Burmese Days

Corina's right. I really do think that everyone should go to Burma. It was so lovely and a nice change of pace from India, which had started to fray my nerves toward the end (more on that in another post). Case in point:  on the drive in from the airport, the driver told us that in Yangon, slow-moving vehicles like bikes, rickshaws, and cows are not allowed in the road. And no horns. So we drove in to the city on silent, empty roads.

We spent Friday in Yangon, visiting the Shwedagon Pagado and walking around the city streets. My impression was that Burmese people must eat out a lot because we passed a ton of sidewalk tea shops and street vendors selling fruit, roasted corn, fried snacks, kebabs, and mysterious bubble tea-looking concoctions. We ate an excellent lunch of noodles at a noodle shop. Also striking was the people with cages full of sparrows that you could buy to set free and earn good karma. (Leading me to wonder if the people who caught them in the first place got bad karma.) 

Later that day, we flew to Bagan. Bagan was the capital of Burma in the 10th to 12th centuries and is the home of something like 4000 temples and pagodas in 42 square kilometers. My friend Jim had warned us that we would want to spend a couple of days there, but we didn't listen. It's not so much that we needed more time to see the temples, because you could spend weeks there and not see them all. But more that it was really beautiful and a nice place to spend time. The highlight:  climbing up to the top of one of the temples to wait for the sunset and looking over the pictures in Corina's guide book with two local kids. The lowlight:  being strongarmed into buying souvenirs from two tiny women who had offered to watch our shoes at one temple.

The next day, we got up early for a 13 hour boat ride up the Irawaddy to Mandalay. This was incredibly peaceful. The Irawaddy is Burma's main river, but is crossed by only two bridges in its 1000 plus mile length. We passed mostly fishing and agricultural villages, and as we got closer to Mandalay, two ancient capitals Sagaing and Inwa, each with dozens of pagodas. The boat was pretty empty, only about 10 passengers, including a couple we had met the day before who told us that they were originally from Penzance -- leading Corina to look at each other and ask under our breath where Penzance was. (England, it turns out.)  We later learned that they were headed to a 10-day silent meditation retreat. The journey came to an abrupt end when we arrived in Mandalay, with a dozen kids invading the cabin asking to carry our bags, followed by a walk through a foul-smelling warehouse and a climb up the unlit riverbank. We got into a cab -- a little tiny pickup truck, with bench seats in the back. I rode in the back and Corina sat up front with the driver and it is debatable which perspective was more terrifying.