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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Faded colonial buildings on the Strand. |
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