Myanmar......A country lost in time

After one month in Burma we made it through most of the country that tourists are allowed to visit. Yangon, Ngapali Beach, back to Yangoon to pick up Rob, Taungoo, Bago, Amapura, Pyi U Lin, Mingun, Bagan, Meikitila, Kalaw and a 3 day trek over the mountains, rice paddies and tea plantations to the Inle Lake area near Nguaweshwe. We flew out of Heho back to Yangoon and then returned to Bangkok, all in 30 days time.

Erikand I started in Yangoon and went to Ngapali Beach ( 20 hours south by bus) on the Bay of Bengal. As it was off season were were some of the only tourists staying at our beach front bungalows. We rested, read, did yoga daily and walked the beach, floated in the waves, did a snorkeling trip to a neighboring island and lost our boat motor enroute, spent many dinners playing checkers while waiting for our freshly caught seafood to grill. (We did not catch it,but the Burmese boatmendid, who go out at night along the horizon and fish all nite for squid and other fish drawn by the lights rigged up on their boats.) It was a great time to get to know Erik and catch up with him on his time in Aspen, his plans to go to Kenya and work at the Mani Home for orphans, and his prior trip to Asia last summer which I had not heard the details of until we had time to let it unfold.

I read a great book while traveling which I highly recommend. It is Colin Thubron's The Shadow of the Silk Road. It is both a contemporary travel logue of his travels across the Silk Road interspersed with rich historical detail to put each place in context, then and now. It gives one a sense of the immensity of the Silk Road geography and the diversity of cultures, people and customs that have unfolded across this vast trading space over time.

I am now reading Under the Dragon by Rory Maclean a contemporary view of Burma, written in 1998 and probably the most realistic view of what Burma is like today. Little has changed in Burma due to their repressive militaristic government since 1998 when he wrote it and his descriptions are all still accurate today based on everything we saw.

It is an indictment on the current militaristic regime that the people of Burma are kept some of the poorest in the world when they were once the rice bowl of Asia and the largest exporter of rice, and still today have a country rich with natural resources ( currently being exploited and sold off to the Chinese and India by their government). They are the hardest working and most truly, congenial people I have ever met. The long arm of the military though is everywhere in the form of spies that will inform on anyone who speaks any word against the government so all our political conversations were limited and honored the fact that we did not want to get anyone thrown in jail. Most everyone we talked too would pretend not to understand English all of a sudden when we voiced support for Aung San Suu Kyi who was thrown into Insein prison just 2 weeks before her 6 year imprisonment was to end. Her trial was going on while we were there and was opened only after the international pressure required the military to do so. However it will not change their method or the outcome as the military is the authoritarian rule there. We only caught the news from Al Jazeera as there is little other news provided.

Government control of communication is rigourous. I have many thoughts, impressions and photos to share on Myanmar but could not do so during our stay there as it is impossible to get much beyond Google and sometimes Yahoo. I could not update this blog but will do so in the next few weeks. Until then. Kathryn