Saturday, June 20, 2009
Friday, May 29, 2009
Trek from Kalaw to Inle Lake
Wow we completed a three day marathon trek over the mountains, through the rice and potato fields, balancing carefully as we crossed rice paddies and only occassionally falling in. The trek gave us a serious appreciation for what travel has been like for centuries without the advantage of motorized vehicles. Deeply rutted red dirt roads that easily turn to slip sliding away mud fields when it rains which is every afternoon. The ruts are from the ox carts and a few horse carts and the path ( of least resistance) that both people and the cows have taken for centuries across the fields and forests. We spent the first nite in the upstairs of a village home thankful to get off our feet from 16 km of hiking. Food was good and the trek guide Jimmy who has been doing this for 17 years stays with families who appreciate the extra source of income he brings. This mountain top family establishment was all contained in its self sufficency. There were orchards of mango, papaya, banana and plum. Gardens with tomatoes, chilis, onions and garlic.....fields sewn in rice and potatoes. The watern cistern had been rigged up with a pipe that allowed a flow for a makeshift shower, much appreciated to get the grime of the dust off. Most of the villages have a piped source of water.
The 2nd day was the real marathon day of 20 km over varied tilled, early growth and ready to be harvested terrain, mountainsides covered with tea plantations, potato fields, bamboo forests, rice paddies, women and children working in the fields taking respite under nearby bhoddi trees.
We arrived at our destination for the 2nd nite, a monastery which was quitelovely and truly picturesque, just as the afternoon rain broke out. The rain was much appreciated from the deep teak porch of the monastery as we drank tea and soothed our blistered feet. We were competing for # of blisters/ person.....I could not compete because all I had was 2 lost toenails. The monastery is run by 2 adult monks taking care of 10 orphans, monks who are cared for and schooled in this mountain seclusion. It is a very well ordered place, simple and clean. We of course were put to sleep by the allocated 1 hour of satelitte TV at 9pm that drew the surrounding children before all electricity went down at 10 pm. We were awoken by the sonorous chanting of all the monks at 5 am, a really nice way to be awoken even though it is early. The mosquito nets had worked well and the blankets were well used byt comfy, so hard to haul ourselves out for the final push to Inle Lake for the balance of our 57 Km trek. After breakfast of tea, fruit guacamole and white bread, ( for some reason they believe all Westerners prefer this tasteless, nuritionless white bread) we were off for the final 4 hours down to Inle Lake from the mountain.
This is when we started calling Jimmie "rush guide" his perjorative term for the other guide who had brought in 7 other trekkers the nite before. Jimmie was like a horse that knew he was heading home to the stable and thus set a relentless pace all morning. We took no breaks and hiked 4 hours through mud slick, oc cart, rutted path across fields and villages and finally, blessedly down to the souther end of Inle Lake. Were immediately picked up one of their long boats which was nicely set up with short lawn chairs and umbrellas to take us the 45 minutes across the lake to the town on the north of the lake Nguaschwe where we will stay for 2 more days. It is lovely here and the town/village is quite spread out. Rob and I are congratulating ourselves for making the trek which was a tough one but certainly one that was worth the effort. The people, the terrain, the countryside, the mountains and the memories we collected of this most amazing people and country will be with us indefinitely.
The 2nd day was the real marathon day of 20 km over varied tilled, early growth and ready to be harvested terrain, mountainsides covered with tea plantations, potato fields, bamboo forests, rice paddies, women and children working in the fields taking respite under nearby bhoddi trees.
We arrived at our destination for the 2nd nite, a monastery which was quitelovely and truly picturesque, just as the afternoon rain broke out. The rain was much appreciated from the deep teak porch of the monastery as we drank tea and soothed our blistered feet. We were competing for # of blisters/ person.....I could not compete because all I had was 2 lost toenails. The monastery is run by 2 adult monks taking care of 10 orphans, monks who are cared for and schooled in this mountain seclusion. It is a very well ordered place, simple and clean. We of course were put to sleep by the allocated 1 hour of satelitte TV at 9pm that drew the surrounding children before all electricity went down at 10 pm. We were awoken by the sonorous chanting of all the monks at 5 am, a really nice way to be awoken even though it is early. The mosquito nets had worked well and the blankets were well used byt comfy, so hard to haul ourselves out for the final push to Inle Lake for the balance of our 57 Km trek. After breakfast of tea, fruit guacamole and white bread, ( for some reason they believe all Westerners prefer this tasteless, nuritionless white bread) we were off for the final 4 hours down to Inle Lake from the mountain.
This is when we started calling Jimmie "rush guide" his perjorative term for the other guide who had brought in 7 other trekkers the nite before. Jimmie was like a horse that knew he was heading home to the stable and thus set a relentless pace all morning. We took no breaks and hiked 4 hours through mud slick, oc cart, rutted path across fields and villages and finally, blessedly down to the souther end of Inle Lake. Were immediately picked up one of their long boats which was nicely set up with short lawn chairs and umbrellas to take us the 45 minutes across the lake to the town on the north of the lake Nguaschwe where we will stay for 2 more days. It is lovely here and the town/village is quite spread out. Rob and I are congratulating ourselves for making the trek which was a tough one but certainly one that was worth the effort. The people, the terrain, the countryside, the mountains and the memories we collected of this most amazing people and country will be with us indefinitely.
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
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Taungoo to Mandalay Road Trip across Myanmar
Mother's Day May 11 was spent on an 8 hour ride from Taungoo, North of Yangoon to Mandalay. With our stalwart driver Aung Kyaw OO driving the 80's vintage Toyota van and his wife and 2 year old son, we covered every terrain imaginable in the middle of Myanmar. From rice fields prepared but unplanted outside Bago, followed by the dust and heat sweltering fields and countryside, to tree lined highway shading passersby as the only respite from the heat, to irrigated spring green flooded rice paddies. As the irrigation appeared it washed the fields bright green with new growth. Rice was high in the field, a prodigious crop in Myanmar that lends its bounty 3 times a year. This country seems to work so hard for its food.
We passed sugar cane fields and stopped to have a drink of freshly pressed sugar cane juice. All the collection of the cane is done by hand and the pressing is done by feeding the cane into an ancient hand cranked machine that presses out the juice. The 1pm sun made the sugar cane stop most welcome but ice is a phantom hope. There was one small chunk of ice floating in the murky water of the cooler that was supposedly cooling drinks. The woman at the stand took the piece of ice out put it in a small piece of tarp and beat it to a pulp then distributed it into 3 glasses and filled those with sugar cane juice. One by necessity ignores what might be the infectious nature of the ice and water used and drinks hoping for the best. It tastes a lot like the cane sugar that is used in most carbonated drinks in the US, although without the carbonation. As we drank the Dad who clearly had been drinking the more fermented sugar cane brew danced his 6 month old across the table and smiled broadly with his betel encrusted red stained teeth. Mom sported a Giorgio Armani knock off branded T- shirt that was far from what Giorgio had in mind for his roadside branding. This was one of many stops our driver made along the way to show us the local color. We initially stopped we thought to meet his wife and child in Yangoon before leaving but when we got there they were packed up with a small bag and jumped in the 7 person van to join us to the trip to Mandalay. They proved to be quite pleasant and absolutely no problem just something we were not counting on but in this country you count on what unfolds. He turned out to be a terrific guid and driver , very kind and competent, friendly and with a facility for enough English to get us where we wanted to go and then some for $50/ day inclusive of van and petro, guiding and interpretation. We shared company for 10 days.
Manual labor is the rule of thumb everywhere in Myanmar and most daily efforts are not mechanized. Things that we take for granted are all done manually: sewing seed, threshing, material production, hand carvings, handiwork for every manner of housing and furniture construction, carvings, pottery etc. Housing materials outside the city are predominantly woven bamboo, reed, cane, palm leaves for roofing and an abundance of tin roofs which has blessedly kept the rain off of most shelters that are then covered in palm leaves to keep the heat down.
After rice and sugar cane we saw the driest of deserts that looked like the Navajo reservation miles going by with no shade and spindly sparse dessicated trees. Then before another hour had passed we were i mango territory and the season was in full fruit. There were fresh mangoes pyramid piled mountains of them everywhere on the roadside. We of course stopped and had multiple mangos and picked up some to go. 6 mangos and all we could eat at the roadside stand were about $1 US. Tarpulains of the blue and orange kind come in handy everywhere sprouted for shade and respite from the rain and sun. No matter the condition of the tarp they never seem to go out of use, string being a useful and common necessity to elongate their usefulness.
Our final stop before getting to Mandalay was the Snake Pagoda. It seems that 3 phython snakes showed up together at this pagoda so the monks allowed them to live cooled in the shady coolness of the marble based Bhudda ensconced there. The snakes attendant accepted donations for prayers and for the upkeep of the monastery. I had the indiscretion to pet the pyhython against the scaley grain and it did not appear to appreciate it but I guess was used to the constant attention from humans. The snake pagoda lived up to its name and there were cobras statues all along the walls of the pagoda.
Finally Mandalay. After going to 3 hotels, one was full (unlikely but not sure what was going on there) one was closed because " no electricity," and the third was a concrete 6 story box called the Nylon Hotel with piles of rocks blocking the street in front of it as the street was under roadwork construction and that along with the heat did not lend itself to a sense of comfort. We ended up at a small guesthouse...the Royal Guesthouse not far from the palace moat and walls. A bare bones room with 2 fans was $10 US, $20 for 2 rooms, but the drains work and the generator which makes up for the lack of Mandalay electricity hums along load enough to keep the fans running overnite. Either way you sweat in this heat and are laying in sheets that are tissue paper thin, knowing your compatriots that preceeded you also left their fair amount of sweat behind. Thus far though no bed bugs. We are so exhausted from the long day of driving and touring Myanmar's heart of the country that we collapse on the bed in front of the fans and remember the kaleidoscope that crossed our travels today in this most diverse country.
We passed sugar cane fields and stopped to have a drink of freshly pressed sugar cane juice. All the collection of the cane is done by hand and the pressing is done by feeding the cane into an ancient hand cranked machine that presses out the juice. The 1pm sun made the sugar cane stop most welcome but ice is a phantom hope. There was one small chunk of ice floating in the murky water of the cooler that was supposedly cooling drinks. The woman at the stand took the piece of ice out put it in a small piece of tarp and beat it to a pulp then distributed it into 3 glasses and filled those with sugar cane juice. One by necessity ignores what might be the infectious nature of the ice and water used and drinks hoping for the best. It tastes a lot like the cane sugar that is used in most carbonated drinks in the US, although without the carbonation. As we drank the Dad who clearly had been drinking the more fermented sugar cane brew danced his 6 month old across the table and smiled broadly with his betel encrusted red stained teeth. Mom sported a Giorgio Armani knock off branded T- shirt that was far from what Giorgio had in mind for his roadside branding. This was one of many stops our driver made along the way to show us the local color. We initially stopped we thought to meet his wife and child in Yangoon before leaving but when we got there they were packed up with a small bag and jumped in the 7 person van to join us to the trip to Mandalay. They proved to be quite pleasant and absolutely no problem just something we were not counting on but in this country you count on what unfolds. He turned out to be a terrific guid and driver , very kind and competent, friendly and with a facility for enough English to get us where we wanted to go and then some for $50/ day inclusive of van and petro, guiding and interpretation. We shared company for 10 days.
Manual labor is the rule of thumb everywhere in Myanmar and most daily efforts are not mechanized. Things that we take for granted are all done manually: sewing seed, threshing, material production, hand carvings, handiwork for every manner of housing and furniture construction, carvings, pottery etc. Housing materials outside the city are predominantly woven bamboo, reed, cane, palm leaves for roofing and an abundance of tin roofs which has blessedly kept the rain off of most shelters that are then covered in palm leaves to keep the heat down.
After rice and sugar cane we saw the driest of deserts that looked like the Navajo reservation miles going by with no shade and spindly sparse dessicated trees. Then before another hour had passed we were i mango territory and the season was in full fruit. There were fresh mangoes pyramid piled mountains of them everywhere on the roadside. We of course stopped and had multiple mangos and picked up some to go. 6 mangos and all we could eat at the roadside stand were about $1 US. Tarpulains of the blue and orange kind come in handy everywhere sprouted for shade and respite from the rain and sun. No matter the condition of the tarp they never seem to go out of use, string being a useful and common necessity to elongate their usefulness.
Our final stop before getting to Mandalay was the Snake Pagoda. It seems that 3 phython snakes showed up together at this pagoda so the monks allowed them to live cooled in the shady coolness of the marble based Bhudda ensconced there. The snakes attendant accepted donations for prayers and for the upkeep of the monastery. I had the indiscretion to pet the pyhython against the scaley grain and it did not appear to appreciate it but I guess was used to the constant attention from humans. The snake pagoda lived up to its name and there were cobras statues all along the walls of the pagoda.
Finally Mandalay. After going to 3 hotels, one was full (unlikely but not sure what was going on there) one was closed because " no electricity," and the third was a concrete 6 story box called the Nylon Hotel with piles of rocks blocking the street in front of it as the street was under roadwork construction and that along with the heat did not lend itself to a sense of comfort. We ended up at a small guesthouse...the Royal Guesthouse not far from the palace moat and walls. A bare bones room with 2 fans was $10 US, $20 for 2 rooms, but the drains work and the generator which makes up for the lack of Mandalay electricity hums along load enough to keep the fans running overnite. Either way you sweat in this heat and are laying in sheets that are tissue paper thin, knowing your compatriots that preceeded you also left their fair amount of sweat behind. Thus far though no bed bugs. We are so exhausted from the long day of driving and touring Myanmar's heart of the country that we collapse on the bed in front of the fans and remember the kaleidoscope that crossed our travels today in this most diverse country.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Yangoon Full Moon Festival
Ahhhh 8 days on the beach in Ngapali on the Bay of Bengal. The secluded beach by a small fishing village Jaataaw was discovered by about 4 larger hoteliers who created European getaway hotels that have fabulous foyers and cabanas. Erik and I however stayed at the vintage teak wood huts on the beach at the Lin Thar OO for about $20/nite. We rented bicyles, did yoga on the beach every morning, sat and read most of the day and had wonderful seafood meals of shrimp, squid, barracuda and red snapper 2 times a day. Photographed some of the boats coming early in the morning, in laden with fish to be dried on the beach, went to the market and the pagoda and was invited into some of the villagers homes. It was delightful and refreshing and settled my traveler's stomach. Now we are back in Yangoon and off to Swedagon Pagoda for the full moon festival tonite. Swedagon is the big Pagoda in Yangoon where all good Burmese Theraveda Bhuddists hope to pay homage in their lifetimes. The full moon festival is a big draw and the pagoda is full of worshippers and monks. The town is closed today so everyone will be at this amazing pagoda. It is so HOT here we do not dare start out until 5pm in the evening.
Tomorrow we head inland to Bagan much like Angkor Wat which is a concentration of temples built over centuries. We are in Yangoon for the Full Moon festival tonite at Swedagon Pagoda. Quite the spectacle. I am pleased to return to SE Asia after 2 years and it is my first time in Burma. The people are wonderful. The place is a challenge to travel in but the rewards worth it. Wishing you the best and please stay in touch. When I am able to I will upload my photos on my blog but internet is sketch here.
Tomorrow we head inland to Bagan much like Angkor Wat which is a concentration of temples built over centuries. We are in Yangoon for the Full Moon festival tonite at Swedagon Pagoda. Quite the spectacle. I am pleased to return to SE Asia after 2 years and it is my first time in Burma. The people are wonderful. The place is a challenge to travel in but the rewards worth it. Wishing you the best and please stay in touch. When I am able to I will upload my photos on my blog but internet is sketch here.
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