Myitkyina to Bhamo – Much Against Everyone’s Advice

An San Suu Kyi

At a restaurant perched above the broad Irrawaddy river I gazed lazily through a picket of empty tea cups and Mandalay beer bottles. Flies buzzed over the remains of lunch – rice with a gristly but tasty chicken curry. Max dozed in his chair, bare feet resting on a plastic stool, a German novel forgotten on his stomach. We had been drinking in what he called the Bavarian way, one beer before lunch and one after, and in the steamy tropical heat it had a pleasantly soporific effect. Below us a girl dressed in a sarong beat clothes on a smooth rock and laid them out neatly on the pebbly bank where they sat in the sun like a huge patchwork quilt. Beyond the slow, brown river rice paddies carpeted a wide valley floor in front of distant mountains that piled higher until I couldn’t tell where they ended and the sky began. We were as far north as we could get in Burma. Farther on the dirt highway dissolved into high footpaths and the river split into clear, fast streams of snow melt. Somewhere over the horizon the Indian and Chinese borders snaked through 4000m ice mountains. It was the end of the road.

            I had met Max on my first day in Burma nearly three weeks before but had not seen him again until we almost literally bumped into each other at our grimy little hotel. He had looked pale and told me of his horror train ride from Mandalay during which he had been struck down with stomach problems while crammed into a wooden seat for thirty hours. He had bounced back manfully the following day and we wandered Myitkyina’s markets and dirty, tree-lined streets for two days while he taught me to swear in German and we tried to determine whether our grandfathers had shot at each other during the war.

            The town was abuzz with talk of the upcoming visit of An San Suu Kyi. Hotels and family homes filled and then overflowed with the tide of people coming in from outlying towns and villages. Many of them had walked for days and were easy to spot with their dirty hands and traditional Kachin clothing. When they saw us, kids hid in their mother’s sarongs and men muttered to each other, called out greetings or just stared.

            An San Suu Kyi is a national hero and on the day of the rally Max and I were swallowed in a honking, singing jam of people and cars as we made our way to the overgrown sporting field where she was to speak. We were joined by a Japanese girl who had gained my undying love by a) having the fantastic name of Misaki Nakayama and b) offering me Indian chapatti bread on our first meeting.

The world's happiest traffic jam.

            The Australian government travel advisory warns against both traveling to this part of Burma and attending any pro-democracy events. But then according to the government advisory any country besides New Zealand and Switzerland is a seething den of murderers and scary foreign types. I had long ago taken as my motto an unusual mash of two of last century’s greatest thinkers – Sir Winston Churchill and Austin Powers.

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and carny folk,” I muttered to myself as the crowd sucked us along. Again my insane pseudo mantra was proved correct, it was a perfect carnival atmosphere – like AFL grand final day in Melbourne, but without the Collingwood supporters. And not a carny in sight.

            Outside the sports field traffic was stopped and we edged between tooting trucks overloaded with singing, chanting people waving the red flag of the National League for Democracy, An San Suu Kyi’s once-banned political party. A dark 4x4 with black windows pushed it’s way silently through the chaos and we watched as it clipped the back wheel of a motorcycle that hadn’t gotten out of the way fast enough. The rider and the bike fell onto the road but the 4x4 didn’t stop or even slow as it disappeared into the throng.

            “Government,” a man said to me with a tight smile. The rider got up and a couple of guys helped her with the bike. No one even looked at the government vehicle.

            By the time we had squeezed through the gate the woman they simply call ‘the lady’ had already begun speaking. I guessed the crowd to be about 20,000. I stood hard against the back fence and peered through a thicket of red flags. An San Suu Kyi stood on a raised dais flanked by supporters. Dressed symbolically in ornate Kachin dress, she looked older than I expected but still slim and ramrod straight. Every few minutes the crowd roared their approval and ten thousand red flags flicked back and forth. Often she was interrupted by a question from the audience to which she listened carefully before replying, usually to gales of laughter. I hadn’t the faintest idea what she said but she was clearly a superb speaker and adored – even worshipped – by the crowd. I listened for half an hour and then wandered through the crowd. The occasional English speaker would ask me where I was from and if I was a journalist, to which I would squeak an alarmed, “no!” I got chatting to a well-dressed man with perfect English which he kept apologizing for. He told me that only a couple of years ago a rally like this would have been unthinkable. As I was leaving he grabbed my elbow, darted his eyes from side to side and whispered, “Be careful.” Then he let me go and began laughing. “Ha! Got you.” Ha bloody ha.

The crowd.

            Behind the crowd, half hidden in a stand of trees I found three vehicles full of riot police. One of the men looked at my camera and waved me away. The rest were half asleep.

            After the rally we sat in a tea shop and watched the crowd leave, still waving their flags, singing and honking. A pick-up crammed full of men pointed to my camera and posed for a photo, laughing.

            On the walk back I thought how refreshing it was to see people so passionate about the future of their country. It felt like a population that could finally taste the end of decades of repression and violence. And that, my new friends and I decided, was a pretty good reason for a beer.

            The following day we all boarded an Air Myanmar flight south to Bhamo – another no-no according to the Aussie government due to the supreme dodgyness of their fleet of old prop planes. But the road south was in the control of one or another of Burma’s rebel armies and the ferry we had hoped to catch downstream could not navigate the shallow, silted river at this time of year. As it turned out the plane was a boringly modern jet rather than the WWII military surplus clunker I had secretly hoped for. The only pulse-quickening moment on the 17 minute flight was the deep thud of an overhead locker door shooting open soon after take off. Safely in Bhamo we found a hotel and went in search of the ferry ticket office.