was ready to go home for a cup of tea and a good lie down, but no! Nin dragged me up to the top of Mount Something to look over Mandalay. Yes, impressive. Then to the last King's temple, then to some other thing, every time it was off with the shoes and socks, feet turning black, clean up, back in the car....more shit...all the while Nin is giving me the ins and outs of a duck's arse about this and that and some other freaking thing. Having your very own guide has its ups and downs, I'm finding. I probably need to be a bit more selective about what I really want to look at, because today I was stuffed by mid afternoon, and in no mood to appreciate some very worthwhile sites. And my camera battery died at the wrong moment as well.
At last, the hotel! Right, up to the room, air conditioner on, one single solitary can of beer in the fridge. I think I inhaled it, then crashed out on the bed. Woke up about two hours later. I'm in the Ayarwaddy River View Hotel, which is interesting, because I always thought it was the Irrawaddy River, but no, here its called the Ayarwaddy. And its a biggie.
Anyway, when I awoke in this strange hotel room, I needed some sustenance, so decided to go for a walk. This might be a good hotel, with a great view, but let me tell you it is in a shit location. I headed down some very dark and dusty side streets, looking for a mini mart or similar. Nothing doing. This was hovel town, nothing but stray dogs and people staring at me. And traffic trying to put me in hospital. Most of the scooters here don't even have working headlights, its seriously scary. Finally, I found a small shop, which sold very small cans of Coke, and very small packets of potato chips. I filled up a pillow case with Coke and chips,for about $5, made the lady smile like she had struck it rich, and headed back to the hotel for dinner! Well, I did have a big lunch. Anyway, the thought occurred to me that the standard of living around here is pretty basic, and that life here is tough. Much more so than even Cambodia. I think a reasonable parallel might be like Vietnam in the sixties, before the war really got going. Not that I was ever there to draw this inference, but I've seen plenty of docos on TV. Myanmar is a country that time has forgotten, but I think it is about to start catching up.
I'm going to fly off at a bit of a tangent here. This is the shower in my hotel room in Pyin Oo Lwin.
I mean, it looks groovy, with the pebble finish, and does give a bit of a foot massage at the same time. Good concept, but the execution is lacking. My first thought was how do they clean it? Then it became obvious that, well, they don't really. Plus, it drains into a channel around the perimeter, and some water puddles in the channel, where it proceeds to brew. Tinea, anyone? Footrot? Leprosy?
But worse still, I found this in my hotel room in Mandalay. Its a surge arrester for the aircon unit, and its mounted right there on the wall. Now, I'm not an electrical engineer (thank God), but that looks awfully like live terminals to me. I'm not going to touch them to find out, Myanmar runs on 240 Volt supply. Good thing the air conditioner is protected though!
But I guess this is what happens when you're trying to catch up in a hurry. Nobody cares about minor details. Like electrocuting paying customers.
Now that the building inspection is finished, I had a good day today. We headed out to Ava first, one of the old Royal Capitals, for some 400 years, mind. On the drive to get there, we followed the Irrawaddy, sorry the Ayawaddy, and it became evident that a lot of people live along the riverbank. In tatty looking shanties. And almost all of them appear to be dirt poor. Its not really a good look, yet everybody appeared to be busily engaged in doing something, making, fixing, buying, selling, loading, unloading. People seem to make the best of their situation, and just seem to hustle and get on with it. I noticed a lot of people just haul sand and rocks out of the river, then pile it up along the roadway and sell it. Amazing! Everything is covered in a layer of dust. Unhealthy and not attractive, but I suppose the monsoon washes everything clean eventually.
Anyhow, back to Ava, The go is to get a horse drawn cart and check out the many pagodas and temples and ancient ruins. I had decided long ago that I wasn't going to play. I had seen photos of the poor emaciated animals that pull these shitbox carts with no suspension, and recall a similar painful outing in an oxcart in Cambodia. My back is damaged enough! So I had opted for a bicycle, and it was terrific. We started early and beat the crowds. The downside was that there is an army of souvenir sellers here that are basically feral and won't take no for an answer, and they had me to themselves. Third world countries rapidly get the hang of how to sell junk to tourists. But it was idyllic, a beautiful day cycling through rice paddies and banana plantations, all studded with ancient pagodas. It was quite surreal, until the hordes of other tourists arrived and the roads became clogged with horse carts and horse shit, and then it was time to go. We had lunch in an attractive looking open air restaurant, a bit like a beer garden, with all the trimmings. Something was not quite right. Oh yes, there was no floor, just the dirt. But the food was good.
I did notice that the tourists I saw today were exclusively European. Myanmar is a big hit with French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish, according to Nin. No Americans, no Aussies that I noticed. I made the mistake of trying to get rid of one souvenir vendor who was stuck to me like a limpet mine. I dismissed him in Spanish, and it backfired. He came back at me in better Spanish than I could speak. All credit to him!! They do what they have to do.
This, by the way, is Nin, my guide for the next few days until I get to Bagan. She lives in Mandalay and loves her job, and is very good at it. She is very knowledgeable about culture and history, and speaks good English, albeit with that distinctly Asian pronunciation that omits the odd syllable at random. (But what do I sound like speaking Burmese, if the three words that I now know qualifies as speaking Burmese!!) She had to change into trousers for the bike riding bit though. Like the vast majority of locals, she normally dresses in a "longyi", the sarong like garment from waist to ankles worn by both men and women in Myanmar.
Check this out. At one pagoda, there was a wedding shoot going on. Couples who are getting married get all the photography over and done with well before the wedding. This can involve a lot of travel to scenic locations or specific important sites all over the country. This couple were using a professional photographer who had about four other guys working for him. It was like a movie set. When they produced a drone to get some overhead shots, I couldn't resist this shot, albeit a bit amateur and nowhere as good as I was hoping for. I guess I don't need to explain it, but its the juxtaposition of the ancient Buddah statue and the hi tech drone that fired my imagination.
However, they didn't. So they tried to reproduce it out here in the colonies. British trees, British churches, British architecture, British street layouts, British pastimes, you get the idea. So after a tour of the town to look at all the attractions, ie the old British stuff, I got dropped off at my hotel. It was about sundown, so I headed out for a walk, trying to find the nearest restaurant on a list given to me by Nin. It was called Feel. No jokes please. It was a bit of a hike, but I found it, and it was on the edge of a lake, quite scenic etc, just me, a few locals, and 50 million mosquitoes. Lucky I brought the Bushman. Not being familiar with Burmese cuisine, I opted for Thai, (mind you, cooked by a Burmese chef). It started out pretty bland, but about half way through, the heat began to build up something shocking, and soon I had tears running down my face uncontrollably, I was coughing and my nose was running like a tap. This is not a pretty picture, I know, but holey moley it was seriously bloody hot. And take note, the chillies were green !! So, a bowl of lava and two beers, all for $8, which included a tip. A small price to pay for malaria.
First thing next morning, we were off again. This time for a quick look around the town market, then to the botanical gardens. And I have to say, I was pretty impressed. Huge site, manicured landscape, and a whole lot of interesting foliage, local animals and birds, a museum of butterflies, and another full of fossilised (petrified) wood. Great stuff. Then we headed back down the mountains, into Mandalay proper. Not before grabbing a real bargain. A 700 ml bottle of Lynchburg's finest for a mere 25,500 kyat. It might sound pricey, but that's $17US folks. Do they sell Jack Daniels to Myanmar any cheaper than they sell it to Australia? No they damn well don't, so we are getting royally screwed. But I digress.
No rest for this tourist, it was straight into a visit to a few workshops, specifically wood carving, tapestry and then gold leaf production. All these were real artisans at work. God knows how hard it is to make a living doing this stuff, but it was impressive. Especially the gold leaf making. It is possible to take a piece of gold about the size of a postage stamp, and by various arduous and very physical processes, beat the sucker into a thin layer about the same area as a tennis court, but only about an atom or two thick. Freaking amazing. At lunchtime, Nin took me to a very busy restaurant for a table full of the real thing, Burmese food at last. There was plenty of it, but I have to say, I found it surprisingly bland. At best it could be described as of subtle taste. Hmmm. Maybe I'm just ordering the wrong stuff.
By about this stage, I was ready to go home for a cup of tea and a good lie down, but no! Nin dragged me up to the top of Mount Something to look over Mandalay. Yes, impressive. Then to the last King's temple, then to some other thing, every time it was off with the shoes and socks, feet turning black, clean up, back in the car....more shit...all the while Nin is giving me the ins and outs of a duck's arse about this and that and some other freaking thing. Having your very own guide has its ups and downs, I'm finding. I probably need to be a bit more selective about what I really want to look at, because today I was stuffed by mid afternoon, and in no mood to appreciate some very worthwhile sites. And my camera battery died at the wrong moment as well.
At last, the hotel! Right, up to the room, air conditioner on, one single solitary can of beer in the fridge. I think I inhaled it, then crashed out on the bed. Woke up about two hours later. I'm in the Ayarwaddy River View Hotel, which is interesting, because I always thought it was the Irrawaddy River, but no, here its called the Ayarwaddy. And its a biggie.
Anyway, when I awoke in this strange hotel room, I needed some sustenance, so decided to go for a walk. This might be a good hotel, with a great view, but let me tell you it is in a shit location. I headed down some very dark and dusty side streets, looking for a mini mart or similar. Nothing doing. This was hovel town, nothing but stray dogs and people staring at me. And traffic trying to put me in hospital. Most of the scooters here don't even have working headlights, its seriously scary. Finally, I found a small shop, which sold very small cans of Coke, and very small packets of potato chips. I filled up a pillow case with Coke and chips,for about $5, made the lady smile like she had struck it rich, and headed back to the hotel for dinner! Well, I did have a big lunch. Anyway, the thought occurred to me that the standard of living around here is pretty basic, and that life here is tough. Much more so than even Cambodia. I think a reasonable parallel might be like Vietnam in the sixties, before the war really got going. Not that I was ever there to draw this inference, but I've seen plenty of docos on TV. Myanmar is a country that time has forgotten, but I think it is about to start catching up.
I'm going to fly off at a bit of a tangent here. This is the shower in my hotel room in Pyin Oo Lwin.
I mean, it looks groovy, with the pebble finish, and does give a bit of a foot massage at the same time. Good concept, but the execution is lacking. My first thought was how do they clean it? Then it became obvious that, well, they don't really. Plus, it drains into a channel around the perimeter, and some water puddles in the channel, where it proceeds to brew. Tinea, anyone? Footrot? Leprosy?
But worse still, I found this in my hotel room in Mandalay. Its a surge arrester for the aircon unit, and its mounted right there on the wall. Now, I'm not an electrical engineer (thank God), but that looks awfully like live terminals to me. I'm not going to touch them to find out, Myanmar runs on 240 Volt supply. Good thing the air conditioner is protected though!
But I guess this is what happens when you're trying to catch up in a hurry. Nobody cares about minor details. Like electrocuting paying customers.
Now that the building inspection is finished, I had a good day today. We headed out to Ava first, one of the old Royal Capitals, for some 400 years, mind. On the drive to get there, we followed the Irrawaddy, sorry the Ayawaddy, and it became evident that a lot of people live along the riverbank. In tatty looking shanties. And almost all of them appear to be dirt poor. Its not really a good look, yet everybody appeared to be busily engaged in doing something, making, fixing, buying, selling, loading, unloading. People seem to make the best of their situation, and just seem to hustle and get on with it. I noticed a lot of people just haul sand and rocks out of the river, then pile it up along the roadway and sell it. Amazing! Everything is covered in a layer of dust. Unhealthy and not attractive, but I suppose the monsoon washes everything clean eventually.
Anyhow, back to Ava, The go is to get a horse drawn cart and check out the many pagodas and temples and ancient ruins. I had decided long ago that I wasn't going to play. I had seen photos of the poor emaciated animals that pull these shitbox carts with no suspension, and recall a similar painful outing in an oxcart in Cambodia. My back is damaged enough! So I had opted for a bicycle, and it was terrific. We started early and beat the crowds. The downside was that there is an army of souvenir sellers here that are basically feral and won't take no for an answer, and they had me to themselves. Third world countries rapidly get the hang of how to sell junk to tourists. But it was idyllic, a beautiful day cycling through rice paddies and banana plantations, all studded with ancient pagodas. It was quite surreal, until the hordes of other tourists arrived and the roads became clogged with horse carts and horse shit, and then it was time to go. We had lunch in an attractive looking open air restaurant, a bit like a beer garden, with all the trimmings. Something was not quite right. Oh yes, there was no floor, just the dirt. But the food was good.
I did notice that the tourists I saw today were exclusively European. Myanmar is a big hit with French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish, according to Nin. No Americans, no Aussies that I noticed. I made the mistake of trying to get rid of one souvenir vendor who was stuck to me like a limpet mine. I dismissed him in Spanish, and it backfired. He came back at me in better Spanish than I could speak. All credit to him!! They do what they have to do.
This, by the way, is Nin, my guide for the next few days until I get to Bagan. She lives in Mandalay and loves her job, and is very good at it. She is very knowledgeable about culture and history, and speaks good English, albeit with that distinctly Asian pronunciation that omits the odd syllable at random. (But what do I sound like speaking Burmese, if the three words that I now know qualifies as speaking Burmese!!) She had to change into trousers for the bike riding bit though. Like the vast majority of locals, she normally dresses in a "longyi", the sarong like garment from waist to ankles worn by both men and women in Myanmar.
Check this out. At one pagoda, there was a wedding shoot going on. Couples who are getting married get all the photography over and done with well before the wedding. This can involve a lot of travel to scenic locations or specific important sites all over the country. This couple were using a professional photographer who had about four other guys working for him. It was like a movie set. When they produced a drone to get some overhead shots, I couldn't resist this shot, albeit a bit amateur and nowhere as good as I was hoping for. I guess I don't need to explain it, but its the juxtaposition of the ancient Buddah statue and the hi tech drone that fired my imagination.
No comments:
Post a Comment