Road to Mandalay

Living in a city where it takes about 15 minutes to get anywhere, whether you travel by car or by bike, I've found it a challenge to visit cities that make New York City seem downright puny.  Add temperatures of 100 degrees, pollution, and crazy traffic, and it really zaps your energy.  So it was particularly nice to visit Pyin Oo Lwin for a few days.  Getting there was an interesting story in itself.

Traffic around Rangoon is terrible, and it took a full two hours to go the 20 miles to the airport.  Our schedule had allowed three, and our plane was delayed an hour, so we spent a couple of hours at the Rangoon airport, waiting for a flight to Mandalay. 

Sadly, the roads are too bumpy to allow for decent pictures out the bus window.  I would have liked to capture the trucks and buses jammed full of commuters and the interesting shops along the way.  I particularly liked the sign at the airport:

Travelers Warmly Welcome
Drug dealing may punishable by death

The sign at security, "Respect all, suspect all," was a warning with no teeth.  Our tour guide issued us stickers, and boarding passes that assigned seats but had no names on them.  No one ever looked at our passports (we were in the domestic terminal).  Our luggage did go through scanners, but I went through the scanner with random stuff in my pockets and a purse around my neck. 

This may have been because we had a professional handler.  Win traveled with us for three days, starting and ending at the ship, arranging for every detail and making changes on the fly.

The airport in Rangoon has two terminals, international and domestic.  The domestic terminal has two gates, which is to say there are two different doors out to the buses that take passengers out to the planes you can see waiting a couple of football fields away.  Our plane had stairs that folded out from the back of the plane, although there were stairs that could be rolled up to the plane, and one jetway to nowhere. 

A bit like Charlottesville, actually, although it serves a city the size of New York.

There were no ticket agents, although there are counters for several airlines.  There are at least 100 seats in the ticketing area, and at some signal, everyone on your flight goes through security.  The departure area looked pretty much the same, but more crowded.  There is a VIP lounge and a second floor with a restaurant (empty), and a couple of stands selling drinks, food, and newspapers. 

Although we waited for two hours, only one plane took off before ours.  While it was boarding, an employee walked through the waiting area carrying a "Ready for boarding" sign with the flight number.  Outside the terminal, I could see that ear protection for the airline personnel was sticking their fingers in their ears.

Our plane was an old prop plane, which meant actual legroom.  And food service, just like the good old days.

Mandalay International Airport makes Rangoon look like the JKF it is.  I guess it's Dulles in the days when everyone was still flying out of national:  ready, but empty.  Win told us it has four international flights per day.  One in, one out, to each of two cities.  I don't remember which countries, maybe Thailand and India?  The day we flew back to Rangoon, there were four flights leaving for Rangoon, none to anywhere else.

From Mandalay, we took a bus to Pyin Oo Lwin.  Win treated us to a recording of Frank Sinatra singing "Road to Mandalay."  Whoever wrote that song had clearly never been to Mandalay.

The highway starts out wide and smooth, a superhighway without an obvious destination.  Mandalay had an airport in town, but the runways were too short and couldn't be lengthened, so the new one was built.  (A familiar story.)

Along the way, you see piles of sand and gravel.  Sometimes you see work stations, but nothing like the construction areas you might see on an American highway.  It is being built by hand, with shovels.  You never see road grading equipment or even trucks.  I saw a couple of places that were brick manufacturing sites. 

There's a large quarry along the way, and you see trucks carrying stone of various sizes down the mountain.  Many of them have workers atop the stone, and large baskets for carrying smaller loads to and from the truck.  In Burma, everything is still done by hand.

We were told the quarrying is done by prisoners, but I saw small children in the complex and free passage in and out, so there is plenty of work for everyone.  What I did not see was any kind of construction site with heavy equipment, anywhere along the road.

All along the way, there are places where vendors have set up roadside stands with water and snacks.  As it gets steeper and narrower, you see hoses stretching for miles along the side of the road for cooling off the brakes.  The road looks barely wide enough for one truck, but it is two-way traffic.  We climbed up through a series of switchbacks to a high plain.  Pyin Oo Lwin sits at 3500 feet above Rangoon.

Pyin Oo Lwin (formerly Maymyo) is a former British Hill Station, a place the Brits came to escape the heat.  Now it's a place for Burmese to come to escape the heat.  It's in the mountains, about two hours' drive from Mandalay, on the road to China.  So there are also a lot of Chinese traders there.  It's now a small city, about 40,000 permanent residents and another 40,000 students.  Pretty much your standard college town, Burmese style.  Lots of buildings left from the British colonial days, and lots of empty lots, teardowns waiting for a Burmese McMansion.  More on Pyin Oo Lwin in another post.

The Chinese are building pipelines for oil and gas and a railroad for other goods.  This will allow them to go overland instead of around the Malay Peninsula, significantly shortening the trip to market.  We saw the deep scars in the earth where the pipeline is going.

This plan depends on development of the deep water port where we docked, an area that is also undergoing rapid development.  It is not clear that these changes will improve the economic situation of the average Burmese, however.  The government has already relocated people from 6 of 7 villages that were in the economic development area.  The poor people get pushed further from their jobs, with no compensation for their houses. 

Off the main road, there are dozens of brand new roads leading away from the highway.  In the distance, we could see gated communities with American size (or larger) houses.  Or huge industrial buildings.  Pyin Oo Lwin has quite a few schools, colleges, and training centers for the military and for civil service.  (Initially, the Burmese knew so little about bureaucracy and red tape that they imported Indians to be their civil servants!)

Burma is struggling to open up to the rest of the world.  During the years of sanctions, they manufactured Adidas shoes, shipped them into China, and paid off the Chinese to wink at the "made in China" labels.  They are rich in natural resources, and eager to sell their products to the highest bidder.  But I am worried that their eagerness to join the developed world will make the old ways impossible without providing any new ways to take their place.