Quick tour of Burma

We are told that traffic is worse in India, and traffic is impossible in Ghana, but Burma must be getting us ready for those countries. 

The “motor mile” in Burma is at the port, where lines of used buses wait for government inspection before being allowed into the country.  If they look beat up, it’s because they have lived out their useful lives elsewhere.  About half of them are right hand drive, although Burmese drive on the right side of the road.  One result of this is that you can’t predict very well what your commuter bus will look like, or even what side of the bus to jump on. 

This does not deter people, of course, and the buses are jammed with people.  Our ship docked in the deep sea port about ten miles out of town, which is a one-hour commute.  On two different days, we went in at rush hour, seeing the roads lined with people waiting to stuff themselves into those trucks and buses.  

There are two different kinds of buses.  The traditional city bus has 40 or so seats and the “light truck” has an extended bed and bench seats along each side.  I think it holds 40 people.  It’s impossible to count them.  There are no official stops; people run up and jump on.  Sometimes, they fall off.  I have no idea how they pay for their rides.

You see these vehicles everywhere.  They are the minivan of Burma.  They cart people and goods, privately and publicly.  I find them most fascinating from a distance.

There are almost no motorbikes.  Motorbikes inside Rangoon are limited to the police and the postal service.  The story I heard was the mayor was involved in an accident with a motorbike (presumably not driving one) and banned them.  The streets must have been chaos with them, because they are truly awful even without them.

The day we docked in Burma, some combination of tides, dredging, and immigration kept us on the ship until 5 PM.  Shortly after, I headed into town with a tour group to see Shwedagon, the famous pagoda, at sunset.  The roads were crowded with people heading to a local pagoda festival, which is like any small town festival:  rides, games of chance, fair food, music, and dancing.  When we passed an oxcart laden with a local family, our guide stopped the bus so we could jump out and take pictures.  You know, in that way that tourists blend in seamlessly with the locals.

The great advantage of organized tours is that someone else has to find a parking place.  All of our tours include a guide, a driver, and a helper.  The helper is in charge of holding the bus step in place, handing out wet wipes, rounding up people—an extra pair of eyes and hands.  He (they are always he) never says anything, but he is doing as much people watching as we are.

Another advantage, we found on our last day, is that with the right connections, you can blast through traffic.  I was leading a tour to the local markets, an ill-conceived tour of three markets, set to arrive back at the ship at the last minute. 

The advantage of this kind of tour is that you can make the most of your last day and not be penalized if you come in late.  Usually, we leave port at 8 PM, and our on-ship time in 6 PM.  But if everyone plans to get on ship at 6 PM, most of us will be late.  Getting on the ship—even if you’re living there—is like getting on an airplane.  Our bags go through a scanner, some of us get scanned or patted down, 

contraband (fruit, bottles of water) gets seized.  In Singapore, it took half an hour just to get through Singapore customs before we ever arrived at the ship.  So it’s a big advantage to have that “free pass”:  no matter how late you are, the ship won’t sail without you and you don’t get dock time for being late.  (Dock time means you’re stuck on ship when everyone else is cleared to leave.  A few minutes late translates into hours of dock time.)

The original plan for Burma did not include transportation from the dock to the town, so people signed up for the SAS tours, which included the bus.  Then a shuttle was offered for $18 for the week.  Then the shuttle was changed to a $10 fee for everyone, which made a great deal of sense if it had started out as the plan, but as a change penalized those of us who had bought SAS tours and didn’t need the shuttle. (Grumble) 

In order to make the trip into town feel like a tour (and be worth the charge), the plan was to go to three markets—a local produce market, the famous Scott Market, and Chinatown.  We left at 7 AM.

There was, of course, nothing we could buy in the local market.  Fruits, vegetables, flowers, meats, seafood are all banned from the ship.  I did see a young lady selling religious items for a nearby temple while wearing a shirt that said, “Put your lips on my butt, 5¢.”  Such a temptress!  I never found anyone who would take one dollar bills, much less a nickel.

I wandered down a quieter street of shops and found myself in a temple that was empty of the usual tourist crowd.  It had a neighborhood feel, with people stopping in to say a few prayers before they got started with their day.

Scott Market, now renamed the General Aung San Market, doesn’t officially open until 10:30, so a 9-10 stop there allowed us to see a lot of stores setting up shop.  Most of us had little money left, further complicating shopping. People either had none or had way too much, it turned out, but we did not realize this until too late to make adjustments.  The guidebooks (and the State Department info) all say that Burmese merchants accept pristine $1 bills, but I found they did not.  The smallest the money changers will take is a $20, and the slightest crease gives you a lower exchange rate. 

This is after you manage to find someone who changes money in the first place.  Money changing consumed a lot of time in Burma:  the ATM is rare, the banks aren’t open, the line is too long, the excuse is in Burmese, untranslated.

It is difficult to boost the local economy when someone will not take your money.  Nevertheless, we plowed on.  Leaving the market, we were scheduled for Chinatown, and our guide was clearly rattled.  She had planned a time in a local tea shop, a walk through Chinatown, and a return to the ship by 1, and she was trying to figure out how to fit it all in.  Sitting in the front of the bus, I saw we were weaving in and out of traffic, driving on the wrong side of the road, following a police officer on a motorbike.  This is not a foolproof way of resolving traffic issues—there is a surprisingly large group of vehicles that ignores cops and will play chicken with a bus—but it is a thrilling way to drive through a city.

Two of the girls on the bus told me the officer had been exiting the bus when they got on at the market, and that their cameras had been switched.  They concluded that he was looking at their photos.  Our field office, however, assures me that our police escort was part of the VIP treatment our tour agency arranged to fit an impossible itinerary into our last day.

Whatever the explanation, we did make it back to the ship on time.  Our flustered tour guide practically threw wet wipes and bottles of water at us.  (I think she forgot and didn’t want anyone to find out she hadn’t provided them earlier.)  She also managed to scare up $190 for people who wanted to change money, including $60 of her own money. 

The job of the tour guide is never done.  As we pulled away from the port, a line of guides from Cruise Asia twirled red parasols and waved us off.  Goodbye, Burma!

Dem Bones

Kristina, my daughter-in-law the osteologist, loves bones and graveyards.  This makes souvenir hunting difficult, but today, on a street corner in Rangoon, she knows I was thinking of her..

We went on a fast swirl through three markets on our last day before on-ship time at 2 PM.  The last stop was Chinatown, where we were told, “stay between the bus and the traffic light.” 

I got to the corner with the traffic light, and looked around to see if it was worth going around the corner and down the main street.  I had only about a buck left, and twenty minutes to get back.

If there is any municipal system of trash collection in Burma, it is not apparent.  We did pass one place where our guide said the Indians recycle plastic bottles, but I don’t know how they get them.  Trash accumulates in certain areas along the road, and I have no sense of how one area becomes an informal dump and another does not.

At the corner of the traffic light, there was a pile of rubble, mostly in earth tones.  Jagged edges, curved edges, broken pieces.  At first I thought some kind of construction project, until I started to pick out familiar shapes. 

Teeth!  All the curved edges are jaw shaped.  Here and there, you can see clear impressions of teeth.  In the compartmentalized world of Myanmar, this is the dental lab’s dump.

Kristina, I’m sure, can tell us more.

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.