Burmese Daze

By Alison Winward

THE Prime Minister is under house arrest. The army is in charge. Spies are everywhere, and if you question the government there’s a good chance you’ll end up in jail.
This is Burma in the mid-2000s and Alison Winward is there.
But even in such tough times, she finds, there is more to Burma than misery. There’s the people, of course – resourceful, resilient, resistant. And then there are the ‘sights’ – the explosive popcorn factory, a monastery’s “jumping cats” and ways of donating to the pagoda that can probably best be described as poetry in motion, to name just a few.
Burma has changed quite a bit in recent years. This book offers a glimpse of how the country was when those changes were little more than a distant dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alison Winward
• Release date: Aug 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370000142

Book preview

BURMESE DAZE

Payas, Politics and Perplexity in a Pariah State

by

Alison Winward

Copyright 2017 Alison Winward

Published by 10,000 Miles Books at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For

Ava Soe

Would that she was around to read this…

About the author:

British, female, journalist, history graduate, occasional traveller

Pictures – and more – at:

https://10000milesandmore.wordpress.com/

Find me on Twitter:

@10kMilesandMore

Copyright 2017 Alison Winward

Published by 10,000 Miles Books at Smashwords

ISBN: 9781370000142

Front cover: Mural, Ananda Pahto, Bagan ©Alison Winward

Contents

A note about names etc

Rangoon/Yangon

Scorpions and sarongs

Payas and politics

Iron Cross and insider knowledge

Pyay

To the Bespectacled Buddha with Jean-Claude Van Damme

Bagan

The People’s Desire

A bad-tempered bus journey: Bagan to Inle Lake

Nyaungshwe

Funky Farming

Undercurrents on Inle Lake

Coffeemix and a Celica, or the Road to Pyin-Oo-Lwin

Going via Gothiek to Hsipaw

Hsipaw

Getting an education in Hsipaw

The Last Shan Prince’s Tractor

Under the (finger and) thumb in Hsipaw

A bangin’ time at the popcorn factory

Of football and face-cream

Mandalay

Moustaches and Marionettes

From the sublime to the ridiculous and beyond

Nothing minging about Mingun Paya

The Road from Mandalay (to Bhamo)

Making it to Myitkyina

Battered by a bus to Bhamo

The Boat to Mandalay (from Bhamo)

Mawlamyine

Getting to the heart – and bottom – of Buddhism

Return to Rangoon

RETURN TO BURMA

Rangoon

A family brought together

Hsipaw

A family torn apart

An open Book

Popping back for popcorn

Kyaukme

Comedy gold and the Silver Palaung

2017

Thanks

A note about names etc

This book has been compiled from diaries and travelogues I wrote during two month-long trips to Burma in 2004 and 2005.

All the experiences in it did happen, and the people I met really existed. However, to protect their identities and out of respect for their privacy, I have, with a few exceptions, reduced their names to a single initial, and changed tiny, irrelevant, details about them, to minimise absolutely the chances of them being recognised. After all, most of these people mixed with me as a traveller, not a journalist, so they have every right to expect me to keep our interactions off-the-record, just as I have a duty to treat them as such.

There are two big names looming large over this entire story – Burma and Myanmar.

It was the junta who, in 1989, imposed the name Myanmar on Burma, and changed the names of other places as well. At the time(s) I visited, in 2004 and 2005, as a rule of thumb, if you respected the junta/generals, you called the country Myanmar, but if you supported Aung San Suu Kyi, and others campaigning for democracy, you called it Burma. Now the country has moved towards democracy – even though the army does still hold a ridiculous amount of power – it’s hard to know which is the correct name; even Aung San Suu Kyi has used both.

However, as one man told me, as he jabbed at the cover of my Lonely Planet: It’s Burma not Myanmar, and it’s Rangoon, not Yangon. Out of respect for him, and all the other brave souls who whispered their resentment of the junta to me, I’ve used the pre-1989 names throughout. As for other places, I have followed the examples of the UK and US governments, and used the Burmese names rather than the Colonial-era ones. As the names have been transliterated from Burmese, some don’t have a standardised spelling: for example, Lonely Planet includes a Pyin U Lwin, but there’s a Pyin-Oo-Lwin on the British Foreign Office map of Burma.

Rangoon/Yangon, 2004

Scorpions and sarongs

WHAT’S he saying? I asked the man standing next to me, who I hoped had a better grasp of English than I had of Burmese. He was kneeling on the pavement, with a scorpion weaving between his fingers and what looked like a load of bits of wood spread out on the tattered sheet in front of him. We were part of the 20-plus crowd watching him in bemusement.

The pieces of wood were blood king root, my neighbour explained. It was like the stuff women put on the faces, but better because: He says that if the scorpion stings him this paste will make it all right.

Having heard about how painful a scorpion sting can be, I figured this bloke must have real confidence in his product. I hadn’t, however, so when he offered me the scorpion I beat a hasty retreat.

The stuff women put on their faces was thanaka, a paste made by mixing finely ground bark and water.

I’d seen foot-long branches of thanaka for sale for a couple of hundred kyat (a few US cents) in the market. And I had seen thanaka paste on the faces and arms of so many local women, even sophisticated-looking ones in this, Burma’s capital city.

Thanaka was partly a sunscreen, partly a decoration; some women ‘drew’ patterns on their cheeks, or put a line of dots down their nose. You could even buy special ‘thanaka brushes’, just for that purpose; they were like toothbrushes only smaller and softer.

Burmese women could well be the most beautiful in the world (always accounting for taste), I decided. They seemed to combine the best of Indian, Thai, Chinese and hill tribe looks, with maybe a bit of European thrown in there too.

The majority had thick, straight, very black shiny hair, which they grew incredibly long – bottom-length was not unusual – and almost every one wore a modern version of traditional dress: a long sarong and a fitted top.

Their deportment was pretty stunning, too; even the oldest women carried themselves so beautifully. Maybe it was because many of them still carried stuff on their heads? The most impressive I saw was a middle-aged woman having a very animated conversation with a man, all the while balancing a three-foot high carrier bag on her head.

The beauty, the long hair, the neat clothes and the poised carriage combined to make this model of grace and elegance… until the woman projected a jet of red betel spit from her mouth.

Everyone in Burma, it seemed, chewed betel non-stop; young or old, man or woman, they were all at it, even though it was rare for a Burmese woman to smoke or drink. As it got them ever so slightly stoned, maybe it helped them forget how crap life in the country was?

Betel was everywhere: there were stalls in the market selling nothing but massive sacks of areca nut and betel leaves, which were piled high on huge platters made from woven grass, and every couple of yards on the street there were little carts where people were folding betel ‘quids’ (chews).

The men wore skirts, too, or rather longyi, a male version of the sarong. It was like a tube of (usually check cotton) fabric, around ankle-length, with the ‘waist’ gathered into a knot in front of the wearer’s belly button. Given the heat and humidity a loose cotton ‘skirt’ probably made far more sense than trousers, and I’d say 85 per cent of the men wore longyi 100 per cent of the time.

Even what I suppose you could describe as middle-class men – office workers and the like – wore longyi for work, but with a conventional, Western-style formal shirt as a top. The longyi was part of the boys’ school uniform too: dark green, worn with a smart white shirt.

Pretty much the only men who weren’t wearing longyi (much) were the men in uniform, although seeing as this was a country ruled by the military, there were rather a lot of those.

Payas and Politics

So that was the people of Rangoon; what was the city itself like?

Well, there were some lovely Colonial-era buildings, all mouldings, graceful arches and character windows. However, many of them hadn’t been properly maintained and were covered in mould, and the once-lovely mouldings were chipped and cracked. (Yeah, yeah, I know that what those buildings represented might not be too lovely