I'm typing this offline on my iPad as my bus rolls out of the hills of Shan state in the direction of Mandalay. We're delayed over an hour because a bus broke down on the bumpy, single-lane highway, meaning that traffic each way had to take it in turns descending into the switchback-carved valley the bus had stalled in and back out again. The road between Mandalay and my departure point in Hsipaw extends out to the Chinese border, and the facing traffic consisted almost entirely of heavy old trucks crammed full of watermelon mostly, but also bags of cement and a wide range of agricultural produce. One truck was stacked full of cages of uncomfortable-looking chickens, whose suffering no doubt will soon be ended.
Bus trips bookend this blog post. I last wrote shortly before leaving Inle Lake for Hsipaw on the night bus. I had luck on that ride, as a free seat meant I could stretch out a little and get a bit of rest before our 4am arrival in Hsipaw. We had a couple of hours before dark (I'm always amazed at how quickly night falls in the tropics, and in this heat it comes as a surprise when the sun drops well before 6 and I'm reminded that we're in the depths of midwinter) and I could admire the rising Shan hills in the late afternoon sun. Myanmar is shaped like a bowl, with highlands rising on three sides of the central plain. The central lowlands are the home of the ethnic Burmans, while the surrounding hills are home to a wide variety of ethnic minorities. At a bit under 10% of Myanmar's population, the Shan are the largest of these minorities, and their homeland spills over into neighboring Thailand and Laos. Their language is also more related to Thai than to Burmese. Both Inle Lake and Hsipaw are in Shan state so I'm only now heading back into a Burman-majority area.
I've seen quite a few Shan flags here (and indeed, a Shan nationalist army has been fighting for independence on and off for decades) with green, yellow, and red horizontal stripes and a central white full moon. By contrast, besides on government buildings, I don't think I've seen a single Myanmar flag, even in Yangon. What I see everywhere--far outnumbering even the Shan flags--are the five-striped flags of Theravada Buddhism, representing the five Theravada nations of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. Buddhism, then ethnicity, and only then the state seems to be the order of priority.
Long-haul bus trips in the developing world seem to have a lot of similarities across very different countries, at least in my limited experience. This trip had a number of signature features: the TV at the front playing music videos and cheap comedy programs; the rest stops where bleary-eyed travellers congregate at plastic tables under harsh fluorescent lighting or buy snacks at surrounding kiosk shacks; the drab window curtains that look like they were made in a cheap factory in the 1970s and haven't been washed since; and of course the rows of small villages of thrown-together shacks under corrugated sheet metal roofing (whoever makes corrugated sheet metal must be very rich indeed) that serve as a reminder of the impoverished lives led in between tourist destinations. The TV on the bus can be a bit distracting when you're trying to sleep--although on this trip they were decent enough to turn it off at around 9 or 10--but it can also be a great cultural education. The music videos on this trip all featured adorable young things mugging and pouting their way through contrived love stories. I don't know how much of Myanmar's recent history I should read into this, but these videos had a disturbing tendency to get violent, one ending with a murder-suicide, and another involving a youth taking a makeshift baseball bat to the jerk who was canoodling with his girl. That one ended happily: the cops handcuffed the youth and then the repentant girl gives her unconscious would-be paramour a kick for good measure so that she and her boyfriend can go lovingly off to prison handcuffed together. Cutesy smile, fade to black.
Hsipaw is mostly a launching point for treks into the surrounding hills, and that's how I used it. I managed to get a couple more hours of sleep in a proper bed after my very early arrival, then had breakfast and met with a tour coordinator to arrange an overnight hike on which I joined an English couple and a German woman. We set out before nine with our guide, Jo-Jo, who was 23 going on 14. A little guy (even by Myanmar standards, and I've yet to see a local who's taller than I am) with a huge smile that reminded me of my nephew James, he had the kind of irrepressible humour one sometimes wished he would repress. I like this independent travel thing, but the one upside I can see to package tours is that they come with fully professional guides. Jo-Jo spoke fairly good English, and was fairly knowledgeable, but he was so eager to please and entertain that he would rather exaggerate or make things up than simply not know or simply not be the focus of our attention. I recently taught Plato's Apology, in which Socrates recounts how, after being told that he's the wisest of all men, he converses with craftsmen, who surely have the wisdom of their craft over Socrates' professed ignorance, but Socrates quickly finds the craftsmen also claim to know a wide range of things about which they're entirely ignorant, so that their ignorance far outweighs their wisdom. I found this to be the case with Jo-Jo, with the additional downside that he couldn't stop telling lame jokes--preference for jokes that give him an opportunity to use the word "shit"--and laughing loudly. Apologies to anyone for whom this description reminds them a little too much of me.
The trek itself began pleasantly enough, rising along a red, dusty track through hills cultivated with sugarcane, banana, wheat, gourds, and other produce, and became beautiful in the afternoon when the track narrowed to a path and we headed into the woods. I'm very fond of trees and it makes me very happy to spend time in their proximity. It's been fun looking at these tropical forests and trying to discern their differences from the forests I'm more familiar with. There are obvious differences, like the abundance of vines and creepers and the various tree-sized monocots, like bamboo, banana plant, and occasionally Palm trees, although they were more common in the lowlands. (Quick botany lesson. Almost all flowering plants--magnolias are an interesting exception--are either monocots or eudicots. Where I come from, the monocots are mostly represented by grasses and a few flowers with grasslike leaves, like daffodils and tulips. Unlike eudicots, monocots can't form woody parts, so that the trunks of Palm trees are actually less like wood and more like very thick and very tough bundled blades of grass. Here endeth the lesson.) But the trees themselves are also different. The fir and cedar of the Pacific Northwest are magnificently solid, and austere in their use of branches, but the trunks of many of the big trees here seem more like a thick, upward-flowing liquid, with smooth bark and a riot of boughs. They often look less like they have a single trunk, but rather a fused-together jumble of thinner trunks wrapped around by a smooth sheeting of bark. The trunks, especially on the banyan trees, are also wonderfully thick, with roots spreading out from a couple of feet above ground. That, along with the fairly low point at which the boughs detach from the trunk and start flowing outward, makes them great for climbing. And then there are the teak trees, for which Myanmar is famous (and for which it has been plundered for over a century), with huge leaves and straight, dignified trunks that really do give an impression of solidity.
We spent the night in the Palaung village of Manlwe (on the trek, my Burmese "hello" and "thank you" were of no use, and Jo-Jo had to teach us these two expressions first in Shan and then, higher up, in Palaung, an ethnic minority of fewer than 100,000 souls). The villagers are familiar with Western guests--we saw a couple other trekking groups overnighting there--but they haven't tarted things up at all. We were put up in a typical wood-with-corrugated-sheet-metal-roofing hut (there was a downpour in the night, and man did that roof make a din) where our hosts sat around a fireplace in the middle of the room and served up the best food I've had so far in Myanmar. One upside to these hill villages is that they're all vegetarian, and they served up a variety of dishes to be eaten with rice that were unlike anything I'd ever eaten. Highlights included tea leaves with nuts and some sort of stewed gourd, and all of it was subtly spiced to perfection.
Our hosts also had terrific faces. Leathery with age but perfectly smooth besides long spidery smile wrinkles extending from the eyes, the result of decades of big toothy smiles that bare an orthodontic horror (in general here people seem to have unusually big teeth). They eventually retired and we curled up on a row of thin mattresses topped generously with warm blanketing. One nice thing about walking all day is you get to eat heartily and sleep soundly.
Oh, and the stars! The clouds that erupted into a nighttime downpour were already rolling in, but with a fairly new moon and little light pollution I got a terrific view of the Milky Way and even caught a shooting star.
The following morning we filled up on an equally delicious breakfast and set out back in the direction of Hsipaw. We got back late enough that, once I'd showered and settled in a little there wasn't really time to explore the town, but I guess a trip like this is bound to be full of such disappointments. I had some tea down by the river and an evening meal before returning to read George Orwell's Burmese Days on the balcony of my hotel. A group of happy-clappy Christians--including a very skinny Shan Santa Claus--were moving building to building down the street singing a combination of what I assume are Shan Christian songs (the only word I recognized was "hallelujah") and heavily accented Christmas carols to the accompaniment of a guitar. Apparently Myanmar has the third highest population of Baptists in the world thanks to the efforts of a particularly diligent 19th century American missionary.
No comments:
Post a Comment