Beautiful Burma

The contrast between India and Myanmar couldn’t be any more pronounced.  Where India is noisy and hectic, dusty and crowded, Myanmar is calm.  There is a distinct lack of air-horns on the trucks; people here seem to use their brakes and their mirrors whilst driving, and they have those funny flashing amber lights you get back in Europe to show when you’re changing direction, they don’t rely on the horn button for everything!  We convince the government / tour guides that the best way to deal with the mismatch of speed between their people carrier car, our bikes and the Italian’s 52yr old Fiat is to give us the GPS coordinates of the next hotel or sight to see and we’ll make our own way.  It’s the first time that Bosoe, our government appointed guide has allowed this with foreign vehicles but by day two of our tour he can see that the Fiat is never going to stay with us as we have to make 350km of mountain roads in one day.  In fact, the Fiat didn’t even make it to the hotel on day two.  After about 8 hours crawling up mountains at bicycle speeds the Italians put their obstinate feet down and refused to go any further, announcing to Soe and Bosoe that they were going to camp.  The Burmese guides nearly had kittens, camping was most certainly not allowed and after much urgent phoning they pulled into a cheap guest house about 100km from our intended rendezvous.  All of our hotels have to be government approved before Western tourists are allowed to stay there, I’m not sure who they are protecting from whom with this regulation, but it means that we’re being put in unnecessarily expensive resorts.  The idea of finding a nice quiet backwater village guesthouse is not going to happen for the next two weeks, unless you’re a stubborn Italian Fratelli in a tiny Italian car which decides to go no further; that was a joint decision of course, both the Italian Fratellis and their Italian car clearly decided to go no further, the car overheated and bust a front wheel bearing.
Our guides for the next couple of weeks are lovely guys.  Soe is getting married next month to a girl who epitomises why everyone falls for Burmese girls, she is stunningly attractive whilst Soe has the sort of figure that most female European models crave; 5’9”, a tiny waist and elegant features.  His English is almost flawless if a little too fast and accented so occasionally I have to guess what the noun is.  If you say this quickly in a South East Asian tone-language accent … “You ‘av avocado in England?” you might understand why my initial answer was “I have a whole car in England, not just the door”.  This caused some amusement, which is good, Soe has a fantastic sense of humour.  Bosoe was the government appointed overseer.  We’re not sure whether he was protecting us from the Burmese locals or them from us, but in reality he was just another nice guy to have along on our journey.  Bosoe is ex-military, he had to leave the army a couple of years ago when he lost his left arm at the elbow to a mine.  He is a little reticent to talk about his military background but it transpired later in our trip that he was pretty high-ranking and now holds a position of some authority within the military government.  He kept his composure in a very military manner, giving away little of what he was thinking, but he did let rip at the management of a new-build hotel who tried to put us in cramped rooms with no windows.  Being tired and suffering from a dubious bout of Burma belly I wasn’t that bothered about the room; it had air-con and a clean bathroom, but Aussie Brett played the grumpy card when we arrived, Bosoe agreed with him and jumped into military mode, and between them they got us all upgraded to executive rooms.  This proved to be a bad move for Brett.  In his nice big executive room he left his laptop synchronising files to his cloud overnight, and, as we all do, he left it on the coffee table by his bed, and, as is often the case the air-con unit is right above the coffee table.  You can guess where this is going … he woke up to find his top-flight Macbook buzzing and whirring like a dying droid from Starwars as it had spent the night being bathed in water by the air-con unit which had not been installed properly.   I don’t think that particular hotel is going to take international travellers again, after room-changing all of us it then had to find $2000 in cash to pay off Brett’s laptop.
I’m worried that the next couple of weeks of blog is going to sound like the schedule from a packaged, guided tour, because that’s pretty much what we were on!  Now in many respects this was no bad thing: we didn’t have to concern ourselves with booking hotels; we were taken to all the interesting things to see and do without having to trawl through a guide book; we had local guides who dealt with all the tickets, touts and translations; we had excursion boats booked in advance … you get the idea.  It was all a million miles away from the concept of solo long distance motorbike travel but in my mind it was a welcome change and I was happy to be shown around without the requirement to think too much, so here’s a few highlights.
Between Monywa and Bagan we stopped at a huge gold statue of Buddha which is 140m high (that’s higher than the London Eye) looking down from the top of a hill.  Nearby at the Sambuddhay Temple there are 582,373 different statues of Buddha to worship in one building!  Near Bagan we climbed up the Sularmani Pagoda at 6am to watch the sunrise over the surrounding 3000 smaller pagodas which have been there since the 11th – 13th Century.  The view was mystical as the sun slowly revealed thousands of little peaked temples shrouded in mist and trees.  Once you get over the vertigo of climbing up the side of an ancient conical / pyramid type building with ridiculously steep narrow steps which make you feel like you’re going to fall over backwards, you get to see some spiritually enlightening sights of ancient Burmese pagodas.  Our road to Mandalay was unfortunately mostly dual carriageway and nowhere near as romantic as Rudyard Kipling’s poem, but the girls’ smiles haven’t changed; they’re totally enchanting.  OCD Lawrence fell in love every time we stopped for petrol, water or lunch and he practically married the receptionists at the Rich Queen Mandalay hotel … It’s just dawned on me that maybe to the Burmese girls Lawrence was like a Rich Queen … how apt … he is quite Metro!  We watched a lunch ceremony at a monastery where over 1500 Buddhist monks live and study.  Every day their food is bought and prepared for them by volunteers; different volunteers each day I think, and for the Buddhists it’s a great honour to be able to provide for the monks.  We took a boat up the Ayeyarwady river to a huge ancient unfinished pagoda which some crazy king tried to build a few centuries ago but never finished, although the highlight of that was the sunset over the river, it gave us the opportunity for shooting some of those enigmatic photos of a big lazy amber sun spreading rich gold reflections on the water, making iconic silhouettes out of the small teak fishing boats.  Stunning.  We were shown a cave with over 8000 statues of Buddha; some were tiny cute little things and some were over 4m high and just as fat, and all of them were covered in gold leaf which the pilgrims and tourists are encouraged to buy and stick on which ever Buddha takes their fancy.  We were shown the traditional method of making umbrellas from bamboo and hand-pulped paper where the craftsmanship of the guys working sticks of bamboo into umbrella mechanisms is remarkable. 
At Inle lake the Fratelli’s and I got up at stupid-o’clock (5am) to photograph the fishermen who control the oar of their boat with their legs and perform the most impressive acts of balance and yoga with huge fishing baskets whilst perched on one leg at the end of a very narrow teak boat.  Although Soe admitted that the guys who we photographed no longer bother with fishing, they make more money doing yoga for the benefit of us tourists.  Inle lake has whole villages and gardens built on stilts or floating in the middle of the lake with indigenous people who practice some quite unusual cultures and traditions.  One group encourages their women to wrap tight brass hoops around their neck.  This elongates the neck, stretching the head away from the shoulders which looks very strange from our perspective, but this seemed the norm for them; not just with the older generations, girls in their teens and twenties were doing it too, they gradually build up the amount of hoops until adults have 21 thick brass hoops permanently wrapped around their neck. 
It’s still quite remarkable how human beings figure out how to make things work even in quite unusual environments.  The Burmese boat people on Inle lake have built huge floating gardens where they grow tomatoes and vegetables in soil beds which float on bamboo and weeds.  There are whole towns with electricity supplies and sanitation systems balanced seemingly precariously on small bamboo platforms which make Venice look positively grounded.  Having spent the previous day bound to a bathroom with Burma belly I missed the scheduled tour of the lake with the rest of the European petrol-head party so I commandeered Soe as a private guide the following day and had a fantastic time exploring the tiny waterways through floating gardens, villages, silk weaving craft shops and jewellery makers.  All drifting around the lake on bamboo and teak structures; this simple life has some appealing features and riding around on long, thin teak boats definitely beats commuting into London.  I could get used to this lifestyle.