Payas everywhere, a highway with no one on it, 'U", and "the Lady" [Myanmar]

2019

We got back last weekend from 11 days in Myanmar (country #95!), after a couple of wks in Malaysia, and are both still suffering from considerable jet lag. I didn't send out a trip email after our trip to Sardinia last fall as there was nothing very special to say (beautiful large Mediterranean island, excellent food..., our 2d in the world's oldest republic, tiny cliff-top, tri-towered San Marino, was more exotic), however the country formerly known as Burma is far too interesting not to write something.

Almost all international flights enter via former capital Yangon- the name was changed from Rangoon (in 1927 it beat out NYC as the world's top immigrant city, and was 2/3rds Indian-now by design a small minority) along with the change from Burma by the then-xenophobic military dictatorship in 1989 as part of their attempt to erase any trace of British Colonialism. Yangon, like the rest of the country, is a lot more modern than we expected, and, although the pace has clearly accelerated since doing a political U-turn from military dictatorship to democracy and opening up to international tourism in 2012 [1M that yr, now over 6M/yr], as far as we could tell, most is not that new. At least where most people live and tourists visit, It is really much more of a typical, albeit lagging, Asian country, full of cars, traffic jams, and pollution, then a lost-in-time isolated paradise. Despite the traffic jam on the way in from the airport, somehow Yangon nevertheless seemed peaceful... then we figured it out- no motorcycles!! They were banned in 2003:

https://www.mmtimes.com/special-features/162-wheels-2013/5788-ban-on-motorbikes-lingers.html

Altho controversial and possibly unfair to the poor, we are in favour of it- it made a noticeable difference to the air quality- too bad heavy polluted, noisy, dusty Mandalay doesn't have one. What is new are the tons of internationally connected ATMs everywhere (including in the payas [a Burmese term similar to pagoda] themselves), gone are the days when a thick wad of immaculate US notes were needed to travel the country- altho a bit of, easily-overcome, resistance was put up by the waiter at our Mandalay rooftop river-side hotel restaurant the only time I tried to use one with a (moderate) fold in it (we wanted to get rid of our excess US cash on hand).

Our room had a fabulous view of golden Shwedagon paya, sticking out among the trees behind our large pool, where 8 of the Buddha's hairs are supposedly located according to the nation's founding story. A short ferry-hop across the Irrawaddy river from Yangon's colourfully-dilapidated busy colonial building- fronted streets is another world- motorbikes, bamboo shacks and naked babies on the plastic trash and standing-water carpet, poverty-ridden rural suburb of Dalah (the equivalent can be found in most Asian countries if you know where to look), which we toured by a trishaw bike-driver who later tried to claim that our 80min tour had lasted over 3hrs...

We then took a businessman-filled small plane to the new 2005-settled pristine capital of Nay Pyi Taw (our other 2 short hop flights were tourist-filled: a mix of Chinese and western), it's empty airport, and 20-lane highway with no one on it (can you hear Bono ['U'2] singing? "treasure just to look upon it..."). Not by any means part of the classic Myanmar tourist trail, but an undeniable part of the country's reality today that we wanted to see (JC's childhood friend who works for ASEAN travels there frequently), the deserted infinity pool at our Hilton was heaven (followed closely by their bkfast buffet the next am- including the cold noodle and chicken nan gyi thoke salad: Burmese salads were the highlight of the good, but not excellent coming from Malaysia, food- including tea leaf and pennywort salads- all mixed with lots of peanuts, oil, and garlic).

Founding new royal capitals has a long traditional in Myanmar; our next stop, ancient-sounding Mandalay (3.5hrs down a quiet 6-lane hwy) was actually only founded as a city and capital in 1856. The older royal capitals including Ava (aka Inwa) and Amarapura (with its world-longest teakwood footbridge, the impressive 1.2km U-Bein Bridge) are a short cab ride away. Be careful making any U-turns on the 48 km/h limit right-side-drive roads in the right-sided steering-wheeled cars! Our driver (who had been in Israel in the 90s as a construction worker- historically the countries have had good relations and we saw one large Israeli tour group) brought along his 16yo daughter Sharon [named after 'shalom' and Ariel Sharon], on the Sunday to help compensate for his poor English. Hers is perfect and she is already in university studying psychology, hoping to further this in Singapore (She has already been there and to Japan briefly on scholarships, most of her family including her Mom are univ-grads, tho she clearly is at best the equivalent of upper-middle class). We happily invited her to join us on our emaciated horse-cart (by design by necessity, traffic jams full of them pulling tourists around the spread-out picturesque sights) tour of across-the-river Ava (where she hadn't been before), so that we could pick her brain about Myanmar today.

Everyone we spoke to likes Aung San Suu Kyi, "the Lady". Sharon actually responded by saying "I love her, she is like a mother to all of us". She is clearly the most powerful person in the country today, she made herself "state counselor", above the president, a post for which she is not eligible, given her marriage to a foreigner [British scholar Michael Aris who died of prostate Ca in 1999 after being refused entry to visit his wife pre-terminally]- too bad the US Constitution doesn't have the same rule! Her father, General Aung San, was assassinated by a rival in 1947 on the verge of leading his country to independence, after having been trained by the Japanese, switching sides just before the end of WW2 commenting "I went to Japan to save my people who were struggling like bullocks under the British, but now we are treated like dogs". Whether her militaristic roots are now showing in her attitude towards the Rohingya, or whether she stills needs to be careful not to offend the military (officially apparently only 8th in power, and we really didn't see any military presence at all, albeit only visiting mainstream Myanmar, surprising in a country less than a decade out from a 60-yr military dictatorship where international isolation of an initially self-isolating regime had led to their being no state structure other than the army itself) is hard to say.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/suu-kyi-honorary-canadian-citizenship-1.4847568

Schematically, Myanmar can be thought of as shaped like a large upside-down letter "U". Through a large central plain down the middle runs the great Irrawaddy river, connecting Mandalay in the north with Yangon in the south, after bowing slightly west to run through Bagan. The Bamar majority live here. The borders are all walled-off by very high mountains from the surrounding countries. Multiple ethnic groups, including the Karen, Kayah (women wear the brass neck rings), Wa, Shan, Kachin, and Chin (but not the notoriously dangerous Jiakchin), most still in various degrees of civil wars (including world's longest, since just after Brits left) or conflict live in these hills. Communist ideology, neighboring countries, religious differences (most of the hill tribes were converted in the 1800s from animism to Christianity, at least one apparently preferring it to Buddhism as they didn't want to give up hunting animals), and the opium and now synthetic drug trades have complicated matters. These areas are off-limits to travelers, and are controlled by the military. It is unclear how active these other conflicts are, however only the Rohingya Muslim problems bordering Bangladesh seems to get any media coverage. Without asking about these issues a tourist would see or hear nothing of them. Certainly to view or treat Myanmar only through the lens of its Rohingya and other border conflicts is to do a considerable disservice to the majority of its inhabitants.

Burma was administered as, and considered to be, a state of British India under the Raj. This is clearly wrong- the Burmese people, both in terms of ethnicity and religion, are much closer to South-East Asians than Indians. The British encouraged waves of Indian immigrants- mostly from adjacent Muslim-majority states, and gave them good clerical positions, leading to considerable resentment and later problems. It seems however that there was at least some presence of Muslims going back to the region's Arakan kingdom centuries earlier. Myanmar's government wants to deny citizenship and remove anyone related to British immigration. They therefore refuse to recognize the "Rohingya" as an actual people, referring to them as "Bengali" (the bordering area of India/Bangladesh). On the other hand, the actual term "Rohingya" has only come into widespread use over the last decade, possibly by design for creating a self-identity separate from surrounding Bengali Muslims and political gain (reminiscent of the Palestinians, who had little to differentiate themselves from surrounding Arabs prior to the creation of the State of Israel- altho 70yrs later they now clearly are a distinct people), the term is not mentioned at all in the 2006-published history I'm reading. There is clearly also a small non-Rohingya Muslim minority elsewhere in the country, and tensions do exist btw them and the Buddhists as well, with one driver telling us that no one can get along with the Muslims, and our Dalah trishaw driver cycling right past the mosque but then stopping at the Hindu temple next door (I walked back, and was welcomed into the mosque despite wearing shorts, and even taken up the minaret). Sharon, on the other hand, told us she has Muslim friends and is welcomed at their religious celebrations. She felt that altho a difficult issue, Canada was correct in revoking ASSK's honorary citizenship.

Our next stop was the 11-13th century temple-littered area of Bagan, over 3000 of them! Altho some are individually quite impressive, the real draw is how many of them there are in this small area, none individually approach the grandeur of Angkor Wat, or the other top temples at the Angkor site we visited last yr. Still it is an amazing place to visit (and especially to bike through- you can easily get one of the medium-sized temples to yourself), and the current town is much more pleasant than the city of Mandalay.

Next we spent 2 relaxing days at seaside Ngapali Beach's very recently opened Jasmine Ngapali Resort with its isolated and clean beach (altho the air was stifled by late afternoon burnings from the nearby village), before flying back to Yangon, where we could see ASSK's house across the lake from our Hotel Sedona window.

Our last day we visited the propanganda-esque Drug Enforcement museum, and the house of U-Thant, secretary general of the UN from 1961-71, and grandfather of Thant Myint-U , the author of the book that I am reading (The River of Lost Footsteps- first half slow, rest much better). "U", sometimes spelled "Oo", is a honorific for men [it is "Daw" for women]. "U Nu" was Burma's 1st post-independence president, "U Thant was his press secretary before going to the UN , "U Saw" was the colleague who assassinated Aung San. All of these men, as well as Japan-trained xenophobic General Ne Win, the dictator who took over for decades in a 1962 military coup (and at one point replaced 10,50&100 kyat-notes with 9,45&90 kyat notes due to his nUmerology beliefs) were from a small group of student colleagues at the U of Rangoon in the 1930s.

You saw, you knew, you can't- the story of Burma.

Until next time,

St-UWe got back last weekend from 11 days in Myanmar (country #95!), after a couple of wks in Malaysia, and are both still suffering from considerable jet lag. I didn't send out a trip email after our trip to Sardinia last fall as there was nothing very special to say (beautiful large Mediterranean island, excellent food..., our 2d in the world's oldest republic, tiny cliff-top, tri-towered San Marino, was more exotic), however the country formerly known as Burma is far too interesting not to write something.

Almost all international flights enter via former capital Yangon- the name was changed from Rangoon (in 1927 it beat out NYC as the world's top immigrant city, and was 2/3rds Indian-now by design a small minority) along with the change from Burma by the then-xenophobic military dictatorship in 1989 as part of their attempt to erase any trace of British Colonialism. Yangon, like the rest of the country, is a lot more modern than we expected, and, although the pace has clearly accelerated since doing a political U-turn from military dictatorship to democracy and opening up to international tourism in 2012 [1M that yr, now over 6M/yr], as far as we could tell, most is not that new. At least where most people live and tourists visit, It is really much more of a typical, albeit lagging, Asian country, full of cars, traffic jams, and pollution, then a lost-in-time isolated paradise. Despite the traffic jam on the way in from the airport, somehow Yangon nevertheless seemed peaceful... then we figured it out- no motorcycles!! They were banned in 2003:

https://www.mmtimes.com/special-features/162-wheels-2013/5788-ban-on-motorbikes-lingers.html

Altho controversial and possibly unfair to the poor, we are in favour of it- it made a noticeable difference to the air quality- too bad heavy polluted, noisy, dusty Mandalay doesn't have one. What is new are the tons of internationally connected ATMs everywhere (including in the payas [a Burmese term similar to pagoda] themselves), gone are the days when a thick wad of immaculate US notes were needed to travel the country- altho a bit of, easily-overcome, resistance was put up by the waiter at our Mandalay rooftop river-side hotel restaurant the only time I tried to use one with a (moderate) fold in it (we wanted to get rid of our excess US cash on hand).

Our room had a fabulous view of golden Shwedagon paya, sticking out among the trees behind our large pool, where 8 of the Buddha's hairs are supposedly located according to the nation's founding story. A short ferry-hop across the Irrawaddy river from Yangon's colourfully-dilapidated busy colonial building- fronted streets is another world- motorbikes, bamboo shacks and naked babies on the plastic trash and standing-water carpet, poverty-ridden rural suburb of Dalah (the equivalent can be found in most Asian countries if you know where to look), which we toured by a trishaw bike-driver who later tried to claim that our 80min tour had lasted over 3hrs...

We then took a businessman-filled small plane to the new 2005-settled pristine capital of Nay Pyi Taw (our other 2 short hop flights were tourist-filled: a mix of Chinese and western), it's empty airport, and 20-lane highway with no one on it (can you hear Bono ['U'2] singing? "treasure just to look upon it..."). Not by any means part of the classic Myanmar tourist trail, but an undeniable part of the country's reality today that we wanted to see (JC's childhood friend who works for ASEAN travels there frequently), the deserted infinity pool at our Hilton was heaven (followed closely by their bkfast buffet the next am- including the cold noodle and chicken nan gyi thoke salad: Burmese salads were the highlight of the good, but not excellent coming from Malaysia, food- including tea leaf and pennywort salads- all mixed with lots of peanuts, oil, and garlic).

Founding new royal capitals has a long traditional in Myanmar; our next stop, ancient-sounding Mandalay (3.5hrs down a quiet 6-lane hwy) was actually only founded as a city and capital in 1856. The older royal capitals including Ava (aka Inwa) and Amarapura (with its world-longest teakwood footbridge, the impressive 1.2km U-Bein Bridge) are a short cab ride away. Be careful making any U-turns on the 48 km/h limit right-side-drive roads in the right-sided steering-wheeled cars! Our driver (who had been in Israel in the 90s as a construction worker- historically the countries have had good relations and we saw one large Israeli tour group) brought along his 16yo daughter Sharon [named after 'shalom' and Ariel Sharon], on the Sunday to help compensate for his poor English. Hers is perfect and she is already in university studying psychology, hoping to further this in Singapore (She has already been there and to Japan briefly on scholarships, most of her family including her Mom are univ-grads, tho she clearly is at best the equivalent of upper-middle class). We happily invited her to join us on our emaciated horse-cart (by design by necessity, traffic jams full of them pulling tourists around the spread-out picturesque sights) tour of across-the-river Ava (where she hadn't been before), so that we could pick her brain about Myanmar today.

Everyone we spoke to likes Aung San Suu Kyi, "the Lady". Sharon actually responded by saying "I love her, she is like a mother to all of us". She is clearly the most powerful person in the country today, she made herself "state counselor", above the president, a post for which she is not eligible, given her marriage to a foreigner [British scholar Michael Aris who died of prostate Ca in 1999 after being refused entry to visit his wife pre-terminally]- too bad the US Constitution doesn't have the same rule! Her father, General Aung San, was assassinated by a rival in 1947 on the verge of leading his country to independence, after having been trained by the Japanese, switching sides just before the end of WW2 commenting "I went to Japan to save my people who were struggling like bullocks under the British, but now we are treated like dogs". Whether her militaristic roots are now showing in her attitude towards the Rohingya, or whether she stills needs to be careful not to offend the military (officially apparently only 8th in power, and we really didn't see any military presence at all, albeit only visiting mainstream Myanmar, surprising in a country less than a decade out from a 60-yr military dictatorship where international isolation of an initially self-isolating regime had led to their being no state structure other than the army itself) is hard to say.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/suu-kyi-honorary-canadian-citizenship-1.4847568

Schematically, Myanmar can be thought of as shaped like a large upside-down letter "U". Through a large central plain down the middle runs the great Irrawaddy river, connecting Mandalay in the north with Yangon in the south, after bowing slightly west to run through Bagan. The Bamar majority live here. The borders are all walled-off by very high mountains from the surrounding countries. Multiple ethnic groups, including the Karen, Kayah (women wear the brass neck rings), Wa, Shan, Kachin, and Chin (but not the notoriously dangerous Jiakchin), most still in various degrees of civil wars (including world's longest, since just after Brits left) or conflict live in these hills. Communist ideology, neighboring countries, religious differences (most of the hill tribes were converted in the 1800s from animism to Christianity, at least one apparently preferring it to Buddhism as they didn't want to give up hunting animals), and the opium and now synthetic drug trades have complicated matters. These areas are off-limits to travelers, and are controlled by the military. It is unclear how active these other conflicts are, however only the Rohingya Muslim problems bordering Bangladesh seems to get any media coverage. Without asking about these issues a tourist would see or hear nothing of them. Certainly to view or treat Myanmar only through the lens of its Rohingya and other border conflicts is to do a considerable disservice to the majority of its inhabitants.

Burma was administered as, and considered to be, a state of British India under the Raj. This is clearly wrong- the Burmese people, both in terms of ethnicity and religion, are much closer to South-East Asians than Indians. The British encouraged waves of Indian immigrants- mostly from adjacent Muslim-majority states, and gave them good clerical positions, leading to considerable resentment and later problems. It seems however that there was at least some presence of Muslims going back to the region's Arakan kingdom centuries earlier. Myanmar's government wants to deny citizenship and remove anyone related to British immigration. They therefore refuse to recognize the "Rohingya" as an actual people, referring to them as "Bengali" (the bordering area of India/Bangladesh). On the other hand, the actual term "Rohingya" has only come into widespread use over the last decade, possibly by design for creating a self-identity separate from surrounding Bengali Muslims and political gain (reminiscent of the Palestinians, who had little to differentiate themselves from surrounding Arabs prior to the creation of the State of Israel- altho 70yrs later they now clearly are a distinct people), the term is not mentioned at all in the 2006-published history I'm reading. There is clearly also a small non-Rohingya Muslim minority elsewhere in the country, and tensions do exist btw them and the Buddhists as well, with one driver telling us that no one can get along with the Muslims, and our Dalah trishaw driver cycling right past the mosque but then stopping at the Hindu temple next door (I walked back, and was welcomed into the mosque despite wearing shorts, and even taken up the minaret). Sharon, on the other hand, told us she has Muslim friends and is welcomed at their religious celebrations. She felt that altho a difficult issue, Canada was correct in revoking ASSK's honorary citizenship.

Our next stop was the 11-13th century temple-littered area of Bagan, over 3000 of them! Altho some are individually quite impressive, the real draw is how many of them there are in this small area, none individually approach the grandeur of Angkor Wat, or the other top temples at the Angkor site we visited last yr. Still it is an amazing place to visit (and especially to bike through- you can easily get one of the medium-sized temples to yourself), and the current town is much more pleasant than the city of Mandalay.

Next we spent 2 relaxing days at seaside Ngapali Beach's very recently opened Jasmine Ngapali Resort with its isolated and clean beach (altho the air was stifled by late afternoon burnings from the nearby village), before flying back to Yangon, where we could see ASSK's house across the lake from our Hotel Sedona window.

Our last day we visited the propanganda-esque Drug Enforcement museum, and the house of U-Thant, secretary general of the UN from 1961-71, and grandfather of Thant Myint-U , the author of the book that I am reading (The River of Lost Footsteps- first half slow, rest much better). "U", sometimes spelled "Oo", is a honorific for men [it is "Daw" for women]. "U Nu" was Burma's 1st post-independence president, "U Thant was his press secretary before going to the UN , "U Saw" was the colleague who assassinated Aung San. All of these men, as well as Japan-trained xenophobic General Ne Win, the dictator who took over for decades in a 1962 military coup (and at one point replaced 10,50&100 kyat-notes with 9,45&90 kyat notes due to his nUmerology beliefs) were from a small group of student colleagues at the U of Rangoon in the 1930s.

You saw, you knew, you can't- the story of Burma.

Until next time,

St-U