Pathien to Chaung Tha – Some Bus Ride

Just north of Chaung Tha beach. Almost pretty enough to make the trip worth it.

At an early morning bus stop in the Burmese delta town of Pathien I breakfasted on sweet tea and fried rice and watched my bus being loaded for the three hour trip to Chaung Tha on the Bay of Bengal. The bus was an old girl somewhere between a coach and a mini-bus that teetered high above skinny wheels. A young guy threw cardboard boxes and striped polyester bags onto the roof where the driver stacked it high. He pointed to my bag, “Chaung Tha?” I nodded and before I could protest it was sailing through the air, my precious ukulele glinting delicately before it was lost under a pile of white sacks. Somewhere a fat Hawaiian man sobbed.

As they lashed down the bulging stack on the roof, the conductor waved me inside and pointed to the very back middle seat. A layer of rice sacks covered the floor so deeply that the aisle now looked like a test facility for new caving apparatus. How the hell was I meant to get through there? A 60 year old woman pushed past me with a smile and crouch-walked to her seat, pirouetting and contorting like a teenager. I backed out of the bus and stretched my dicky back and tight hamstrings, much to the amusement of everyone. I continued the show by crawling on all fours up the aisle, pushing my small backpack in front of me like a dropout from an SAS training course, bumping and squeezing past passengers who sat comfortably cross-legged in the aisle. When I reached my seat many hours later I was facing the wrong way so I had to turn slowly on all fours in the manner of an elephant in a dressage competition. It was all done with the grace and controlled movement of Russian ballet dancer and I could tell the crowd appreciated it. I sat on the ripped upholstery with my feet resting on a rice sack several inches above my seat bottom and peered out from between my knees as the bus continued to fill.

            “Mister, mister!” The driver called to me, “Please.” He shoved a cardboard box tied with string through the side window and indicated that I should stuff it between the seat back and the roof, blocking the bus’s rear window.

            “Mister, please.” This time he held a tiny waif of a girl, maybe six years old with her face prettily painted with pale thanaka paste. She held out her arms but was too shy to look at me. I lifted her through the window to the seat beside me and her mother followed, vaulting lithely through the high window and smiling her thanks. There were now six people sitting on between or under their bags on the back seat. By the time the bus left with a shudder of warped clutch, I counted 54 people on the 36 seat bus including 17 sitting in the aisle. It was stiflingly hot. A young guy sat facing me, using another man as a back rest. We smiled at each other awkwardly from between our knees – aside from the odd kick, I have never anyone’s feet so close to my testicles.

            When the bus left town and slammed into the first of a million potholes I felt a sting between my shoulder blades as I bounced out of my seat. With difficulty I leaned forward and felt behind me. A nail that had once held upholstery protruded from the bare wood and had been playfully poked at my spine. After ten minutes I barely felt it over my cramping knees and screaming lower back. Soon my little neighbour fell asleep on my chest. Her mother lolled against the window, occasionally waking enough to drag her daughter towards her from where she would gradually slump closer towards me with every sway and thump.

Outside I could only glimpse a vista of dusty roads between dry fields and houses made from panels of woven grass and bamboo. Soon the road climbed and wound into low mountains, green and lush with patches of scraggly jungle and fields full of smouldering stumps from the slash-and-burn farming. At the edges of the road grew tall jungle trees roped with vines which rose above broad palm fronds. They were a strange uniform grey, robbed of colour by a thick layer of dust from the busy road. The bends tightened and the road narrowed as we rose. The driver continually had to climb on the brakes as we rounded blind corners too fast and were confronted with trucks and buses doing the same. Every time it happened both drivers jerked upright with surprise like they had forgotten they were sharing the road with other vehicles. At one mid-bend near collision we were forced into a ditch and sticks scraped along the windows as we edged past a fuel tanker.

            My little friend woke and tapped her mother on the shoulder. I didn’t need to speak Burmese to know what she said.

            “Mum. Mum! I think I’m going to be…” She vomited between her legs and over her shoes. Mum grabbed the still-gushing kid and stuck her head out of the window where she stayed for the rest of the trip, pale-faced and dribbling. Where do little kids store all that vomit? She couldn’t have weighed more than 15kgs but there were litres of pale rice-chunder sloshing around her mother’s feet. The driver’s cavalier disregard for the laws of physics combined with the smell, heat and dust set off a chain reaction of sympathy chucking and soon people were leaning over each other and painting the sides of the bus. I watched this impressive display with a kind of detached wonder – I couldn’t have designed a worse bus ride.

            After three hours we dropped out of the hills and passed the beachside hotels, restaurants and draught beer joints of Chaung Tha. At the parking lot that doubled as the town’s bus station I followed the lead of most of the rear half of the bus and slid out of the window. My passage through the tight opening was lubricated by an interesting mix of vomit and powdery dust – I wondered if there might be an industrial application for it. I was aiming for a Dukes of Hazard exit from the window but ended up half falling and staggering, wind-milling arms striking people at random.

            “Mister, mister. Please!” The driver threw my heavy bag off the roof and I caught it neatly with my face. One of the locals I had struck was an enthusiastic young man who gave me a card for a cheap hotel near the beach before stepping quickly beyond flailing range. I felt as though I owed him and jumped on his scooter.

            My room was bare with a cold shower and a hard bed. The electricity only came on between 6 and 10 but it was cheap and offered a free breakfast. In the shower dirty water streamed from orifices I had previously thought dust-proof. My t-shirt was full of holes and stained with blood where the protruding nail had cut my back. I lay on the hard bed and waited for the tetanus to kick in. 

Parthien – Delta Fire

Near Pathien.

My first Burmese meal outside of Rangoon nearly killed me. Not because of the poor hygiene or bad water that I had expected, but because it was made from the sun. I’m not a total spice-pussy but this was horrific – what was I going to do if every meal in the Irrawaddy delta was going to turn my face inside out like this one? The restaurant was wooden and whenever a boat left the dock nearby the place swayed in it’s wake. I was afraid to breath on anything as I sensed the place would burn like a lit fart. As the only foreigner in the place - the only one in town as far as I knew - I attracted quite a crowd as I billowed steam and gasped like a cartoon fish.

            My new friend Win returned from the bathroom – actually he returned from walking outside and pissing in the river, we were in Burma after all – and sat opposite.

            “Are you ok, Max?” He was a little confused over my name.

            “Yeah.” I croaked, pointing to the plate of watercress and greens we were sharing as a beer snack, “Spicy.”

            “I think Myanmar food is more spicy than Australian food,” he laughed, snagging a hearty amount with his chopsticks. His smile drained away.

            “Holy fuck,” he gasped, showing an impressive grasp of idiom for a non-native English speaker. Before I could warn him he took a generous swig of beer and held it in his mouth. Rookie error. I watched his immediate relief turn to horror as the beer intensified the pain and he began pacing back and forth. Meanwhile the acid in my mouth must have burned through a new layer of face and I joined him, throwing my streaming eyes heavenwards and slapping tables.

            The restaurant staff watched the impressive spectacle – even the chef left his kitchen to enjoy the evil he had wrought. Eventually the pain subsided and I sat at the table while my ruined brain flowed out of my nostrils. I gingerly examined the offending dish with my chopsticks and realized our mistake. In the dim light, and after a few beers, we had mistaken the vicious whole green chillies for green beans. Win must have had at least three. When we’d recovered I proposed a toast to Myanmar food, and we both giggled.

After 25 hours on an ancient riverboat from Rangoon, I had arrived in the Irrawaddy delta port of Pathien earlier in the afternoon. I was prowling the streets looking for food when Win waved to me and asked me where I was from. We got chatting and he had given a short tour of town before leading me here for an early dinner. As we sat carefully picking around the chillies he told me he had learned English while working as a guide in Rangoon and had recently returned home to work for his uncle, learning the electrical repair trade. Because he was learning he earned nothing but was given food and board at his uncle’s house.

            “After two years, maybe I will make a salary,” he said.

            A 12 year old kid with a crew cut and a grubby shirt brought a plate of chicken curry, a bowl of soup and some rice. I handed Win an empty bowl but he pushed it away.

            “No, I can not eat this. It’s not halal. You know halal?”

            “You’re Muslim?”

            “Yes, there are many Muslim people in Pathien.”

            “So what is this?” I tapped his beer with a chopstick.

            He grinned and changed the subject. “You must come to my house.”

            As we walked past empty colonial buildings and a busy pier my new friend waved and chatted, showing me off like a prize. Everyone smiled and wanted to shake my hand and practice their English. At the back of a market where pig heads hung on hooks and dying fish flopped in shallow pans, we turned down a raised dirt road that ran through rice paddies. The house was a two room shack raised off the ground and surrounded by palms and banana leaves. If you ignored the chickens picking in the mud and the thatched roofs repaired with plastic sheets, the neighbourhood looked like a beach resort in Thailand. Win’s house had a sleeping room that he said that five of six people usually shared, a small kitchen and an everything else room with a television and a karaoke system. The house was swept clean and the only decorations were laminated posters of the two national heroes – Aung San Suu Kyi and her assassinated father, General Aung San. Two teenage girls, Win’s niece and her friend, lay on their stomachs watching music videos. They blushed when I said hello. Win introduced me to his aunt who was scrubbing the kitchen and his four year old nephew Mohamed, who was learning English. Little Mo gave me an impromptu demonstration, “How are you? One, two, three. I love you,” before hiding between mum’s legs.

            Win said he needed help with one of his girlfriends – he had many – so we walked to the night market in town.

            “What’s the problem exactly?”

            “I don’t know her name.”

            “You don’t know your girlfriend’s name?” He shrugged.

            The girl worked for her parents at a food stall on the waterfront section of Pathien’s bustling night market. She was slim and pretty, maybe nineteen, and Win said she spoke English but was very shy and that I should introduce myself. She stood behind a charcoal grill flipping Chinese sausage and tofu but when I walked over Win grabbed my arm.

            “No, her father is there. He does not like me.”

            Instead we went for a tour around the night market. Piles of cheap jeans and business shirts sat next to hand-woven traditional dress and herbal medicine. A steady stream of locals walked through the market, eating fried tofu or ice-cream. I stopped at a stall selling small logs of pale wood. Win told me it was the thanaka that nearly all Burmese women, and many men, wear as an all purpose sun block and skin treatment. The women at the stand quickly ground some bark onto a flat stone and mixed it with water. Laughing, she spread the tan-coloured paste on my stubbled cheeks. It was cooling and smelled woody.

“Do I look like your girl friend now, Win?”

“No, you are too ugly.” Imperfect English speakers can be so cruel.

Loud music boomed in the distance and as we rounded a corner I saw an inflatable blue arch brightly lit and advertising women’s cosmetics.

            “This is an expo from Rangoon.” Win explained and at a stall inside I bought us both an ice-cream which he said was his first ever.

            At a stage set up in the middle of the road a crowd had formed to watch a hip-hop dance troop perform. Two girls dressed as naughty schoolgirls, a la early Britney Spears, performed hair-tossing hip thrusts to a dirty beat. It was overtly sexual and I couldn’t imagine anything more out of place in this little Burmese town. The crowd loved it. When they had finished I bought a bottle of local rum for no other reason than it was 700 kyats and I couldn’t pass up 750ml of booze for under a dollar. At the hotel we had a couple of shots with the owner who showed us CCTV footage of a robed monk having urgent sex with a young women as she bowed to the Buddha to pray. Win said that it was the source of a recent scandal and I wondered if this was Burma’s first viral video. Better than those stupid cats, I thought.

            It had been a big day and I had an early bus to catch so I went to my room, leaving Win slumped over the bottle of rum watching English football with the owner.

Rangoon to Parthien - On Burma Time

Setting nets on the Irrawaddy river.

I sat in the dirty iron shed that serves as Rangoon’s ferry terminal clutching my $7 ticket for the 20 hour boat ride to Pathien deep in the Irrawaddy delta and waited for the foreigners’ ticket master. There was, I thought as I looked out at a row of a dozen rusty pontoon jetties each with a ferry moored to it, no way I would ever find my boat without him. Most of the boats had no markings although the jetty entrances were marked in Burmese script that reminded me of the patterns in crop circles – intricate, pretty and indecipherable.

True to his word the ticket master strode towards me at exactly 2.30, neatly uniformed and dry-skinned in the sauna air. I followed him as quickly as I could with my pack and a plastic bag full of snacks. In the middle of the open upper deck he shooed away a group of elderly ladies and indicated a patch of steel floor. The deck was divided into a grid of rectangles about 1 meter long and 1.5 wide marked with red paint and numbered. I made myself at home in number 47 while thirty people stared at the funny foreigner with the light-weight sleeping bag and bottled water. The woman next to me looked to be in her seventies with a face like a leather glove. She faced me cross-legged and smoked a huge cigar, the end of which she put into an open tin as she inhaled. She laughed at me and her front teeth were black stumps where the cigar sat. When I refused a toke she laughed even harder. I sat back on my bag, using my towel to cushion me from the raised welds and lumpy steel and watched the deck fill. By the time a procession of families laden with sacks, cooking pots and battered cases had finished stepping over my legs on their way to a free bit of floor, the small deck was crammed. Everyone was good-humoured and gave their neighbours as much room as possible, going to great pains not to step on anyone’s grass mat or plastic sheet, slipping their shoes off where it was unavoidable. I went to explore the boat, feeling big-footed and awkward as I tip-toed and hopped over legs

Home sweet home.

Our boat, like most of the government ferries that ply Burma’s rivers, was a relic left over from British rule. It was100 feet long with three open-sided decks, a handful of empty first-class cabins in the bow and a raked smokestack. It was probably from the 1920s but it felt ancient – every wooden surface was faded, scarred and patterned from the scrape of a thousand heavy bags and the steel undulated and curved organically. Down a set of worn-smooth wooden steps a lady squatted on the floor selling bananas, three-in-one coffee mix and bottled water. I ate a banana and watched men jump between the lower deck and the pontoon carrying sacks of rice which they dumped through small hatches. In the hold more crew worked hunched in the foul dark air to distribute the sacks as ballast. Above them on the heavy-planked deck, barefoot men stacked electrical goods, engine parts and unmarked boxes ceiling high. A thick bamboo pole bent under the weight of a truck engine as 8 men lifted with their shoulders like shirtless coffin-bearers. They shuffled forward to the shouted instructions of a boy who jumped back and forth between the pontoon and boat. Once it was safely on board, the men rolled their necks and slapped each other on the back before repeating the process with an industrial freezer. They all looked like underwear models.

We untied at around 4pm, an hour behind schedule and I leant on the rear rail of the passenger deck and felt the deep throb of the twin engines while I watched the faded roofs and bright pagodas of Rangoon sink into the deep green bush. A man in his twenties tiptoed around a sleeping couple and stood beside me, holding a bag of what looked like the Burmese equivalent of Cheezels. He grinned at me and grabbed me by the wrist, pouring the yellow, crispy snacks into my hand. His grin was infectious and he gestured for me to watch as he threw one of the balls high off the back of the boat. Just before it hit the boat’s wake, a seagull swooped and caught it deftly. Soon a dozen birds dived and cartwheeled after our lofted treats as we laughed and pointed out particularly spectacular efforts in our respective languages. After the bait was exhausted, he returned to sit with his mother and every time I glanced towards them he would catch my eye and grin.

Feeding the birds with Rangoon in the background.

In the afternoon I stood on the small top deck watching the muddy banks slide by under a fringe of lush green bush broken occasionally by open boats tied to grass huts stilted above the mud. Alone on the highest point of the ship and I could see rice fields framed by buffalo tracks disappearing at a ruler-flat horizon. The vast network of rivers that wind through the Irrawaddy delta are still the main, and often only, mode of transport and we passed hundreds of boats. Ugly square barges sitting half submerged under loads of rice and coconuts barely moved against the current. Fast boats bounced over our wake powered by converted car engines that screamed and fanned muddy water high into the air. At the confluence of two big rivers, the banks fell away and the huge expanse of water was dotted with hundreds of tiny curved fishing boats powered by a single scull oar.

We docked briefly at a village where men ran along a long narrow gangplank from the mud bank with more white sacks. In the evening we stopped at a bigger town and dirty-fingered ladies climbed over the handrails, stepping over dozing passengers and selling fruit and fried snacks from wide baskets they carried on their heads. Already sick of bananas and chocolate bars, I bought a couple of shapeless, deep-fried things for about 10 cents. They were a kind of corn fritter, cold but not bad. I hoped they wouldn’t make me sick. There were no lights on deck and after they left, all I could here were snores over the diesel thump of the engines. It was 9pm – bedtime in Burma.

At 4.45am I was woken by the warbling trill of a transistor radio. Three monks sat cross-legged and listened to their morning prayers, swaddled in their red robes against the pre-dawn chill. The chant was musical and repetitive under a sea of static. By 5.30 they had finished and everyone was awake, preparing breakfast and chatting. I gave up on sleep and munched on a tasteless bun from my bag. The night had been damp and my sleeping bag was wet to the touch, the metal deck beaded with dew. The morning sun burnt off the fog and I spent the day watching the bank slide past from the top deck. My bag was unlocked downstairs but I never worried about theft in Burma.

A busy river town we passed in the morning.

At 4pm, 5 hours behind schedule, I figured we were nearly there when my shipmates begun packing, tying their rubbish neatly in plastic bags before throwing it into the river.

From the boat, Pathien looked like a colonial town on the Amazon. Crumbling wharf buildings with broken windows and faded signs obscured by creeping vines sat beside corrugated iron houses suspended above the river on rotting poles. All along the banks, small boats were tied to trees or dragged onto the bank and the whole place looked in danger of being consumed by the bush. The only vehicles that met us at the pier were pedal trishaws looking for a fare. My bird-baiting friend grabbed me by the shoulder and asked for money. I gave him 1000 kyats – just over a dollar – telling him it was for the Cheezels, but I don’t think he understood. After I had my passport details recorded in a bare office I walked along the esplanade past once-grand houses whose top floors overlooked the river. They looked empty and ready to fall down. Behind them I found a hotel on a dirt road next to a weed-choked creek.

Two weeks after my trip a ferry on it’s way from Pathien to Rangoon capsized while trying to dock at a village during a storm. The boat was carrying 78 passengers, 10 of whom were killed. 

Pathien.

Rangoon II – Robbed!

Shwedagon Pagoda, Rangoon.

The currency of Burma is the kyat, pronounced something like chat. US dollars are accepted for hotels, tickets and entrance fees but for everything else you need kyat. I survived my first three days on $50 I had changed at a hotel but the rate was crap and I wanted to change a couple of hundred dollars before I left Rangoon. The best exchange rates, I had heard, were given by the black market money changers that loitered near certain parks and markets. I tend to be somewhat absent-minded when it comes to trivial things like passports, credit cards and volumes of cash – recently in Thailand I lost my passport for 5 days and was surprised when it slingshotted itself across the room on a pair of underpants I was pulling from my pack – so I was nervy about a shady, street-side money change.

            My money-changer's name was Rashid. He was short and skinny with long lank hair and quick eyes. He looked about as trustworthy as hepatitis, but his rate was good. At a nearby tea shop I was given tea spiked with condensed milk at a tiny plastic table that would have looked at home in a child’s play house. Three of Rashid’s friends were there with us, standing behind me or sitting with us. I double checked our exchange rate.

            “850 kyats, right?”

            “Yes, yes, of course 850. Where is your money?”

            I handed him a clean, crisp $100 bill. He checked it quickly, holding it to the light before passing it around. There was a rapid-fire debate in Burmese.

            “No, no. It’s no good. See, it’s serial number starts with hb.” He indicated the number. “I can’t take this. Give me another one.”

            And this is where it gets stupid. Flustered I took out a wad of four $100 dollar bills and handed him one.

            “Ok. This one’s good.” From out of his bulging bag he pulled out bundles of 1000 kyat notes. “Count it please, you see I’m an honest man, but be quick, before police come.”

            By the time I got to 850, Rashid was on his feet. He shook my hand and left quickly. I knew I had been scammed, I just couldn’t work out how. I counted and recounted my money, checking every note for damage or forgery. It wasn’t until I got back to my hotel that I realized he’d never returned the original bill. I counted my stash of hundred dollar bills and sure enough, I was one short.

            “Oh, tits.” I said. Or something to that effect.

            Outside my hotel an elderly taxi driver must have seen the smoke billowing from my ears. “Have you been robbed, sir?”

            “Yes.”

            “At the gardens, I think. I have seen it many times. They are bad men.” I nodded. “Can I ask how much, sir?”

            “Um, $100.”

            “$100! So much. You must go to the police. It is a short walk, you do not need my taxi.” He led me to the intersection and sketched a map on the pavement.

            I thanked him, wondering how many cabbies the world over wouldn’t have exploited such a golden opportunity for a fare. The police station was off a main road between a restaurant and a mobile phone shop, set back behind a wall of sandbags topped by razor wire. I remembered that a Burmese cop shop hadn’t been on my itinerary. A young policeman sat in a booth by the open gate playing on his phone, automatic rifle dangling from a chair. He hardly glanced as I walked through the gate. In the station an officer behind a wooden desk looked up without surprise, waving me to a stool as he talked on a phone with a rotary dialer. Soon an older guy strode in from a back room, his uniform jacket unbuttoned in the heat.

            “Yes?”

            “A man took money from me.” I said in my slowest talking-to-foreigners English.

            “Ah, robbed were you? At Mahabandoola gardens I suppose. We’ve had a problem with that lately. You should just use a bank, you know. How much was it?”

            I told him and his eyes flickered in surprise. I later learned that it was probably more than he earned in a month, although most Burmese civil servants made their real money from bribes.

“Come with me.” He buttoned his jacket and with the full might of the Burmese government behind us we strode across busy roads, waving traffic and pedestrians to a halt imperiously. At the gardens, a pack of money changers saw us coming – well, saw him coming – and flinched. Stopping a bus with a casual flick of his hand, he summoned a man to him. After a two-minute dressing down, including several pokes in the chest, my new friend told me to describe the thief.

            “He was shorter than me and slim with black hair…” I began, before realizing that I was describing every man in Burma. “His name was Rashid.”

            “Was he Indian or Burmese?”

            “Indian.” I replied.

            “Ok, we will find your money. Go with this man now.” He pointed to a quiet man who took me to the tea shop where I had been robbed. I bought him a Star Cola, the local fizzy drink, and we sat down.

            “This man, he is Indian. I know him. I am Myanmar man, we are money changers for many years. For one year the India men come. They are bad men. Now the police don’t like us.” He sucked on his straw. “I think you will get your money.”

            Soon a tall Burmese man introduced himself to me. “I am the boss of the money changers. We could not find the man but I know him, I will get the money. Now I can give you 80,000 kyats. It’s ok?” He pulled out a wad of cash and handed it to me. It was all there and I was amazed that he would do this without any proof.

            An hour later I boarded a ferry to the Irrawaddy delta, smiling at the thought of Rashid having a rough few days.

At Rangoon's ferry terminal I found a new contender in my ongoing search for the world's worst toilet.

Rangoon – Like Nowhere I’ve Been

Sule Paya in central Rangoon.

High above the Thai-Burma border on an Air Asia flight from Bangkok I opened my photocopied, water-stained Lonely Planet Myanmar for the first time. I flipped to the money section and read what I already knew – Burma has no ATMs. Fantastic. For some reason the idea of a whole country in 2012 without something as commonplace as an automatic teller seemed more exotic than a thousand sun-drenched beaches or spear-wielding hunters.

            I watched for a glimpse of Rangoon like it was my first time abroad and felt a nervous fizz of excitement as a flat grid of roofs appeared suddenly out of the cloud. We dropped towards busy roads flanked by ramshackle terraced houses and shops until I could see the faces of the workmen sitting in the open trucks. A row of rusted roofs flashed 100 feet below our wingtip before we crossed a concrete wall and touched down neatly. It looked like we had landed in the middle of the city.

            The airport was small with swept-clean concrete floors. I stood in the line marked passport control-foreigners, chatting to a Californian called Santiago. We agreed to split a taxi and as we waited for our bags a young Frenchman named Gil overheard us asked to share the ride. None of us had booked rooms and it was dark when we climbed into a battered cab.

            The trip took 45 minutes through late peak hour traffic past dark footpaths and dirty buildings. We honked and wove between ancient smoke-stained trucks, battered 25-year-old Toyotas and men walking calmly through the traffic in longyi, the checked sarong that looked to me like an oversized tea towel. The streets were unlit and many cars had no lights. What I took to be oncoming motorbikes were cars with one headlight out – I later heard that motorbikes had been illegal in Rangoon since a government official had outlawed them in a fit of pique after his car was damaged but, like everything about Burma, it was hard to tell between rumour and fact.

            “Ten years ago, could you imagine ever going to Burma?” I said, breaking the fascinated silence that had set in soon after leaving the airport.

            “Ten years ago, I’d never heard of Burma, man.” Said Santiago.

            “I was eleven years old.” Said Gil.

Mobile phones and traditional longyi in front of British architecture.

            In the city centre the taxi driver dropped us at the White House hostel but they were full, as were the next three we tried. And the ten after that. Eventually a local, barefoot on the broken pavement, signalled to us to follow him. For an hour we sweated and struggled to keep up with our self-appointed guide as we were refused by every budget place in town. In the end our guide shrugged and held out his hand. I gave him the only small money I had, a one dollar bill. My companions had only 100 dollar bills. Our guide glared at us and stalked off. It was 9pm and we were sweat-drenched, aching and hungry. We sat on a filthy step and Gil announced that he was going to sleep in the park. Santiago said the same and we shook hands as they staggered under heavy packs. I was still feeling good so I carried on. In fact I was better than good, I felt exhilarated, excited to be lost and homeless amongst crumbling British-era buildings in this strange, dark city. By 9.30 all the restaurants were closed and the streets were empty except for the occasional taxi, headlights off. A few dogs sniffed the in the gutters and I had to watch my footing where the roots of gnarled trees had torn the pavement. On most corners small shrines sat in tree trunks – a dim bulb hanging from the branches illuminating a dirty stone Buddha and burned-out incense sticks. It was a perfect antidote to the 24-hour neon convenience stores, midnight traffic snarls and leering prostitutes of Bangkok.

            At around ten o’clock I stumbled upon Rangoon’s central landmark, the Sule Paya, a golden temple on an ancient religious site which now forms the middle of a roundabout from which four-lane roads spread in three directions. Nearby, I found a Chinese-run business hotel where I paid the astonishing sum of $50 (I had averaged $8 dollars per night in the rest of South-East Asia) for a ‘delux’ room – a windowless box with whiny air conditioning and Chinese satellite TV.

            After a free breakfast I checked out and dragged my bags to the Garden Hostel where I got a $6 room with walls stained the same black as the cracked buildings outside.

For the next three days I walked through the heat, filling SD cards with poorly-framed photos of men hanging out of ancient buses singing out destinations, bicycle trishaws stacked 10 feet high with propane tanks, barefoot workers sleeping on mounds of gravel in the backs of rumbling dump trucks, pretty girls with thanaka-swirled cheeks selling sliced watermelon from buckets they carried on their heads and action shots of stub-toothed men spitting the blood-red juice of beetel nut they chewed wrapped in leaf and spiked with spices. The background was always the same – peeling paint and mould-stained brick of the once-grand architecture of the British looming above broken, beetel polka-dotted streets teeming with pedestrians and beaten-up vehicles. In the evenings I ate steaming plates of rice, vegetables and stringy curry chicken in tiny, smoky restaurants and washed it down with longnecks of Myanmar Beer. Afterwards I bought loose Red Ruby cigarettes from one of the plastic canisters that sat on every table. I hadn’t smoked in years but I was free and unknown away from mobile phones, skype and email and it felt appropriate in such a grimy, tumble-down city.

Most Burmese women and some men paint their faces with thanaka as an all-in-one sunblock and beauty treatment.

It was only February but the heat and humidity were building and I had vague ideas about catching a riverboat to the beach. After a long walk down the Strand, past the city’s grandest whitewashed colonial buildings, boxy factories and muddy construction sights advertising river view condos, I reached the ferry port. Sandwiched by the broad, swift flow of the Irrawaddy river on one side and a four-lane highway on the other, Rangoon’s port stretched along the muddy bank. Dozens of pontoon jetties bobbed under the footsteps of wiry, bare-chested men shouldering 70kg bags of chicken feed – more than their body weight – from rusted ferries into waiting trucks. A man crouched in the sun husking coconuts with a machete, one every few seconds, before flicking them blind to a boy standing on the cabin of a truck 20 feet away. Between trucks, under trees – wherever there was room – women sold fruit, cold drinks and cigarettes from bamboo stalls or folded beetel nut packets from behind tiny booths. I sat on a concrete bench and watched, feeling self-conscious with a DSLR camera hanging over my shoulder. The river below where I sat was a traffic jam of boats big and small. I watched a huge rust-bucket of a container ship glide past on the swift current, looking ridiculously out of scale against the bamboo houses on the far bank and scattering dozens of open wooden dinghies riding too-low under stacks of coconuts or bags of rice on which passengers balanced. Their un-muffled, single cylinder outboards put-putted furiously and sprayed brown water into the sky as they scrambled to avoid the bigger boat’s wake. On an open ferry, a monk in red robes stood high on top of a pile of rice sacks, a serene splash of colour through the diesel smoke. As the boat beached, he dropped lightly onto a plank laid on the sticking mud and strode past me towards town. He must have been eighty.

Rangoon's ferry terminal.

I could have watched all day but I had to find a ticket office. Farther along the bank were some more substantial buildings, one of which was restaurant. I stopped for lunch and the man who shooed a cat off my table before seating me spoke English. I asked about boat tickets and after lunch he led me to a cloyingly hot, corrugated iron building where 100 people stood in line or sat on rows of wooden pews bolted to the floor. Behind a door marked ‘foreigner tickets’ a neatly uniformed man sat at a desk next to a rattling fan. He spoke perfect English and sold me a ticket to Pathien on the Irrawaddy delta from where, he explained, I could catch a bus to the beach. A deck class ticket cost me $7. The boat left at three o’clock the next afternoon and would take 20 hours. I was to meet him half an hour before departure.

Faded colonial buildings on the Strand.

Koh Samet to the Burmese Border – Insert Witty Title Here

Koh Samet

Alicia had left me in in Koh Samet to fly to Shanghai and on the ferry to Rayong it felt strange to travel alone. In Bangkok, I spent the night in street-side bars chatting to backpacker couples with clean hiking boots who were obviously bored of each other’s company and talked over one another constantly. Most of them were on a four week trip through Thailand, Laos and Cambodia – their first time in Asia. They stopped talking each time a street vendor approached with a tray of wooden frogs and plastic shit, smiling and no-thank-you-very-much-ing. They all had a morning buses to Chang Mai or Koh Samui and one by one they made their excuses. Later, as I sat alone, I overheard a French girl talking to a busy waitress.

            “Excuse me, I asked for fresh orange juice, zis is not fresh.”

            “Yes it is. We make it everyday.”

            “Non. Zis is, how you say, concentrate. It’s full of chemicals. I can’t drink it.”

            The waitress shrugged and started to walk off.

            “I’m not paying for it.” The drink was less than a dollar. They argued for ten minutes until the waitress stalked away. It pissed me off.

            “Excuse me, what happened?” I asked the French girl.

            “This juice, I’m not paying for it. Here, taste this.” It was fine.

            “It’s terrible. You know that she’s gone to get the police right?”

            “What?”

            “Yeah, I speak a little Thai and I think that’s what she said.” I lied.

            “Oh… really.”

            “Yeah, might be easier to pay. You know what Thai police can be like.” I was laying it on thick.

            “Well, yeah, maybe.” She thought for a minute then slammed some money on the table.

            “Thanks.” She smiled at me.

            A manager had been watching us.

            “What did you say to her?” She asked as she collected the money.

            “I said you called the police.”

            She laughed. “Stupid bitch. You want another beer?” I didn’t, I just wanted to get out of there. I dodged and elbowed through a whole community of hustlers – tuk-tuk drivers who doubled as sex show touts flashed explicit photos like they were FBI badges, massage parlour girls and lady-boys beckoned and whined, girls in lycra Heineken outfits and welded smiles held menus in front of ladies selling greasy noodles from carts which blocked the road. Everywhere people sold fake watches, glasses and underwear beside tasers, handcuffs, num-chuks and flick knives. Back at my hotel I locked the door behind me.

Night time Bangkok.

In the morning I caught a train to Chumpon. As we rattled south, I read and watched the sunset out of my second class carriage’s open window. The land was brown and dusty and I remembered how green and wet everything had been just a few months before. We arrived late at night and I wandered the wide streets past closed shops and dark houses. At a 7-11 I asked directions to a hotel and an English-speaking customer left his place in line to point me in the right direction.

The Farang bar and hostel was just closing when I walked in. Farang is Thai for foreigner and Ivor, the farang, led me to a bare room with a pedestal fan and a shared bathroom. There was no food so I sat with him in the closed bar drinking Singha and chatting. He had come to Thailand from England twenty years ago to work on the then-undeveloped island paradise of Koh Pha-ngan where he had met a Thai girl. They had gone from island to island, moving on as development and tourism pushed the prices up before settling in this dusty little nowhere where the only trade was from SCUBA divers on their way to Koh Tao. It seemed all veteran travellers and expats ever talked about was how much better Thailand had been twenty years ago – friendlier, safer, cheaper, more beautiful. I wondered how much of this was misty-eyed nostalgia and how much was true. A lot of the same people said that Burma was like Thailand in the ‘80s or Vietnam in the ‘90s or Laos ten years ago – the last undeveloped, unspoiled country in South-East Asia. I mentioned this to Ivor but he had never been, even though the border was only 30kms away.

“Can’t go anywhere, mate. Chained to this bar seven days a week.”

By then a big olive-skinned Welshman, the only other farang in town, had joined us and I asked about the chances of getting across the border.

“I doubt it mate. You’ll be locked up.” But he hadn’t been either and, like everyone else I had asked, was just guessing.

In the morning Ivor gave me a business card for a travel agent in Ranong and pointed me to the bus stop.

I waited an hour for the mini-bus to fill before we left. The road soon left the river valley and wound past small villages, terraced rice paddies and concrete towns. As we skirted the Burmese border, a soldier flagged us down at a road block. He swung the door open and collected IDs before speaking to the driver. A young guy near the back of the van was beckoned outside where the soldier directed him to stand against the side of the van and took a photo. He grabbed the young passenger by the collar and marched him away as the driver jumped into the van and roared away. I wanted to ask what had happened but nobody spoke English. An hour later I was standing in an empty lot between industrial buildings that served as Ranong’s bus station. I jumped on the back of a motorbike taxi and asked to go to a cheap hotel. The driver awkwardly cradled my bag between his legs as we wound through grubby streets, the back wheel scraping harshly with every rotation. At the hotel I checked into a bare room. The driver gave me his phone number and waited at reception for his cut of my $15 room charge.

One of Ranong's many fishing boats

Ranong sits on the Andaman Sea where Thailand meets Burma and the locals make their money from fishing and trade – both illegal and legal –  from across a wide estuary which separates the town from Kawthoung, its Burmese counterpart. I chained my bags to the bed and went in search of the travel agent Ivor said might be able to help me. Pon’s Travel is a one-stop western restaurant and ticketing service and Pon himself gave me the low down as I wolfed a curry. He told me that I could get to Kawthoung but only on a special one-day visa that couldn’t be used to travel more than five miles outside the town. I already had a 28 day tourist visa and was hoping to make my way by boat to Rangoon. He doubted that I would get my visa stamped and even if I did no boat would let a foreigner on. It wasn’t looking good for my overland route but I decided to give it another go. I bought a ticket for the small island of Koh Payam, where I knew there were travel agents and expats.

In the open back of an old pick-up a handful of backpackers and I drove through the heat to Ranong’s dock. The ferry shared the dock with a thousand wooden fishing boats. In a huge shed next door hundreds of people unloaded, gutted and packed fish into ice chests – there was no mechanization and they operated like a yelling, sweating production line. Blood and guts sluiced down the sloped concrete floor into a mangrove-choked stream and the workers moved quickly through the filth in flip-flops. The road in front was covered in rubbish that crunched under the tyres of reversing trucks. The smell was unreal – like a fishy hell. I noticed that the sing-songs yells and jokes weren’t in Thai. As I walked closer a wiry, dark-skinned man in a shirt stained black with fish blood waved me over. “Where are you from?” he asked.

His English was good and he told me that he was Burmese, as were all the workers, and had moved here from Rangoon two years ago to earn Thai wages.

“I like Thailand, so many jobs, but not Thai people.” He said. “They are not nice to us. I live with these people in the Burmese part of town.” He indicated the workers. “I don’t even speak Thai!”

I told him that I was going to Rangoon and he said that his father worked there as a diplomat. It was strange to think that this diplomat’s son with his perfect English had come to this dreary border town to make his fortune processing fish.

We docked at the end of a long concrete pier on Koh Payam where I rode a rented scooter to a thatched bungalow near the beach and watched it rain for two days – a steady tropical downpour that clattered on the palm fronds and seeped through the roof.

You know you're bored when you start taking photos of yourself reading.

I liked Payam, especially once the rain stopped, and spent a few days swimming in the warm clear waters and waiting for the generator to come on at the posh resort next door so I could use their wi-fi. I learned that my granddad had become gravely ill and spent hours trying to get through to his hospital bed. He was morphine-confused and hard to hear on the scratchy connection and the call left me deeply homesick and wondering what I was doing. It was the last time I spoke to him.

In the morning I caught the boat back to Ranong. As we came into port, I hung my feet over the side and watched the Burmese coast slip past a few hundred metres away – dull-green jungle over dense mangroves and muddy water. Back at Pon’s Travel I booked the night bus to Bangkok and an Air Asia flight to Rangoon for the following day. 

Koh Payam.

Bangkok – Again

Playing with my new camera on Soi Rambutri, Bangkok.

In a couple of months back in the land of Aus I celebrated my thirtieth birthday, attended four weddings (some of them of complete strangers, I just like free champagne), built a shed, bought a camera, broken a puppy’s toe, done no writing whatsoever, and – most importantly – finally beaten Dad at table tennis. It was mid January 2012, time to get back to the trip.

It was good to catch up with the clan and to meet Amy.

          The new plan – if my vague ideas can be called plans – was to try to cross the Thai-Burma border on the Andaman coast, travel up to Rangoon, north through Burma to the Chinese border, then through Southern China to Shanghai where Alicia had landed a teaching job. How hard could it be? Except everyone said that the Burmese border was closed to foreigners, so was the Chinese border. Hmm, only one way to find out.

            I woke on my second day in Bangkok with a nightmare about being tied in a burlap sack and beaten with bamboo by Burmese border guards still lingering in my brain and set off for a spot of visa shopping. First stop was the Chinese embassy – hardly a byword for friendliness and convenience.

            For anyone wanting to get a Chinese tourist visa in Bangkok, here’s a brief outline of how not to do it. First, don’t spend an hour at the riverboat terminal waiting for a boat that never comes, then you shouldn’t give up and sit in the mid-morning traffic for 45 minutes listening to your taxi driver swear in Thai. Whatever you do, don’t get to the embassy an hour after it opens, spend 20 minutes filling out unbelievably complicated forms and attaching two passport photos and a photocopy of your passport. Then under no circumstances should you take a number and wait THREE HOURS for it to be called only to be told by the turkey behind the Perspex that you can’t get a visa unless you have proof of flights in and out of China and proof of hotel bookings for EVERY NIGHT you are in China. That’s what you shouldn’t do.

            What you should do is find a travel agent on Khao San Road who, for an extra 20 bucks will simply take your passport for three days, forge all the required documents and give you a passport complete with 30-day visa for you while you sit sulking in a bar plotting petty revenge like braking an arm off a terracotta warrior or spray painting a giant cock on the Great Wall. Who says you have to be mature just because you’ve turned 30?

Drinking whiskey buckets on Khao San Rd with some Saigon friends.

             Have you guys ever seen that Bourne Supremacy thing? I know – pretty rubbish film. But there is one scene that made me a bit spongy in the trousers. No, it’s not that French chicks boobs, it’s the scene where Matt Damon opens a Swiss deposit box and finds a little compartment full of passports, credit cards, licenses, loads of cash in different currencies and a gun. Well, now I’ve bloody got one. Ok, so there’s no gun – although there is an unusually sharp-edged library card that could give you a nasty graze – but my big old leather wallet does contain two passports (Aussie and Pommy), three bank cards, two drivers licenses and about a thousand bucks in US dollars and Thai Baht. It also has a laminated four leaf clover which – on reflection – I think I may have stolen, which would explain all the bad luck and Irish people punching me in the face.

            All this is a long-winded, silly way of saying that the upside to the awful shame of having an English-born father is that I have two passports. So the next day I woke up early and trekked to the riverboat station, paid thirty cents to get to central pier and hiked to the Myanmar (Burma to you and I) consulate.

            The visa section of the consulate is a barely signposted building down a side street behind a shopping mall. It wasn’t hard to spot though because at 8.30am (half an hour before it opened) there was a line of 50 travellers sitting on the footpath chatting and reading. With a mixture of sensibly-shoed German backpackers and aging Americans of the floppy-pants, tie-dyed bandana variety it looked like someone had double-booked the Grateful Dead fan club and a Gore-Tex expo at the same venue. By the time the doors opened at 9am the line stretched 100m up the street. I braced myself for another long day but I was in and out in 45 minutes. The only awkward moment came when I had to ‘fess up to the whole double passport thing. I explained to him that my Aussie one with the Thai stamp was at the Chinese embassy and that the reason I had a beard in my UK passport photo had less to do with international espionage and more to do with a beard race I had been involved in at the time. After deciding I was too simple to be a spy he handed me a receipt and told me to stop talking and go away. Two days later I returned to get my newly visa-ed passport.

            For the record, I won the beard race in both length and coverage.

            Paperwork sorted, Alicia and I decided to GTFO of Bangkok to the island of Koh Samed. We spent three days swimming in the warm blue water, eating good food and buzzing through the national park on scooters – just your standard Thai island stuff. It was so pleasant it’s not even worth writing about.

Island life.

            Alicia had a flight to catch to start her new teaching gig in Shanghai. I planned to stay on for one more day before making my way to the Burmese border. As her boat chugged away I could see her, squashed between some fat Russians, crying. On her way to a strange, faraway town to start a new job while I pissed around Burma and China for six weeks. I stood waving and smiling – I can’t remember ever feeling like such a massive prick. After a while I must have got some shit in my eyes. That afternoon I rented the fastest dirt bike I could find and tore around the rutted tracks and sandy roads. Helmetless I jumped, slid and wheelied though the jungle at stupid speeds. Then I booked a boat out.

Pretty Koh Samet.

Vientiane to Australia – Home Jeeves

The Mekong river at Vientiane.

Although only a couple of hundred kilometers apart, Vang Vieng and Vientiane couldn’t be more different. Well, I suppose they could really. If Vang Vieng was the term used to describe that feeling of melancholy and regret one feels after paying to watch a Bruce Willis film and Vientiane was, say, a variety of orange, then I guess they would be more different. But you get the point, they’re a bit different.

            As astute readers will infer from the above paragraph, three weeks riding a motorbike through the rain followed by three days partying in Vang Vieng had done strange and probably long-term things to my brain. Fortunately Vientiane is a likeably boring place, a good place to wind down. It’s not drink-Windex-and-pierce-your-own-nipple, Adelaide-boring or anything, just quiet and restrained, with a smattering of colonial-era French buildings, pretty parks and the muddy Mekong flowing past.

            After a lie-down and a little deep breathing, the first order of business was to offload the bike. I only had a couple of days in town and it had to go. I stayed at the same guesthouse as I had a year before when I had sold my previous bike after riding from Saigon, through the Mekong delta, into Cambodia and up through southern Laos. I bought that bike from the same street in Saigon that I had got this bike from and now I was selling it at the same guesthouse in Vientiane. Viewed on a map, these two trips would make an unbroken loop through Indo-china. The symmetry of it pleased the map-nerd in me no end.

Over 4000kms through three countries on two motorbikes.

            I festooned the bike with for sale signs, posted some more ads on the internet and spent the next couple of days sitting in restaurants with the bike parked conspicuously and waited for the phone to ring. One morning as I lingered over a coffee, I watched an old lady poo into a public rubbish bin. I was tempted – when in Rome and all that – but decided against it. I’m not in Kansas anymore, I thought.

            By the afternoon before my train left for Bangkok, the only offer I’d had for the bike was from a taxi driver who offered to swap it for a ride to the train station – haha. I drank a beer and wondered what to do. I was resigned to riding it to the train station and gifting it to someone when my luck turned. A couple of middle-aged American ladies looked interested. I wandered over and gave them my best pitch. After a brief but terrifying riding lesson I had my asking price of $300us. Those of you who’ve been paying attention will know that that is a $70 profit. Oh yeah.

Not fast, not pretty, but look where she got me.

            The following afternoon I jumped in the back of a little truck with a bunch of other backpackers, stamped out of Laos and boarded the party train bound for flooded Bangkok. It wasn’t advertised as the party train, but when you put enough lonely backpackers together and sell them beer, things kick off.

The train was one of the usual Thai specials with too-cold A/C and arm chairs that turn into bunks for the overnight trip. On the way the to the station I had been espousing the wonders of the Thai dining car to my fellow passengers and once I had chained my bag to the luggage rack I headed in that direction. Beer ordered, I watched the sluggish Mekong pass slowly under the Laos-Thailand Friendship bridge. Not far into northern Thailand the sun set and the backpackers emerged. Unlike the freezing sleeping carriage, the dining car was had open windows and was full of warm tropical air. I had a very decent Massaman curry, begged a cigarette and kept the Singha flowing. When we sped through a village the car filled with the smell of woodsmoke and cooking. Through the flooded paddies it smelled warmly of mud and stagnant water.

Soon eight backpackers had taken over and we set about emptying the ice box. It was like a budget murder on the Orient Express. Only without the murder. Or nice clothes. There was a Belgian, but he had no moustache and his sleuthing abilities were substandard (I hid his beer in a luggage rack but, disappointingly for both of us, he never found it). As well as Herclueless Poirot, there were four Frenchies, an Irishwoman who lived, like most Irish, in Sydney, an Englishman and a Yank. The great thing about meeting people like this is that you know you’ll never see them again. You have about seven hours to conduct an entire relationship. This makes people completely mad, which is fantastic.

ACME Insta-Friends - Just Add Beer.

Except for the Belgian, everyone there was a perfect stereotype. The American was fat, southern and enthusiastic. The Brit’s first name was Conningsby. The Irishwoman was incomprehensible but great craic. One of the Frenchies had just stolen something. Ok that last one’s a bit mean. But she had just been released from a Laotian prison. Apparently the Gallic quartet had come from Vang Vieng to Vientiane with a bagful of leftover weed which they’d smoked in the park. Soon after two of the girls found themselves admiring a clock on the wall of a busy Vientiane café. One of them nicked it. Unfortunately for her the café was owned by the son of a government official. Oops. After two days in jail and a 1000 euro fine she was told to leave the country and never come back.

“I don’t want to go back anyway. It’s a sheet ‘ole.” She told us diplomatically.

The night got louder and drunker as we trundled south through farms and villages. At midnight the attendant told us to stop being silly and go to bed.

Flooded fields north of Bangkok.

In the morning I watched the sun rise over flooded farms north of Bangkok as I nursed an instant coffee and a spongy brain. The extent of the flooding was amazing. For miles the raised train line was the only dry ground. The tops of rice paddy dikes stretched into the distance and islands of dying trees broke the surface. Some houses were on raised ground and surrounded by sandbags, others were window deep and abandoned. Closer to Bangkok the stagnant water had formed motes around apartment buildings and filled streets. People were expecting the water to rise for another week at least and there wasn’t a house without sandbags at the door or newly-built concrete wall.

At the station I shared a tuk-tuk to Koh San Rd where I met Alicia. We spent a day walking near the river watching the water stream out of the drains and over the city streets. There were hardly any tourists around. We boarded the sky-train to the airport under ominous skies and as the doors hissed shut the sky unleashed on the flooding city. It was a good time to go home.

A river-front bar in Bangkok. The water rose for another week after we were there.