Wow. It’s hard to believe that it’s almost Easter. We’ve just had 4 incredibly busy months (as you can tell by the general lack of blogging) and it’s about time we all caught up!
As you know, back in January Stu and Ha Young, then Zach, visited Yangon. S and HY stayed for just over 2 weeks, one week of which they spent ‘upcountry’, around Mandalay, Pyin Oo Lwin and Amarapura. We did plenty of sightseeing around Yangon as well and, one day, when the internet gods decide to give us enough bandwidth, we might even be able to upload some photos! (public internet has been on the blink in most of Burma for the past couple of months, so we only have access at work) Zach has been nice enough to blog about his Yangon visit, which also resulted in one of his videos getting something like 1,000,000 hits on YouTube. I’ll let him put the link to his blog in the comments.
I’d say that they all visited at exactly the right time, for after Zach’s departure at the beginning of February, we ended up getting incredibly and unbelievably busy. Actually, ‘busy’ just doesn’t seem to do it justice. See, in addition to working full time, I also ended up with a lot of ‘extras’ related to my MA. I designed a syllabus and all the materials for a special course that was given in March, which I then wrote an assignment about. I was working 7 days a week, and not slowing down for anything. I had barely enough time to get my nails done! (Hey, you know you are busy when…)
But now, the syllabus is done (and taught). The assignment has been handed in. And we’re at the start of a new term, after a very well-deserved break. And that’s what I am going to write about (the break, not the new term)…
We had a week break because of Thingyin – the Burmese New Year, which is celebrated with a 3-day long country-wide Water Festival (more on that later). Hotel prices triple, and everyone seems to be on the move (heading back to their home towns out of the city). We’d decided that a bit of R&R was in order, and Ty booked us into a beach bungalow in Ngwe Saung, just before Thingyin and the tripling prices. We’d do Ngwe Saung for three days, then come back to Yangon for the infamous Water Festival. If you’ve got a Burma Lonely Planet handy, you’ll find that they call Ngwe Saung “seventh heaven… [an] indulgent, lie-back-and-do-nothing sort of beach”, and we were more than happy to comply with the idea of “sitting around doing nothing more strenuous than wiggling your toes in the sand”. Mmmm. Sounds awful.
To get to Ngwe Saung means taking a night bus. If you’ve ever passed a junk-yard full of rusted out bits of cars and buses, that’s pretty much where the vehicles on the streets of Yangon come from. The buses here tend to be rejected junkers from China or Japan, held together by bits of wire and string and certainly not the nicest ride in the world. Imagine our surprise, then, when in the middle of a busy, dirty, crazy street in Yangon, the shining beacon of a real-live South Korean air-con tour bus appeared. Anyone who has ever traveled in South Korea knows that their buses are luxuriously comfortable, with plush seats that recline all the way back and a big screen TV. It looked so out of place – a bit like a UFO had landed to whisk us away to paradise.
The road to paradise is, well, partially paved, very windy, and once the air-con is fully cranked, freezing. Eventually, we started unpacking our backpack and putting on whatever bits of clothing we could find: The lady across the aisle from us was wearing a winter coat with a towel wrapped around her head. We survived, though, and arrived at 4 am on the shores of the Bay of Bengal where we were taken to a nice little tiled bungalow.
There really is nothing to do at Ngwe Saung. It’s the little sister of more developed beaches such as Chaung Tha and Ngapali (home to several 5-star beach resorts). It’s also mildly hilarious in its under-development, and takes a bit of traveller’s good humour to get over some of the weirder aspects. For example, we had a fridge, air-con and a TV in our bungalow, but no electricity from 6 am to 6 pm. And, the TV only got one channel – whichever channel the person who controlled the satellite decided to watch (which tended to be a Thai version of ESPN). The restaurant had a 12-page menu, but could be counted on to temporarily “no have” whatever we ordered, no matter what it was, from chicken to banana pancakes (ten minutes after you’d changed your order, however, they would suddenly have whatever it was you wanted in the first place). Everything was fried in about a gallon of peanut oil (good when you ordered the French fries, not so good when you ordered a fried egg with toast), and the whole place was decidedly rustic. I don’t want any of this to sound like complaining… for the most part, we joked about it. Still, we were centuries away from the resorts of Abu Dhabi!
The first day, we sat on chaise-longues under a thatched palm umbrella and read. From time to time, we would wander into the ocean and float around – the water was just slightly cooler than soup. Ahhhhhh. I discovered that for about 50 cents I could get a coconut with a straw in it (the restaurant never ran out of those) to which I added my own rum (the restaurant “no have” cocktails), and it was quite heavenly. We watched the few other hotel guests wander around on the beach, befriended two stray dogs (we named them Gidget and Brian Wilson), and watched two ox carts walk along the shore line as the sun set.
The second day was a bit more athletic. We walked up the white sand beach a bit, past similar clusters of beach bungalows to our own. Some of them were abandoned and falling down (Ngwe Saung was not hit by Cyclone Nargis in 2008 but the rest of the Delta was, meaning that for about 2 years no tourists could get to the coast. These crumbling cottages were, perhaps, indirect victims of Nargis). In any other country, this beach would be crowded, home to a million hotel chains, and the water would be full of jet skis and banana boats. Here, we passed hundreds of crabs, a few ox carts, some unbelievably quiet motorbikes, and a family having a picnic in the shade of a huge boulder that was topped with a small gold stupa. This beach was as beautiful as Mexico, the Maldives or Malaysia, but without all the tourist circus.
Sitting on the beach in front of our bungalow, we could see an island just off a point about 1km from us. It seemed like people were able to get to the island, so we decided to give it a bash on the third day. We came to the point and stood there a bit, staring at the wooded island about 150m away, but not sure how to get there. As it turned out, there was only one way to get there – walk! We waded across the waist-deep water (being careful of the camera, of course) and ended up on a weird island that boasts a crazy looking mermaid statue, the world’s most dangerous stone staircase, and a small forest. There were a few other groups of visitors: one looked like a bunch of day-labourers, the other looked like an emo boy band. We walked over the island until we came to some tide pools where we cooled our feet and stared at the wildlife (The crabs were about the size of a fist, with fake decoy pincers on their backsides. The fish had small ‘feet’ under their bellies and walked rather than swam – it was a bit primordial!).
We left the island, crossing with the emo boy band, with the water rising up to chest level, and continued up the beach. From the top, we’d seen something that looked like a restaurant and we headed to what might have once been a nice resort (with a pool and a patio, tiki torches and a stage). And wow… even a cocktail menu! The waitress was mildly lobotomized and it took about 2 hours for us to order, get our food and eat, as we watched the rehearsals and had our eardrums blasted by the sound checks for a traditional dance concert. The food (and the cocktails) made it worth it, though – nary a drop of peanut oil to be seen, but chilli peppers and garlic a-plenty. We finished our strenuous day by returning home for a nap (Ty snagged the hammock) and then attempting to watch a movie on TV (which was pre-empted when the satellite controller decided he’d rather watch the Man U football match).
The next day, tanned and rested, we boarded a slightly less luxurious bus for the ride back to Yangon. Now, the ride to Ngwe Saung was done in the dark, in the middle of the night. This time, we’d actually be able to see the sights of the Delta. The bus operated on teamwork: everyone drives on the right in Burma, but the cars and buses are set up for left-hand driving, i.e. the driver sits on the right of the vehicle. To overcome the loss of road visibility, another person (or two) stands next to the driver and yells at him to warn him of oncoming hazards. A bit disconcerting on a narrow, barely paved road that winds its way along the top of a ridge, full of pedestrians, people with pushcarts, and other massive tour buses coming the other way.
When I got tired of panicking over the road conditions, I had the big screen TV to distract me with random Burmese music videos played at ear-splitting decibels, helpfully subtitled so that several of the passengers could sing along tunelessly. Burmese music videos deserve their own blog/cultural analysis, but I’ll mention them quickly now: many of them look like they’ve been filmed, produced and edited by someone who just got Windows 98 MovieMaker. They are almost always set in Kandawgyi Park in Yangon, where the youthful singer and the object of his desire (a heavily made-up woman) walk along and pout at each other, frowning through the chorus until one of them breaks up with the other. Lather, rinse, repeat for 17 videos in a row. Other times, the song has a recognizable tune (something top of the pops-ish from the 80s), but is sung in Burmese. There were a few exceptions to the rule, including a rapper named Kaung Myat (maybe you can find him on YouTube?) who shows us how badass he is by sporting a thin moustache and posing next to a BMW parked in what looks like my neighbour’s driveway. But I digress…
We passed tiny clusters of thatched houses around different bends. Usually, the people would wave and smile as we passed. These citizens are the survivors of Cyclone Nargis, and live in utter poverty. The Delta is being rebuilt after Nargis, the road is being widened. Much of this work is being done by women and adolescents (I hesitate to use the word ‘children’): carrying baskets of rock on their heads, raking gravel, shovelling sand, spreading hot tar chips. When the bus reaches a spot where roadworks are being done, the driver slows, the women approach his window with a basket and he plonks 3 bottles of water into it. The women cheer.
Every two hours on our seven-hour journey, the bus stops so that we can stretch our legs, use the toilet or grab a snack. We have lunch at one of the stops, an odd collection of tables in a concrete shell of a restaurant, but it’s oily and spicy and delicious, and there’s enough rice to sink a ship. There’s a beggar outside the restaurant. At first, I think he’s had his legs amputated, but then realize that his legs are still there, twisted and mangled under his body in a perpetual cross-legged sit. I temporarily lift my ‘never-give-money-to-beggars’ law and give him a 1,000 kyat (about $1) and he smiles.
At another stop, I get a gorgeous hand-made lacquered parasol for 4,000 kyat (about $5). I’m sure that I’m paying the ‘tourist price’ but I don’t mind.
Our final stop is only about 90 minutes out of Yangon, and I’ll just call it ‘the world’s most disgusting, gross, filthy parking lot full of buses aka a rest stop where I can barely stand to get out of the bus’ and let your imagination fill in the rest.
As we get closer to Yangon, we start to see more evidence of the famous Water Festival. Every so often as we roll along, children holding small plastic buckets run out to throw water on the bus. At another village, large papier-mâché puppets are being walked up the main ‘street’. Just 20-or-so minutes outside of Yangon, a stage has been set up, with a bedazzled woman singing, flanked by a dozen people holding hoses that spray a joyous crowd of bouncing people constantly with water. This will become a familiar sight over the duration of the Water Festival, but our first visual proof that this is actually happening leaves us staring.
Depending on who you talk to, the Water Festival is either the best or the worst festival in the world. It’s a celebration of the April Full Moon, the Burmese New Year, and somehow related to the pre-Buddhist nat festivals as well. I’m not really a theologian, but I can tell you that there is a blurred line between belief in nats (kind of like tree spirits) and Buddhism in Burma that doesn’t seem to exist elsewhere. According to Mr. Win Tin, this used to be a sombre face-washing festival, when you clean your shrine room and wash all the Buddha images in the house (our landlady, Auntie San, has spent the past 3 days doing just that). Now, it’s something more like a street festival, or a Woodstockish rock festival, and yes, it is very very wet. Some Burmese colleagues I spoke to spend the duration of the Water Festival holed up at home, daring not venture out to the streets where truckloads of the young and drunk drive around, and massive stages set up with water hoses spray every passer-by. There are smaller water stations as well: a barrel of water surrounded by a few kids armed with water pistols to joyously spray you down. We’d been told that the Water Festival could be very fun, or very dangerous: Last year, a bomb went off at one of the bigger stages downtown.
But back to our bus from Ngwe Saung… we got off at an intersection, where Mr. Win Tin said he’d find us. We ended up missing the stop and having to walk back to the junction. All along the road, sopping wet people were walking, or hopping out of taxis, or driving by in Jeeps or pickups, and a few small businesses had set up barrels of water that were surrounded by little kids flinging water at people. We stood there with our full backpacks and wondered what would happen next. Ty wrapped his camera in plastic bags as we were approached by our first kids wielding water. They smiled and waved, then ran up and gently tipped the water onto our necks and shoulders. It was such a gentle, friendly gesture, and one that would be repeated again and again (often followed up with a kind “Are you okay?” or “Are you happy?”, just to make sure we weren’t offended). Mr. Win Tin, looking a bit damp himself, finally caught up with us and we ran to his taxi, but not before being ‘blessed’ a few more times.
In the taxi (with the windows rolled up!), Mr. Win Tin turned to us and asked, as he has so many times before, “Do you have 10 minutes?”. This is a sort of magical question: It’s never only 10 minutes, but you can be guaranteed that when Mr. Win Tin asks if you’ve got a bit of time to spare, he’s about to show you something cool. So, instead of going home, we drove onto one of the main streets of Yangon, Pyay Road (in Colonial times, this was The Prome, and before that it apparently had the nickname ‘Tiger Alley’. No tigers prowl here anymore…). We’re only a few blocks from our house, not far from Inya Lake, and the traffic is absolutely jammed with cars, trucks and people. One of the stages (owned by the infamous Tay Za) has a legendary Burmese rock star performing with his son, and of course, there is water. Water being thrown from the back of one truck to another, water being tossed by kids in the street, water spraying out of huge hoses mounted on the stage, water shot from super soakers, water being gently tipped down pedestrians’ backs… And this was only the warm-up evening!
Mr. Win Tin chuckled, even when water meant for us ended up all over the inside of his taxi, and suggested we drive past his house. Of course, once we got to his flat, we were ambushed by his grand-daughter and her friends who had their own barrel of ice water and buckets set up. We happily joined them, waiting for a car, a guy on a bike, or a pick-up to come down the not-too-busy street. Every person we splashed responded with a smile, a cheer of “Thank you!” or “Happy New Year!” and “Are you happy?” And this would continue for the next three days.
Soaking wet and chilled to the bone, we hopped back into Mr. Win Tin’s taxi and headed back to our house. It was nearing 6 o’clock, which meant that everything had to be cleared up. See, it’s an absolutely crazy good time, but the curfew is also strictly enforced. At 6 pm, everyone just picks up and heads home. Things might get out of hand from time to time (given the amount of booze involved, that’s not surprising), but in general it’s just good, clean, wet fun. The normally docile and shy people of Yangon really let loose, and it’s incredible to see… we knew that we’d have to check it out again.
And so, a few days later (after a day of chilling at home), we were back out on the street. We walked up our little road (getting splashed three times in the process), then squelched our way up to Pyay Road. It was weird: Instead of the normal stream of cars, taxis and buses, the road was empty except for pick-ups and jeeps full of revellers. It was about 3 pm, and everything was in full swing and if you were on the street or (wow!) a foreigner, you were a water target. We walked up to where we’d been with Mr. Win Tin – Tay Za’s stage - it took a long time and by the time we’d arrived, we were absolutely the wettest we’d ever been. Everyone waved and smiled at us (and we waved and smiled back – getting that good old Korean ‘I’m a foreign celebrity’ feeling for the first time in a while), and shouted whatever random English phrase as they sped by – or splashed us down.
Near the stage, the traffic was jammed up and simply not moving at all. We stood on the sidewalk, not far from a line of hawkers selling beer or frying up samosas and things on sticks (yes, open flames and boiling oil in the midst of gallons of flying water), and just waved and smiled at everyone. The music was quite good, and the mostly young crowd rocked and danced – most of them dressed in a kind of mish-mash of emo-punk-hard rock style (lots of black, concert t-shirts, studded belts, a few guys in eyeliner, a couple of kids with dyed mohawks). Standing on the sidewalk, we realized that we were probably the only foreigners there. Just about every single person had to come up, shake our hands, give us a hug (a very un-Burmese thing to do), hand us a beer, dance a bit, ask us “Where from? Are you happy? Do you love Myanmar?”, and then continue on. We were fed random bits of things on sticks, spice-covered mangoes, and – strangely – given (by one exuberant 17 year old Green Day lookalike) Aerosmith and Limp Bizkit pins. It was friendly, it was fun, it was wet, and it was weird.
And all this was happening in Burma. I can’t think of a single street festival in Canada or anywhere else where this kind of absolute crazy booze-fuelled street festival could happen with zero police, no EMT services, and nothing more than a few (rare) fights. And, everyone just heads on home at 6 pm!
Wow. This has been a lot longer than I expected. I hope you have enjoyed it, and stuck with me thus far. Now, we’re heading into the post-Thingyin very very very hot and dry season, when everyone pretty much counts the days until the ‘mango rains’ come and we’ll finally get to feel water dripping on our backs once again.
... then walked along the southern shore of the Thames, taking in the street performers (and my first 'real' fish n' chips), then stopped by the Globe Theatre where I got to watch actors rehearsing (!) and nurture my inner Hamlet geek. 
... then walked along the southern shore of the Thames, taking in the street performers (and my first 'real' fish n' chips), then stopped by the Globe Theatre where I got to watch actors rehearsing (!) and nurture my inner Hamlet geek. 
