Bagan to Mandalay – Smoke Me a Kipling

Burmese trucks - I just want one.

There’s a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling called ‘The Road to Mandalay’ or some such thing. Now as we all know, poems that aren’t limericks are far too awful to consider actually reading so I haven’t read that one, but as my bus swayed and jolted down the actual road to Mandalay I wondered how a poem about being crushed against a window and sandblasted with dust while dying for a pee ever got so popular. I later learned that the man named after the area behind a sawmill (“Where do the offcuts go, boss?” “Just throw ‘em in the rudyard.”) had never actually been to Mandalay. This, in limerick form, is what he would have written if he had.

           

There once was a road to Mandalay

            It was shit

Now I know that’s not technically speaking a limerick, but it captures the essence of my experience. The bus, in true Burmese fashion, was hopelessly overloaded with three people to every double seat and the aisle full of plastic stools that bounced and slid on cracked linoleum as we slammed through potholes and swerved around ox carts. We stopped, or at least slowed slightly, every few miles to pick up passengers from the ends of dirt roads or ten-hut villages choked with dust. All day we passed flat, dry fields. As we crawled through towns girls rattled stones in dented pots, begging for money from the passing motorists. As our shadow flickered through the grass, I could see the silhouettes of the handful of guys who rode on the roof, laying on sacks and luggage. After a rest stop I began climbing onto the roof but the driver pulled me away, saying it was dangerous. I tried to explain that I just wanted slap the guy who’s red beetel-nut spit kept flying past, and sometimes into, my window and then return to my seat but it was a hard concept to mime and anyway it was a lie – I’ve always wanted to ride on the roof of a bus, and it looked infinitely more comfortable than my seat. I past the next four hours in my sun-nuked seat with no food or water and my sunscreen safely packed away and lashed to the roof.

Mandalay’s bus station is actually an enormous dirt parking lot filled with hundreds of buses. Ticket sellers sit behind sandwich boards advertising prices and departure times. They are all private companies and popular routes are often serviced by a dozen buses, the prices depending on their speed and state of disrepair. Air conditioned coaches sat beside windowless 1950s school buses without seatbacks and between them all a near-gridlock of honking taxis and reversing buses. As we rolled to a halt in long grass next to a chain link fence I disembarked through a mob of taxi drivers, swooning like a Victorian lady-in-waiting. I let an older guy lure me onto his motorbike taxi with the promise of a drink. I chugged a litre of water, letting it dribble down my neck as though I was advertising a rehydrating sports beverage (Why do they do that, by the way? I watch those adverts and think, “well, I’ll certainly avoid that product, it looks incredibly difficult to drink.”) before whirring towards Mandalay.

The city was a hot square grid made of concrete and dirt set against a huge palace compound fenced with a moat and high walls. Beyond the palace rose Mandalay hill – its gold-roofed pagodas just visible through the smoke haze. Mortorbikes were banned in Rangoon but Mandalay was choked with scooters going the wrong way and blocking intersections while tiny blue Mazda utilities the size of pedal cars squatted under a load of crouching passengers. I had, my driver told me, hit afternoon peak hour. The first three hotels I tried were full but eventually I found a room up seven flights of stairs. As I fumbled for my passport at the reception desk, a group of businessmen elbowed me out of the way and started jabbering at the clerk, all talking at once. He gave them a key and they sat down on the lobby couches, ashing their cigarettes on the carpet and talking so loudly I could hardly hear my room number. Soon they left.

“I’m sorry about those men, they are Chinese,” said the clerk screwing up his nose and glaring at their retreating backs. “They’re so rude.”

Mandalay is only a day’s drive from the Chinese border and the clerk told me that trucks bring a stream of cheap electrical goods and plastic tat into Burma through the city.

“They get rich but we get nothing.” I felt like pointing out that he was employed by a hotel full of Chinese businessmen but he had mentioned something about a hot shower and I was excited. It was my first hot shower in Burma and by the time I had scrubbed myself a few shades lighter it was dark and I was starving. I found a restaurant – all Chinese food, I noticed – and sat planning my next move. I had hoped to go from Mandalay through the border town of Lashio and into Kunming in China, the same road that the Chinese trucks were plying, but with fighting near the border the whole area was off-limits. I rather snidely considered disguising myself as an endangered species or an old growth forest – a sure way to get into China – but of course I would be immediately killed. Or mulched.

The next day I got talking to a Chinese backpacker – the first I had met – who was drunk at lunchtime and looking for company. He was on his way back home to Xi’an in central China by land. I told him that I wanted to do the same and he became my instant best friend.

“Then we will go together!” He exclaimed, toasting our journey.

“But I can’t go cross the border. I think I must fly.” I said.

“No, no. I will check for you.” He fished in his pocket for a mobile phone and made a call to the Chinese border post.

“No good. He says that only Chinese people can cross. If you try you go to jail. Or maybe Burmese people shoot you,” he leaned closer, “They’re crazy, you know.”

It looked like I was flying.

Best. Thing. Ever.

Bagan – Angering the Gods in Tourist Town

Bagan.

My first impressions of the Burmese tourist Mecca of Bagan were coloured by the dreamworld of a 5am bus stop. Two drunks stood under a streetlight exchanging wild haymakers that connected with sharp slaps. Somewhere in the distance a tinny loudspeaker broadcast the Buddhist morning prayer, a monotonous monotone chant over discordant music. Three young monks pedalled past and creaked into the mist. The brawlers chased each other away but their yells echoed out of the darkness for a long time as I warmed my hands on an instant coffee and watched a yawning man hitch his blinkered horse to a cart, ready for the morning rush of tourists wanting to watch the sunrise over Bagan’s ancient temples. I yawned in sympathy and my mouth felt gritty after 24 hours on a succession of dusty buses so overloaded that people sat in the aisles on plastic stools and men rode on the roof and spat blood-red beetel nut juice past the open windows.

            As the dawn tinged the mist orange, a trishaw driver offered to take me to a cheap hotel. The place was old and dirty but I didn’t care as I flopped onto the bed and passed out.

            At midday it was a different place – hot under a clear sky and crawling with tourists. I walked past souvenir stands and hotels to restaurant row where I wolfed my first meal in 36 hours. Desperate to stretch my aching back, I spent the afternoon walking amongst the crumbling ruins of ancient temples. No longer haunted and foreboding as they had seemed from my bus window, they dot the plain at random and goats graze around them while their herders sit on thousand year old steps. There are more than 2,000 within a few square miles and although a steady stream of middle-aged tourists in horse carts and backpackers on wobbly bicycles passed me, there were still more temples than visitors and I spent a happy few hours humming the Indiana Jones theme while crawling through dark passages and clambering over crumbling roofs. I wished I had a large whip and a sexy assistant, although what I’d do with them is no business of yours.

Early morning ballooning over ancient temples.

            In the evening I hired a bike to get an early start for sunrise but at 6am my hotel clerk was snoring on a cot and my bike was locked behind a spiked gate. I didn’t have the heart to wake him so I muscled my bike over the fence, nearly skewering myself. I pedalled through another cold mist and again the temples seemed ghostly and strange, like squared-off pyramids silhouetted against the lightening sky. I swerved through soft sand towards a likely looking temple, off by itself and on a slight rise. The view from the top was a postcard scene of hundreds of temples wreathed in mist and sapped of colour in the half light. As I clambered higher up the steeply stepped roof for a better vantage point, a 500 hundred year old piece of mortar came away in my hand and for a moment I teetered above a 30 foot drop. I wind-milled my arms like a cartoon character and remembered that I had forgotten to remove my shoes before entering the temple – that’ll teach me.

            I returned back to my lower, less spirit-infuriating position and watched the scene change colour and sharpen in the breathless air. As the sky began to blue, five hot air balloons took off and drifted low and slow above the skyline. I could clearly hear their burners hiss from a kilometre away. The sun appeared dull orange and stretched from behind low mountains and I stood filling SD cards as the landscaped changed from uniform grey to jungle-green broken by red-brown temples and white mist which hugged the ground.

Eventually I tore myself away and spent hours wobbling my bike between rows of deserted temples on sand tracks I shared with ox-carts before hunger forced me back to the burgers, wi-fi and all-day happy hours of restaurant row.

Poser.

Chaung Tha – Confessions of a Burmese Beach Bum

Chaung Tha beach, Burma.

Still aching from a hellish bus ride from the Irrawaddy delta, I limped the length of Chaung Tha beach and let the sea breeze restore my sanity, such as it is. Bamboo huts selling plastic toys, coconuts and beer dotted the brownish sand between scraggly palms and the dull green chop of the Bay of Bengal. Locals riding tandem bikes along the beach waved and asked were I was from. A group of teenaged boys back-flipped off a pontoon behind the break and fully-clothed girls splashed and giggled in the shallows. At a construction site on a rocky point, English signs on the scaffolding advertised a luxury hotel. Near the end of the beach the huts and palms had been replaced by new white-washed resorts and I wondered how long it would be before prices would soar beyond the reach of many of the holidaying families I passed. 

            On the beach I got talking to an American girl and we spent the afternoon drinking beer and playing guess-which-European-country-the-fat-old-man-in-speedos-is-from.

            My friend Win in Pathien had given me the name of a travel agent where I might be able to rent a motorbike so the following morning I spoke to a friendly young guy who said he would rent me his scooter for about $10 dollars on the condition that I didn’t ride in town where he said the police might fine me. He dropped me at a resort out of town and arranged to meet at four o’clock.

Oh, artsy. A Buddhist shrine north of Chaung Tha.

I rode through deep sand tracks between sweeping coral-white beaches and cool groves of palms under which people dozed in front of small grass houses with million dollar views. 20km north of Chaung Tha the road reached a small village and disappeared into a wide river mouth. There was another village on the far bank and I watched as a truck drove onto a small barge which chugged across the river towards me. The whole palm fringed scene was sparkling blue and white with the only noise the muffled popping of the small engine. The barge beached in front of me and thirty people jumped from the truck’s open tray and onto the soft white sand. The driver revved mightily and aimed for the tyre tracks of a previous crossing. As he reversed up the beach there was a cough and clatter of something terminal followed by sudden silence. The truck sat dead, its rear wheels axle deep in sand. A collective sigh went up from the passengers, but tinged with laughter and resignation – these were obviously people used to unreliable transport. The driver produced a length of heavy rope which he doubled around the tow bar while a group of young men excavated the sand from around the wheels with plastic shovels. Everyone pulled, the men straining, showing off to the girls who were too busy laughing at the silly westerner at the end of the rope to do much good. Eventually we got the stricken vehicle off the beach and the driver slid underneath to look for the source of the oil pooling on the road.

The dead truck almost off the beach.

            Another truck going the other way drove onto the barge and it chugged back across the river. I wished I could load my little scooter on too and explore this amazing coast further but I knew that north of this river was the start of one of Burma’s many restricted areas and I couldn’t imagine the authorities taking kindly to a board-shorted backpacker rattling around on a hired scooter. Instead I stopped in a little stall for a warm Star Cola poured from an often-reused bottle and tried some guide-book Burmese on the friendly owner. My natural aptitude for languages held true and I may as well have been speaking Swahili but we persevered. He proudly showed me a photo of him and his teenaged son holding an enormous fish. It was at least three feet long and he pointed to the river mouth beside us and mimed fishing with a hand line. His wife slid a huge half melon in front of me, jabbing a spoon in the sweet flesh and miming that it was free. I bought a packet of cigarettes and passed them around with some of the men who were waiting for their truck to be repaired. When I left an hour later the pool of oil under the truck had spread and the passengers waited patiently.

I dearly wanted to drive onto this barge and across the river but the other side is off-limits to foreigners.

            I left the beach and wound up a broken tarmac road high into the hills past jungle and mountains obscured by smoke haze. As I stood on the side of the road snapping photos, a man in a dusty suit jacket pulled up beside me.

            “Hello, hello. Please, you drive now. It is danger to stop here, too danger.”

            “Why is it dangerous?”

            “Um, big animals. Take tree,” he began, struggling for the word. “Animal, big nose. Very dangerous.”

            I grasped what he meant. “Elephants!” We rode side by side and he explained that they were being used to log the jungle nearby and sometimes carried timber down this road. A few miles on we came to a more major road and he pointed me back towards town where I met the scooter’s owner. He looked nervous and told me that the police were at a tea shop around the corner. As we rode past I waved but they just stared at me.

            I lost track of time on sleepy Chaung Tha beach and it wasn’t until I looked at my hotel receipt one morning that I realized I had been in Burma for 10 days. I only had 18 days left on my visa so I booked a ticket to Bagan and braced myself for another bus ride. 

Crossing this bridge was sketchy with skinny scooter tyres.

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.