At this point in time, all I can do is sit in the van and stare out the window, trying to take it all in. As Kipling said, “If you’ve heard the East a-callin’, you won’t never heed naught else.”
Then I popped onto a barge to go down-river, jumped off on the other side of the Irrawaddy, visited Inwa, a small village with clean toilets, and then hopped into another horse cart, feeling like George Orwell in “Burma Days”. Then we arrived at some kind of palace or something out in the middle of nowhere.
“The Ava dynasty lasted for 400 years,” said my guide. “A king fell in love with a village girl selling betel nuts and appointed her his chief queen.” Apparently that was the wrong thing to do. She became very powerful, which pissed off the king’s brother who then got up an army and put the queen in jail – and then he cut off her head. “But a monk tells her right before she dies that by dying this way she will be paying off all her karmic debts and now she will be free. So she died happy. Then her granddaughter became a great queen.”
But wait. The plot thickens. The granddaughter apparently turns out to be a schemer too and kills off all the other crown princes except for her son, who is unqualified to rule and manages to lose all of Burma to the British. Anyway, where we are now is the monastery that belonged to the monk who advised the village girl/queen two generations back. Did I get all that right? Probably not.
In any case, I got lost inside this empty, haunted monastery and called out my guide’s name. Nothing but echoes. Empty and haunted. Then, just as I began to feel the ghost of the headless queen closing in on me, my guide suddenly appeared. “Jane, where have you been? And where are your shoes?” The (ghost) queen took them?
Next I climbed up to the top of a bell tower – or at least I was supposed to climb up to the top of a bell tower. Forget that. I don’t do stairs. Plus it was the Burmese equivalent of the leaning tower of Pisa and didn’t look all that safe. I’ll just wait down below, contemplate nature out here in the farmland and hide out from the village children who want me to give them my pen and notebook and to practice their English on me.
“Money, please?”
In another bone-jarring horse cart, I rode past rice paddies on the way to the village’s monastery where I visited a classroom and listened to children chant the alphabet. The entire monastery was carved out of teakwood.
“This is where they make the pots that monks use to go out and beg for alms with.” The monks use large metal pots and the novices use lacquerware bowls. A small boy stood among the piles of pots, playing with a plastic machine gun. “The metal ones are made from recycled oil drums.”
Then we went back to the boat and sailed back to Mandalay to eat lunch at a Chinese restaurant called “The Peking Duck”. By then I was tired and hungry. This morning when I woke up, I really didn’t know if I could endure yet another day of intense touring – touring is hard work! But I not only held up okay but was really glad I came. Still and all, when I get back home to Berkeley I’m still gonna look into getting a wheelchair. My days of running off to Afghanistan and Iraq are definitely over. Crap.
On the way back to the restaurant, I looked at a map of Burma. Hey, Kipling is wrong. It’s impossible for the dawn to “come up like thunder outer China ‘crost the bay.” The freaking bay is hundreds of miles away from Mandalay. I read somewhere that Kipling never made it to Burma. However, he did go on to say that “the blasted English drizzle wakes a fever in my bones….” Ha! The weather in the U.S. right now is something like minus-forty degrees below zero. If that doesn’t get tourists to Burma, what will?
Meanwhile, back at The Peking Duck (which had a statue of Donald Duck on its front porch BTW), I got to talking with a local woman about heroin. “I have heard that Myanmar is famous for its heroin trade but I myself have never seen any signs of it here,” I said. But then I’ve lived in Berkeley for 42 years and I’ve never seen any signs of heroin there either.
“Other Southeast Asian countries make large profits off of Burma – they import our teak, jewels, natural gas, etc. But then they seem to deliberately slur Burma’s reputation,” said the woman -- after I had consumed a fine lunch of Peking duck, shrimp, chicken and four kinds of vegetables including a whole baked pumpkin filled with soup.
“Why would they do that?” I asked.
They do it because if U.S. companies refuse to trade with Burma, then Thailand, etc. make a greater profit by serving as the middleman.”
Next I went down by the docks, where whole bunches of people live on the shore of the river and whole bunches of people live on its boats. It is all organized confusion. “Which river is this?” I asked.
Then I popped onto a barge to go down-river, jumped off on the other side of the Irrawaddy, visited Inwa, a small village with clean toilets, and then hopped into another horse cart, feeling like George Orwell in “Burma Days”. Then we arrived at some kind of palace or something out in the middle of nowhere.
“The Ava dynasty lasted for 400 years,” said my guide. “A king fell in love with a village girl selling betel nuts and appointed her his chief queen.” Apparently that was the wrong thing to do. She became very powerful, which pissed off the king’s brother who then got up an army and put the queen in jail – and then he cut off her head. “But a monk tells her right before she dies that by dying this way she will be paying off all her karmic debts and now she will be free. So she died happy. Then her granddaughter became a great queen.”
But wait. The plot thickens. The granddaughter apparently turns out to be a schemer too and kills off all the other crown princes except for her son, who is unqualified to rule and manages to lose all of Burma to the British. Anyway, where we are now is the monastery that belonged to the monk who advised the village girl/queen two generations back. Did I get all that right? Probably not.
Next I climbed up to the top of a bell tower – or at least I was supposed to climb up to the top of a bell tower. Forget that. I don’t do stairs. Plus it was the Burmese equivalent of the leaning tower of Pisa and didn’t look all that safe. I’ll just wait down below, contemplate nature out here in the farmland and hide out from the village children who want me to give them my pen and notebook and to practice their English on me.
“Money, please?”
In another bone-jarring horse cart, I rode past rice paddies on the way to the village’s monastery where I visited a classroom and listened to children chant the alphabet. The entire monastery was carved out of teakwood.
“This is where they make the pots that monks use to go out and beg for alms with.” The monks use large metal pots and the novices use lacquerware bowls. A small boy stood among the piles of pots, playing with a plastic machine gun. “The metal ones are made from recycled oil drums.”
Then we went back to the boat and sailed back to Mandalay to eat lunch at a Chinese restaurant called “The Peking Duck”. By then I was tired and hungry. This morning when I woke up, I really didn’t know if I could endure yet another day of intense touring – touring is hard work! But I not only held up okay but was really glad I came. Still and all, when I get back home to Berkeley I’m still gonna look into getting a wheelchair. My days of running off to Afghanistan and Iraq are definitely over. Crap.
On the way back to the restaurant, I looked at a map of Burma. Hey, Kipling is wrong. It’s impossible for the dawn to “come up like thunder outer China ‘crost the bay.” The freaking bay is hundreds of miles away from Mandalay. I read somewhere that Kipling never made it to Burma. However, he did go on to say that “the blasted English drizzle wakes a fever in my bones….” Ha! The weather in the U.S. right now is something like minus-forty degrees below zero. If that doesn’t get tourists to Burma, what will?
Meanwhile, back at The Peking Duck (which had a statue of Donald Duck on its front porch BTW), I got to talking with a local woman about heroin. “I have heard that Myanmar is famous for its heroin trade but I myself have never seen any signs of it here,” I said. But then I’ve lived in Berkeley for 42 years and I’ve never seen any signs of heroin there either.
“Other Southeast Asian countries make large profits off of Burma – they import our teak, jewels, natural gas, etc. But then they seem to deliberately slur Burma’s reputation,” said the woman -- after I had consumed a fine lunch of Peking duck, shrimp, chicken and four kinds of vegetables including a whole baked pumpkin filled with soup.
“Why would they do that?” I asked.
They do it because if U.S. companies refuse to trade with Burma, then Thailand, etc. make a greater profit by serving as the middleman.”
Next I went down by the docks, where whole bunches of people live on the shore of the river and whole bunches of people live on its boats. It is all organized confusion. “Which river is this?” I asked.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
