You mean, there's no humidity or death heat here?

Unlike any other

In Northern Burma one is plunged into a life where he wishes everything would slow down just so he might hold some semblance of a chance to remember it all. This is more genuine Asia. This makes you feel alive.

On September 8, I boarded the 44 seat prop-plane with 15 others who were all probably with me in wondering how Air Mandalay could possibly afford to fly the thing on such dismal business. Nevertheless, the wonderful flight introduced me to the real Myanmar with the yellow boxed text in the complementary reading listing among the nation's "People's Desires" to crush those with negative views; while simultaneously being pampered and smiled at to no end by the flight attendants. Such is the duality...

We hit ground on target, at a phenomenally modern airport with a grand total of 16 travelers in it after we arrived. We flow through the paperwork with supposed agents of oppression with remarkable ease, and with only smiles on both ends. Huh. Not too bad so far.

The taxi comes equipped with a langyi wearing man that tears to shreds all the westernization of Thailand and "skirts" life with a little more traditional authenticity. Two-legged textiles are second-rate clothing here.

Then...Mandalay. Oh, Mandalay. An organized mass chaos similar to Saigon, but with motorcycles replaced by bicycles and rickshaws. The roads are unwaveringly potholed where not submerged in dirt or water. The city, outside of the very center, is composed almost entirely of mediocre, at best, bamboo housing - save those blessed residences of government officials and Chinese businessmen, usually complete with SUVs in the drive. Water comes from the blackened moat around the palace, the Ayeyarwaddy, or wells just like days of ole. I'll have bottled water. thanks.

Day one. Hour one. Meet Chit Sun Oo, one of those common Asians trying with a strength beyond this world to tug you into their orbits and practice their English. I offered to buy him a beer if he taught me Burmese. He didn't really. Only a few numbers, etc. But he did take the opportunity to throw his very best line at an American - "George Bush is a runny nose." Caught by laughter I was simultaneously shocked at this as I would be by various others' more in-depth knowledge of the outside world throughout my stay. As it ends, this infinitely infamous military junta with an "iron grip" on the nation's people has openly allowed access to the BBC for years - not to mention the more recent addition of Satelite television and everything therein that cause critics to warn of the downfall of civilized society. In terms of information control - only domestic truths are pseudo-hidden. And, largely, in the external media Myanmar, and human rights therein, is conveniently ignored. Thus, need for censorship is negated. (that is, censorship on all outside information save the Internet. The information superhighway does exist to an extent, but in the major towns one will find perhaps one or two cafes that often perplexingly exist practically next door to government offices. Typically, any attempt to view a website that may offer customized access to information will be thwarted by the national firewall. However, in some locations sites such as Anonycat.com - designed to bypass corporate firewalls - serve to futher the cause of human rights. In others anonycat is also blocked, but the smartest systems somehow tap directly into servers in the United States, probably through Thailand, and provide instant access to practically every fact and factoid on the planet. I was just enjoying my time in the abyss too much to update you all.)

Not only this, but as I grew more and more into the culture, it seems that the Burmese are even more driven to acquire knowledge in any form than in the rest of Southeast Asia that I know. Maybe even more than in the West. It's almost as though through oppression, both of economics and of the mind, they find despair; so they take refuge in gaining knowledge just for the sake of knowledge. An unexpected twist.

Chit Sun Oo and I ride around the entire next day on the typical cruiser bikes. We hit some impressive yet bland teak-wood monasteries, a shop with thousands of buddhas and tribal relics from around the country stretching into several rooms - each of which is lit up as I walk into it, whereupon the salesman runs back to the other to flip the preceding switches back to off. To cliché it as it has never been clichéd before - I felt like good ol' Indiana heading for the Temple of Doom. We also dropped by the area of town where hundreds of marble buddhas are carved by hand constantly; which was only the very begginning of a long inner dialogue on why the hell the world needs a buddha for every three square feet of earth. Just STOP already. Look at the gagillion that you already have! But no....never too many buddhas...

This fact is signified in Mahamuni pagoda, where a large Buddha wearing a sweater of gold leaf that has grown to be several inches thick over the past century. All the leaves are made by hand by pounding gold fragments for months on end. Why? Well, because this is a REAL Buddha, not just an IMAGE of a Buddha as are carved daily.

Oh. Of course.

Also during my time in Mandalay I came to be the aquaintance of a tourist-hunter by the name of "Cherry." A woman of 49 years who looked to be 80 no less, she claimed aquaintance to everyone in Mandalay (which I later verified many-a-time) and that for some reason her visibly ill-healed broken shoulder kept her from practicing her profession. Being that her profession was teaching English, I found that claim more than slightly confusing.

However, after seeing the holed walls and flooded floor (an understatement) of her mosquito-infested 5 by 10 shack, and her two suitcases of belongings under her Jesus altar, I didn't much care about the validity of the claim anymore. I can safely say that sleeping in this "home" would provide for the most dismal existence imaginable. Sleeping on the street might well be better. So after she washed my feet of her floor/mud with water from the Jesus-era clay pot filled with H2O that "the boy brings" (the boy is an elderly hunchbacked man in a shack next door) and hearing that her pots had been stolen a year before so she couldn't cook, I made the rash decision to buy her pots. Hell, even if she suckers every tourist into the cookery purchase only to return it the next day, I simply couldn't live with myself had I not spent the $3 on the possibility of making her life a little better.

My entire time in Mandalay was not defined by the stupa-covered hills stretching towards the plain on the banks of the Ayeyarwaddy, nor the stream of monks and stragglers on the 1.2 kilometers of a rickety wooden bridge at Amarapura. Mandalay was defined by people like Cherry, and like the rickshaw driver who explained the bribes behind the illegal floating bamboo trade and the ferry to the illegal gambling ring alongside the police station; and like the woman amidst the throngs of launderers in the Ayeyarwaddy screaming across the crowd in disgust as she had been accused of stealing - an insult of magnificent proportions for a Buddhist; and like the taxi drivers who bought me beers; and like the stranger who paid for my chapati on the street. In this nation where for the first time I can respond to pleas that "Myanmar is a very poor country" with a genuinely honest "yes. Yes it is," the people are among the friendliest on the planet.


The Book Man

As I moved on to Hsipaw I met Mr. Book alongside yet another Israeli. On the first attempt at conversation, Mr. B sent us away as he whispered "the police are watching me" and pointed to the street. As the well known dissident Monk down the road had been arrested recently, we left in a pretty rapid clip. On a subsequent attempt, he was sure the surveillance had been suspended pending the completion of a European league soccer game at the Cinema. He poured out the information.

The government is trying to rewrite the constitution as a typical attempt to increase positive international regard. The opposition boycotts. The Shan Army may have already broken the cease-fire agreement nearby. Trekking in the area is a terrible idea.

I leave the conversation with a few things running thourhg my head. First, how third world this whole attempt at oppression really is. Or, if you prefer, how half-hearted. How imperfect. Again, how human. Mr Book is written about in the guidebook, yet in all the years is still "free." Moreover, despite the fellow dissident's arrest; and despite his being monitored, he is still very willing to talk to us openly after we walk through his front door just because he thinks the spy is at the soccer game. It seems that I would be more covert were I Mr. Book, and more hard-handed were I the policeman. That is, if I were an agent of oppression.

I still leave feeling like I've done something wrong just by being there, though. Like a small tinge of fear has found its way into my mind and convinced me that free speech is taboo. And yet, this place, I believe, has much in common with Iraq pre-2003. Factions of society with nothing in common but a colonial boundary. Factions that might erupt in chaos of separatism rather than cooperation were the hard hand to disappear. But the arguments and philosophy to be discussed therein could bore you more than an afternoon of televised golf, so I'll spare you...for now.


Kyauk Me

Kyauk Me (pronounced Chau Me because some crazy Brit who created the Roman version is an idiot) provided an opportunity to be absolute smothered for a day as an English Teacher, a bus ticket agent, a cargo driver, and an English student fought for the right to show me around. In this town of zero tourists, I ate in the luxurious home (must have something to do with government) of a Shan woman, saw a few manual labor factories, had tea at the student's house, saw tea production on a tour led by the tea producer, was treated to local Mohinga (soup) by a friend of the ticket agent, went to two mountaintop monasteries, taught two English classes, and learned to play snooker while wooden oxcarts rolled by on the dusty roads outside. All in the name of English practice. And just good old hospitality to put southern hospitality to shame.

Southward back through Mandalay where I go for a pathetic run around the palace in celebration of Jenny's birthday because, well, Jenny likes running. And damnit, if I can't talk to her because of $6 per minute phone calls, I'll at least go for a run. Running, by the way, is still silly and stupid - probably because I'm terrible at pacing myself.


Disenchanted Glory

Then Bagan (which we get to only after the bus's drive shaft somehow breaks and we sit roadside for 4 hours or so) where a few thousand temples cover a very limited plain on the bank of - you guessed it - the Ayeyarwaddy. The view is indeed magnificent if you can get even 15 feet above the plain. Luckily, all but two temples had their second stories closed for some stupid reason like "they were built 1000 years ago and are fragile." So for the most part one just rides around looking at nearly identical stupas for a few hours until sunset, which was remarkably dull.

In fact, the best decision I made in Bagan was to throw the hotel's advice to the wind and bike on my crappy cruiser several miles out of town to a mountaintop pagoda overlooking the plane. When I reach the bottom of the hill a few men and women are drinking tea and invite me for a cup. They exchange some money between themselves at one point, and we share a moment on how worthless Kyat are, and they chuckle as they ply for dollars in exchange. Then I ditch the bike for the climb and after a coke and pizza-flavored terrible snack chips arrive at the pagoda in time for sunset, which isn't too spectacular save the hills jutting from the plains as if the Burmese version of the Flatirons, then rolling southward like the back of a serpent. So THAT's where these Asians get all their ideas.

Westwasrd is the plain with distant pagodas speckling the area between palm trees and rice paddies of both brown and green. In the distance is the grand Ayeyarwaddy weaving around the base of the mountains guarding the far side of the valley, and finally curving around their southern flank to box them in.

"They" include three rows of peaks, each larger, fainter and bluer than the first. Each more magnificent.

Behind me, where the clouds meet the horizon; is a deep glowing blue that whispers of how beautiful the world really is. To touch it all off, just at the right moment, the sky glows orange above the serpentine ridge. The kind of view that escapes attempts at photography. The view that when boxed in loses its majesty.

All of it witnessed from atop a small wall on the mountaintop, under the glow of a towering golden pagoda encirlced with Buddhas. As the sun disappears and darkness obscures the landscape, the pagoda - and some others in the distance - are lit by incandescence in this land where electricity rarely works and generators are inexorably expensive.

This is Burma.


Orwell swoops in again...

And so is Pyay, where I meet another tourist-hunter who buys my tea first thing in the morning. We zip over to his house - a standard 2-story teakwood/bamboo combo with several lakes forming on the ground floor. This issue is not abetted by a woman throwing dishwater onto one of them. Then we head to a monastery where I somehow end up playing checkers against monks.

A crazy man who apparently lives at the monastery though not a monk has tatooed arms and weird white curly long whiskers growing from his cheeks. He wants to arm wrestle. I lose. Monks laugh. Together we all go upstairs to watch the local lottery which apparently comes across the screen with stock info - you know, DOW, NASDAQ, etc. scrolling under CNN-esque coverage. I have no idea what number they looked for other than it was 51 and my 60 got me nothing. After a sporadic somewhat terrifying massage by the Boxer with white whiskers, I eat at the tourist-hunter's house while everyone else just watches. For me three kinds of curry. For two other men who come later, just rice and peppers. The special treatment still afforded to white people today would make one wonder if any time had passed since Orwell's Burmese Days.

We also visited a giant buddha wearing spectacles. A bizarre image to whom monetarily-challenged believers give their own eyeglasses in hopes that it will aid their eyesight. Oh the things we do in the name of religion...

Speaking of which, Buddhism has become something entirely different in my mind now that I've finished the book given to me by the Monk in Dalat, Vietnam. Pure Land Buddhism, it seems, disregards the need to achieve enlightenment and nirvana in this lifetime. It replaces the self with a pleading to Buddha - through constant chanting of his name - to deliver the practitioner to the Pure Land. To Heaven. There, he will live in Eternal bliss and have ample time to become enlightened in the company of those before him. In this way, it seems, Buddha - born a simple human prince - gains title of not only leader or guide, but of God. Accept Jesus in your life or accept Buddha, to corresponding believers they both seem to have the same effect.


Salvation in a big dull city

Which brings us to Yangon, where I was stunned to see a big church with "Salvation Army" slapped on the front. I went in for a conversation with the regional director for Malaysia, Singapore, and Myanmar. Interesting to no end to hear of the projects they undertake and the ways they find to skirt the government - i.e. build a community center, never a church. Even more intriguing, however, was his analysis of the entity's efforts to bring Jesus to the lives of Burmese. I think they come to Christ when they see that we offer eternal salvation. This life is only a small part of the whole picture and you can live forever in the mercy of God. This is what we offer that they don't have..."well, I don't know if they have it. But we certainly do and I think that's what brings them to us."

Are there words to describe? Words to display the jaw-dropping amazement that this native Burman who has dedicated his life to turning people toward Christianity doesn't even understand or, apparently, wish to understand the belief he turns them against? That he doesn't know of the belief to break the cycle of life and death? The belief and benefits of enlightenment? The belief in Pure Land? Maybe, maybe not. But the rift is less than unpredictable, I suppose.

The rest of Yangon was remarkably dull. Not too many amazing people were met. Smiles and bows are rarely returned in the street. Big block buildings dominate the cityscape. Overall, it's terrible. Alas, I was stuck there for a week for a few reasons. The first: logistics. That is to say, flights. The second: infectious disease. Are you serious? Yes. I got yet another infection and this time was ready and willing to buy a ticket to Bangkok to avoid being cared for in a land where a bachelors degree is achieved in 6 months of study - spread out over 4 years, of course. And in this land where at least one person I met could not locate a medical dictionary anywhere. Requiring any sort of treatment while alone in Burma brings to light a small aspect of what life really means here. It is not by chance that one constantly meets disfigured bodies, or eyes with cataracts, or hacking coughs, or.... Oppression is not always half-assed.

Instead, though, I recieved some advice on treatment from home and hung out in Yangon poised ready to fly at any moment. Eventually, I mustered the courage to venture afield to Kyaitiyo, where one of the holiest sights in Myanma resides.


How can we ruin nature today?

After bickering with the truck driver over how much the foreigners (6) would have to pay to get the cargo of 48 people moving, we finally head off to the starting point of the pilgrimage. A few minutes pass before I give in to my all-too-rapid pace of hiking and leave everybody else to hobble to the top. 45 minutes later I've paid the $6 "foreigner discount" and am engulfed in fog, staring at the stupa. Of course, I could write magnificently about it: Just at the summit of the jungle peak emerges a single spire of granite. The grays and blacks of the Earth streak skyward until just at the crest they dissolve into a golden lotus of the heavens. Sitting atop the throne as an emblem of the perfect world beyond, a boulder lay as though carefully place by a goliath turned holy. Teetering on edge, as though a simple tap will bring chaos to all below, the idol calls out to all who will listen: "save yourselves as he showed you how."

But, alas, it would all be bullshit. It's just a big boulder. A big foggy boulder atop a mountain virtually ruined by viewing platforms and tourist-bait. (Sorry, Pilgrim-bait.) To say I was disappointed, however, is a fallacy to the highest. Better to say that it was exactly as I had expected it to be, but had hoped it wouldn't be. Perhaps expectation determines more than just anticipation. If you want to see cool rocks, go to Canyonlands.


Burkha Intermission

Back in Yangon I waste one more day in the dull before sitting in the airport with a few other travelers during the four hour delay of our flight to Dhaka. For an idea of how Biman Bangladesh operates, feast on this: In the Biman office sits a man ready to sell you a ticket. This man then shows up at the airport, where he runs the desk to take your airport tax. Some time later, he occupies another position to give you a boarding pass and check your bag. Then he appears in the waiting area to guide you upstairs where he will aid in the serving of the complementary meal due to the delay. Later, he will take your ticket as you board the plane. And finally, he will aid passengers aboard the jet in stowing their luggage in the overhead bin.

In Dhaka one is herded in chaos among Indians flaunting their status as Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist to a desk where your flight ticket for the next day is exchanged for a plastic token. Then to a desk where your passport is exchanged for a decaying laminated "transit token." Your life is now in the hands of sketchy Bangladeshi officials.

After two or so hours you will arrive at your terrible hotel. The next morning to awake at 5:30 in an attempt to see perhaps a market or some other aspect of life here only to find that you are situated 20 km from town. Nevertheless, a walk will lead you through a land of Islam where at least one entire cow is being butchered in the middle of the street.

It will be demanded that you be ready for the shuttle to the airport, which is about 2 minutes away, three hours before your flight. At which point you will wait one hour for the shuttle. You will approach the desk at the airport where the clerk will say "passport? You have passport?" And then call someone in confusion. Finally, though, your passport will arrive and you will proceed to the gate.

Here you will meet a man from Hawaii who apparently lives in Boulder on Grove street now, though he omitted that point when you first asked his origin. His neck-lenth wavy white hair and semi-albino face indicates that he may be either 1) very interesting 2) just plain crazy.

A little bit of both, the entire exchange is epitomized by the fact that the tug boat on which he used to work in Alaska picked him up in Hawaii in 1967 as he had "sold LSD to the wrong guy or something" and carried him for three months to Vietnam. Here, he rode through the war on the Mekong into Cambodia while "everybody shot at [them]. Even the Americans." All this, just for fun.

After disappointingly seeing no Himalayan peaks on the flight, I stand at the immigration desk (that is, AT the immigration desk, with my passport in the officer's hands) as this man explains loudly that Nepal in 1964 brought him to enlightenment through LSD. This is a pilgrimage to his roots. Somehow, we still got through.


The destination anew

Then it happened. I emerged into a land where ungodly humiditiy has given way to heavenly dry heat reminiscent of Colorado this time of year. Where 9,000 foot mountains surround a city of sporadic neighborhoods. It just feels right.

As I walk down the street of the Kathmandu Khao San, I marvel at the bookshops selling material other than sporadic newsweeks from 1996 or 1962 and the manual to the 1986 Toyota Corrolla. Internet cafes actually exist en masse. ATMs abound. This is definitely not Burma.

At to top it all off, my heart jumped at the view of a down sleeping bag. Ice Axes. Boots. Coats. I know I'm in heaven when it appears - a topo map. The mere fact that topo exists to be graphed is something wholeheartedly wonderful. Something to revive the dead. And in the upper right corner the number - 8848.

Sagarmatha, Chomolungma, Everest. Welcome to Nepal.