Mandalay to Myitkyina – Trainpouline

Mandalay. The end of the road - the road east anyway.

With a couple of weeks left on my Burmese visa and my hopes of crossing into China dashed, I sat and studied a map of Burma over a beer. I had a list of permitted transport routes and restricted provinces and I saw that my options were limited. By area at least, the vast majority of the country was either off-limits entirely or required permits. Because of these restrictions and the slowness of travel, the banana pancake trail – the route taken by backpackers – is particularly deeply grooved in Burma. From Rangoon to Inle lake via a trek from Kalaw with the obligatory stop in Bagan, then to Mandalay and back to Rangoon – around and around it goes. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but with recent lifting of travel warnings by several western nations, this tourist season was booming and the number of cheap beds in hotels licensed to take foreigners was somewhat less then the number of foreigners wanting cheap hotel beds. Anywhere recommended or even mentioned in a guide book was booked out weeks in advance. All I’ll say about the kind of person who sits at home with an itinerary and a Lonely Planet guide booking hotels over the phone in Burma for every night of their stay is that I wouldn’t want be stuck next to them on a bus.

            At this point I’d like to introduce a new and probably controversial regular feature on this blog called ‘Things I Think Should Definitely be Illegal and if you Don’t Agree You’re a Massive Nonce’. Unwieldy title I know but bear with me. The inaugural TITSDBIAIFYDAYAMN is reservations. I support a first come first serve policy in all things, including but not limited to hotels, restaurants, sporting events and all forms of transport. This is, in fairness, mostly because I can’t work reservations. The last time I tried to book a flight online the website emptied my bank account and emailed me a ferry ticket to Greenland, and whenever I book a hotel it’s in a part of town that taxi drivers have either never head of or are too scared to enter. How the hell does one go about booking a youth hostel in Burma from Australia or the UK anyway? I had never considered it a possibility.

            Anyway I was sick of having to choose between overpriced Chinese business hotels and $5 hovels – and nowhere does hovels like Burma – so, as nice as a boat trip across Inle Lake to see a traditional Shan minority make-money-off-white-devil dance or whatever, I decided to give it a miss.

            North of Mandalay towards where the Irrawaddy river is born in the Himalayan foothills near the Chinese border was a town marked in my map as Myitkyina. It is the capital of Kachin state where an uneasy peace reigned between the Burmese army and the rebel Kachin army after a recent bloody uprising. The trip there was still listed in my permitted transport routes and when I looked up my old Lonely Planet, it whined drearily about the slow, dirty and dangerous train ride. I thought that ought to thin the ranks of tourists so I bought a sleeper ticket for the following day.

            I was hoping for a British-era relic but Mandalay’s train station had been recently rebuilt and now sported an odd façade that brought to mind an outsized Swiss chalet in front of two levels of boxy concrete waiting rooms and ticket offices. It was a shame because the train that arrived two hours late belonged in a Victorian brick-and-steel station full of hissing steam and men in splendid hats. The loco was a square modern diesel (anything built after 1970 is modern in Burma) but the carriages were survivors of the original 1920s rolling stock – so many layers of cream paint had been applied over 90 years that every edge appeared rounded and organic and the stern English lettering marking lower, upper and sleeper cars had been carefully retouched. Before the train had stopped people clutching bundles and bags jogged to the doorless entrances, jostling for a seat. The trip would take somewhere between 20 and 30 hours – no one seemed quite sure. Foreigners in Burma pay anywhere between double and 10 times the local price but, embracing my English heritage, I had lashed out for the most expensive ticket, an upper class sleeper – must keep up appearances, old boy. My four-bunk compartment was already occupied by three people.

            “Hello. How much was your ticket?” said a man laying on the opposite top bunk. He was in his thirties, chubby with a baby face and rotten teeth stained red with beetel nut.

            “45 dollars.” I said. All government-run transport is paid in dollars by foreigners.

            “How much kyat?” He frowned.

            “36,000.”

            He hung his head off the edge of his bunk to translate for his mother in the bunk below. “We pay only 10,000 and the people in lower class,” he waved vaguely towards the back of the train, “they pay only 2,000. Where are you from?”

            “Australia.”

            “Australia! Kangaroo, very good. Do you like beer?” I nodded. “Good. We will have a beer.” He vaulted from his bunk, poked his head out of the compartment and made the kissing noise used in Burma to summon a waiter – think of the noise you might make to get the attention of a cat, only louder – and yelled something down the corridor. A teenager carrying a dirty basket full of scratched beer and cola cans stopped outside our compartment. My new friend bought four cans of Myanmar beer and handed me two.

            “We must drink now, before the train goes.”

            “Why?” I asked.

            “You will see.” He grinned, happy to have a drinking partner, and threw his empty can out the window. I hadn’t had a sip yet.

            Soon the train lurched and clanked into motion and I saw why he was in such a hurry. As we picked up speed past a carpet of plastic bags, the train began to bounce and sway. We squeezed between diesel-stained houses built within feet of the tracks – I could easily have touched them – at a maybe 30kph. I sat perched on my bunk next to the window and was forced to press against the underside of the top bunk with my palm to avoid hitting my head every time I became airborne. During an especially spirited period of bouncing I waited for us to de-rail as my free hand snaked and swayed in front of me in a gallant attempt to keep my beer upright. The bouncing came in waves like a succession of earthquakes and I found that I could predict the most spine-compacting periods of seismic activity by listening to the metallic slam of successive carriage couplings hitting their limits as the train moved over a particularly undulating section of line. By listening carefully and letting my elbow go slack I could occasionally get a mouthful of beer which helped me relax into the rhythm. Only another day of this, I thought.

Somewhere, Burma.