Burma - More Things We Have Learned

As we continue to quietly sail down the Irrawaddy River we pick up more information about Burma.
1. The Irrawaddy River rises 50 feet in the rainy season. In the delta region it can rise 200 feet.

2. Many villagers on the banks of the river have to move their homes, their belongings and their livestock every 6 months. Then they return a few months later when the rain stops.


3. 60% of the population of Bagan works in the tourist industry.

4. The tourist industry is down by 80% this year, and some say it is down by up to 90%. The people of Bagan are really hurting, as is the rest of the country.

5. On our one hour drive back from Poppa to Bagan, we saw exactly three other cars.

6. We have been traveling for 9 days now and have seen very few monks.

7. Many workers who we talk to in the tourist industry, tell us directly that they hate their government.

8. There is a pension for people over 65, but it consists of a few dollars a month, and no one can live on it. Consequently yet another burden is placed on the workers – they have to support their parents in their old age.

9. A phone line, believe it or not, costs $5,500 to install. A cell phone costs over $2000 and can only be bought on the black market, which in this case means buying one from a government employee.

10. Electricity is cheap, but who cares, if you can hardly ever get it.

11. Men and women of all ages wear a skin cream made from the bark of the Dhanakhar tree. It protects from the sun, and helps against acne and wrinkles. It is a yellow color and the women and children paint it on to their faces every day.


When boys get old enough to feel self conscious, they stop wearing it in the day time. But most everyone, including the men, put it on at night. We have been commenting that the Burmese have wonderful skin, and if this is the reason for it, we have to get some! But maybe it’s too late!

Poppa - Dinner and Politics

We buy a bottle of Champagne, which a Boy named Sue has never tasted before. He takes to it like a duck takes to water, and demolishes the best part of the bottle while we are still working on our first glass. We do nothing to stop him, as his reluctance to talk politics disappears with each glass he consumes. He tells us that this Hotel would normally be packed at this time of year. Last year every hotel in Bagan was filled and there weren’t enough cars, drivers, and tour guides to go round. This year the Hotels are empty, and the tour guides and drivers are struggling to find work. He goes on to say how life is getting harder every year for the people of Burma. He, and most of the educated people, are fed up and really angry. But the poor and uneducated are not interested in politics. He claims that when the demonstrations were going on, the government actually rounded up the people from the countryside and offered them food, soap and shampoo if they would gather in the streets and shout pro government slogans, which of course they did. Buddhists believe that what ever happens to them in this life is a direct result of how they behaved in their last life. So a hard life is just seen as a penalty that must be endured, and not as something that can be changed.

We revisit the discussion of education, and he tells us that University is little more than a joke. He went to University, and all he had to do was go for one month each year for 3 years and then he got his degree. He said it was really just a party for the one month a year and he gained very little from it.

If you want to be a tour guide, you have to attend another school. The exams at the end of this course were difficult tests on your language skills, history skills and knowledge of architecture as it applies to the Stuppas and Palaces. However all he was taught in the classes were the rules and regulations that the government has put in place to regulate tourism. Consequently only one in seven passes the exam.

As the bottle of champagne empties, a Boy named Sue gets more and more depressed and ends the evening by saying that if things don’t get better soon, he will try and leave Burma and live somewhere far away, where he will be able to send money home to support his family. He is a bright, intelligent and hard working young man, and one that most countries would want to keep as a valuable asset. But we have the feeling that the Generals would not be upset to see him go.

We admire what he has achieved, and are sad for him. His life is going to be hard, and the only reason for that, is that he was born in Burma.

Poppa

We leave Bagan reluctantly. The last two days have opened our eyes to the wonders of Mynamar, and the small town of Bagan is infinitely more charming than Yangon. We could, and hopefully will, return and spend much more time here.

Today we drive for an hour to the mountain town of Poppa, where there is a temple on the top of a huge rock, with fantastic views, which can only be reached by climbing 770 steps.


There is also a Spa Hotel well known in Myanmar as a wonderful place to relax. We view the sights,


and the charming town of Poppa and then get to the hotel in time for lunch, an afternoon by the pool, and a massage and body scrub.Life can’t get much better than this.

A Boy named Sue has come with us on this trip as our guide. We are just staying one night in Poppa and so we are surprised to see a Boy named Sue arrive with a suitcase nearly as big as ours. But, as the day wears on, the necessity of a large suitcase is made evident by the number of changes he makes during the day. We count no less than 4 different outfits during the one day. He also has some super cool shades that he wears, but his eye sight is so bad he can’t actually see anything with them on, so he is constantly switching back to his regular glasses.

We soon realize that we are the only people staying at the Hotel. A Boy named Sue leaves us alone during the afternoon, but we invite him to join us for dinner. This is an extremely poor country, where many people are dressed in rags, so it seems incongruous to see a Boy named Sue appear for dinner in a very trendy pair of ragged jeans with worn cuffs and manufactured holes

Living in Bagan

Everyone we meet asks us to compare Bagan with Angkor Wat. But they are totally different. Firstly Bagan is on a flat plain. Secondly the scale is so different. Here the buildings are on a much smaller scale, but there are thousands of them. Angkor Wat is all about scale, huge buildings with decaying stucco covered with carvings and statues. Bagan was originally similar, but the stucco was made of mud and over the centuries was worn away by the elements. What remained of the stucco was mostly shaken loose by the 1975 earthquake. So now all the buildings are red brick, which gives them a totally different feel.


The town of Bagan is divided into Old Bagan and New Bagan. The centre of Old Bagan is a one square mile lot that is surrounded by a City Wall and Moat built in the 9th century.


There are 75 stuppas within the city wall, and until recently several small villages.


The family of a Boy named Sue lived in one of these villages. In 1990 the generals told everyone living within the City Wall that they had five days to tear down their house and move to an area the generals would provide. On the 5th day the Generals sent a large truck to each house and the family was ordered to load everything they owned including as much of the structure of their old house as possible, onto the truck. They were then taken to a plot of land in New Bagan, where all their belongings were dumped. They were told that this was their new home. They were given no help or monetary aid to build their new house.

A Boy named Sue is much more reticent about discussing the Generals than our previous guide, but he did tell us that story, as well as telling us that all the guides hate the present Government. However, when we told him that we had heard that all of Myanmar only got electricity for 3 days a week, he looked totally shocked that we knew this and refused to discuss it. This, despite the fact that Bagan is plagued by electricity cuts all the time. We are staying in one of Bagan’s five star Hotels, which is lovely. However the power shuts off several times each evening and everything goes pitch black for a few moments before the generators kick in. The same happens in the restaurants we eat in at night. When the power is on, it is totally erratic with the lights dimming and brightening again all the time. We have a television in the room which, because of the power supply, only produces a picture intermittently, although the sound works all the time.

This is also the first hotel we have stayed in that has Internet. However whenever we try to use it, we are told that it is down and that it will probably be switched on tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. It is never available for our use during our stay.

Bagan and Unesco

After the earthquake, Unesco came to Bagan in 1977 to lead the renovation. They stayed for 7 years until they had a falling out with the Generals. The Generals wanted to build new buildings to replace the old, while Unesco insisted that the old ones should be reconstructed. When the Generals went ahead with building new ones anyway, Unesco left. They have never been invited to return, the area is therefore not designated as a World Heritage site, and Mynamar gets no monetary help with the upkeep of this wonderful site. Now the Generals are building new stuppas everywhere. They find a footprint of an old stuppas or temple and build a new one on it, with no thought as to how the original looked. They just copy another one nearby. They use bricks and then put a concrete Buddha inside. These new stuppas stand glaringly apart from the old buildings, and no one pays them any attention.

Two hundred and twenty seven of the buildings have or had wall paintings inside. The vast majority have been lost, mainly due to erosion and to the effects of sunlight. But some buildings, which are darker inside, still have varying amounts of these paintings visible. We visit three of them that were restored by Unesco before they left, and are breathtaking. One is called the Cave because it so dark inside. It has many small chambers designed for novice monks to meditate in. All the walls and ceilings are hand painted and date back to the 13th century. Much of it has been lost, but there is still much to see and it is truly fascinating. We stay in the Cave for a long time studying the paintings, which were done by amateur painters, and represent their lives in the 13th century.

Bagan

The best way to absorb the splendors and scale of Bagan is to see it all spread out beneath you. The easiest way to do this is to climb one of the taller Temples where you get a 360 - degree view of the plain and can see all four thousand of the stuppas and temples radiating out for miles.


The plain is full of trees and shrubs with the red brick stuppas and temples rising up out of the vegetation. There are groups of smaller ones clustered together, while the larger ones tend to stand on their own.


It is a fantastic sight and one that the Government feels you should pay for. Many of the taller temples used to have staircases leading to the top where you could enjoy the view. In 2005 the Generals closed the staircases in eleven different buildings that the tourists used to climb, and built a watchtower that they now charge $10 for you to use. The watchtower is a truly ugly building designed with no thought of blending into the surroundings. It was built despite the United Nations asking the Generals on three different occasions not to build it. However, the tour guides are so furious with the Generals that they refuse to take tourists to it. Instead, they have scoured the thousands of temples and stuppas for other vantage points, and have found several. It is to one of these that we are taken to watch the sunset and see the fantastic views.


The Generals also built an Archaeological Museum in the middle of the plain, which is another ugly building. They filled it with treasures from the temples and Stuppas and charge the public $5 to enter. Again the guide refuse to take us there, instead taking us to the many temples that still have treasures inside, so that we can view them in situ and without paying the Government anything.

Bagan and Our Guide

Our guide in Bagan immediately reminds us of Lawrence, but without the star quality. He is twenty two, tall and lean with a terrible complexion and very trendy black framed glasses. Like many of the young Myanmar men his shiny black hair has dyed brown highlights. He has on a baby blue sweater over a white shirt and dark longyi, which he wears slung very low over his hips. He carries a mobile phone in his hand, and hanging from it is a small, terminally cute, white and pink teddy bear with a heart emblazoned on its chest. The overall effect leads one to question his sexuality. When he walks, the question is answered by a delicate swaying of the hips. He flashes a 200 megawatt smile that transforms his acne scared face into a very attractive one. What he has been unable to do with his complexion, he has made up for with many trips to the dentist. His teeth sparkle and gleam in the sunlight. He introduces himself by his Myanmar name, which is, he acknowledges, too difficult for foreigners to pronounce, so he suggests we call him Soe. Well that gets us off to a good start, and from this point on we refer to him as a Boy named Sue. He is charming and far easier company than Lawrence, plus he is an intelligent and knowledgeable guide.


We spend the next two days touring Bagan. Until today, we have been unsure about how well Mynamar compares to our previous trip to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Today, Myanmar comes into its own. Bagan is breathtaking; a large plain of around 42 square kilometers on the east bank of the Irrawaddy River, that is home to a few small villages and over 4000 temples and stuppas. Most of them were built between the 11th and 13th centuries, although the earliest date back to the 3rd century, and we see several from the 9th century.


It all came to an end with the Mongolian Invasion in 1287. Fortunately the Mongols were also Buddhists and left the Pagodas intact. At one point there were 5000 of them, but the ravages of time reduced that number considerably. Then a huge earthquake in 1975 damaged many more. Now there are around 4,000 but many are just piles of rubble. There are maybe 2,000 that are worth a visit. We only have two days, and manage to see about 15!