From Mandalay to Hsipaw

Pronounced, Sih-Poh, this place rocks my socks.  I refuse to leave.  Or to do anything today, besides sit on the deck of my guest house, reading, thinking, smiling.

I keep forgetting that I don’t have to go somewhere new each day.  It’s tricky because in Myanmar, I have a time limit.  In order to enter this country, which only allows you to fly in, you have to have a flight booked for your exit, to prove you aren’t staying.  So I have a time limit.  And that’s not how I like to do things.  I feel rushed, but I shouldn’t.  It’s my trip.

I spent my last night in Mandalay out on the town, with Angelay.  I had been pretty much just frightened the entire day, so it was nice to have a companion to keep me calm.

He might have been just carting me around town on his motorbike so he could show off that he had a foreigner friend, and I’m pretty sure actually that this is the case.  But he was very kind.  He came and picked me up to take me to dinner.  He was wearing a pressed button-up white shirt, with a freshly pressed sarong.  He slicked back his hair, and wasn’t chewing the gross red stuff that rots your teeth and spits out looking like blood.  We went to eat noodle soup, which is my new favorite dish.  Anyone that tells you the food here is bland and unimaginitive is lying.  It’s amazing.  Angelay gave me a bite of chicken from his soup, chopsticking it into my mouth.  ”Five dolla!”  he said, as I ate the tender piece.  I appreciated his humor. It’s sometimes pretty hard to understand jokes with the language barrier, but it wasn’t lost on me.  We laughed.

I went to see The Moustache Brothers, a “comedian” trio, who have been banned, arrested, and jailed many times in Burma during the heavy-military occupation days. The show started out very interestingly, with the main “comedian” showing video clips of American actors and actresses who spoke out years ago in a campaign for the freedom of the Burmese people.

Will Farrell, Silvester Stalone, Jennifer Aniston, and others, bringing awareness to the violence that was going on in Burma years ago. It was shocking to watch, the immense human rights violations that the government perpetrated for almost 60 years. I took this short video to show how adorable Lu Maw is and how hard it was to understand him speak (for example, when he says “Burma” I kept thinking he was saying “Obama,” but perhaps that’s just election-fever influencing me):

Anyways, the show transformed from that kind of solemn beginning to another informative session about the government, then to some really strange dancing scenes, between which were filled with strange silences and what might have been jokes? It was hard to follow. But it was amazing to watch these 60-year-old activists-turned-comedians, do this act that they do every single night for an hour and a half in their living room. Apparently it is still only legal for them to perform under the conditions that they perform in their own home and NOT in Burmese. Interesting and informative. I enjoyed it.

And of course, Angelay was there to pick me up at the end of it.

I had to get a picture of Lu Maw with his beautiful smile and his photo-pin of the Obama family that he proudly sported on his chest. “Anyone from USA here? Anyone? Obama? Yeah! Obama! We here in Burma we for Obama. Freedom, we for Obama. We for freedom.” And so it went.

On the way back to my hotel, Angelay promised he would meet me at 3:30 in the morning to take me to the train station. I knew I wouldn’t really sleep that night anyways because I was still pretty shaken from the earthquake, and the aftershocks. And finally, when I did fall asleep, I woke up at 1 am with a frightening dream. In it, I was rocking on a boat. Then I dreamed that the river was splitting under the boat, and water was pouring inwards. In my dream, it was an earthquake, and I woke up thinking we were having another one. But when I woke up and was lying there, my bed was shaking. I opened the curtains  panicking again. The lights on the building across the street were swaying, and that was all I could see in the dark.  Oh God, not again, please.  I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

In the morning, I asked Angelay if he felt it. He did, and he confirmed at the same time that I felt it. But he kept calling it a cyclone, even though I told him repeatedly it’s called “Earthquake.” In 2008, there was a devastating cyclone in Myanmar that killed thousands of people, and so I guess with his limited education and English, he refers to natural disasters as “Cyclones.” I asked him about other natural disaster events in his country’s history, and they, too, were all cyclones. I understand.

The train to Hsipaw was 10 hours, and it was the most bizarre “first class” train experience I’ve ever had. Normally, I’d buy the normal fare, $4, but I had been told that on the longer rides, first class is the way to go, because there are comfy chair seats, instead of a wooden bench. So I paid the $7, and you can imagine my disbelief when I was seated in my assigned first class seat on a bench with a half an inch cushion on it. Really? I curled up on the bench and tried to sleep. It was actually the most hilarious ride I’ve ever been on. It was like a bad roller coaster–screeching sounds, unexpected breakdowns, and all. I’m not sure about the mechanics involved in this train/track relationship, but at various intervals the train would just start bouncing, violently, up and down.

So, if you happened to be silly enough to be sleeping, you’d be rudely awakened to your body in midair, on its way to slamming back down on the bench–up, down, up, down. The clip above didn’t capture the worst of it.  We literally were lifted out of our seats on many of these little bouncing highlights of the ride. I couldn’t contain my laughter, really. It was like sitting for the first time on a saddle atop a galloping horse that you can’t control. It’s both awkward and uncomfortable, while being something that you can do absolutely nothing about.  Oh my, how I laughed.  When I had told Angelay I was taking the train, he giggled and made gestures of bouncing that I could not have interpreted at the time. Now I knew exactly what he meant. It was comical, to say the least.

We crossed the Goitek Gorge, which was a really incredible, and also a nerve racking experience.   The last couple days have been full of em.  The train, which had proven to be extremely strange in its locomotive behaviors already, started making the most horrendous sounds just before we got to the bridge crossing the gorge. Not comforting. I was relieved that the conductor slowed the thing down to go over the bridge, but it was nonetheless terrifying to listen to the painful close-to-death sounds coming from the gut of this train during intervals as we were coasting hundred of feet above ground. After an earthquake. Yikes.

Interestingly, though, until very recently, it was illegal to photograph this particular bridge, in the name of national security–it is still the military’s only route from one end of the gorge to the other, and so they wanted it to be unknown for defense purposes.

We arrived in Hsipaw around 4, two hours later than expected. I had a terrible headache. Probably from my brain bouncing against my skull so many times on the rollercoaster train ride. I shared the back of a pickup with 5 other foreigners, and was dropped at a guesthouse, Mr. Charles’ Guesthouse, to be exact. Well, I don’t know what it is about me and falling out of trucks, but in my defense, I was squinting my eyes because the glare of the sun was splitting my head. So I wasn’t quite looking, when I completely missed the step out of the back of the truck, came tumbling off the back end, and caused a motorbike driver to crash into a ditch as he swerved to avoid my body rolling awkwardly across the dirt road and spewing my valuables everywhere. How completely embarassing. Hopskotch Kings: you know what this looks like. Why does it always happen to me as I am disembarking at a hostel, where I have to face the witnesses of such clumsiness for the next couple days? The rest of the night: “Oh yeah!  Weren’t you the one who fell out of that truck and caused an accident?” Yeah, whatever. I missed a step. It happens quite often in my life, you’ll see.

I tried to sleep off the headache, but it didn’t work. This questhouse, Mr. Charles’ Guesthouse, is quite nice, but there are two schools on either side of our building, where the students chant from 6 in the morning to 8 at night.  They chant, all in harmony, over and over.  (But it isn’t religious.  I hopped a fence later  to spy on the lesson.  I was fascinated to find that they were learning Euclidean geometry, and chanting between the teachers drawings on the board.  A choral chant for geometry?  How inspired!)  So, unable to sleep through the chanting, I went for a walk. I noticed a very blonde haired, blue-eyed guy walking just behind me, and he was alone, so I turned and introduced myself. This is the perk of travelling alone: people always talk to you, much more so than if you are in a pair.  I, for instance, may have only turned to talk to him because he was alone, and I doubt I would have if he were walking in a pair or group, in his own conversation.  Plus, it would have been uncomfortable to walk in the same direction so close together without acknowledging each other’s existence.  He is from Holland. What is it with the Dutch coming to Myanmar? So far they’ve been the biggest demographic of foreigners that I’ve met, and their country is geographically the size of Massachusetts, with only 16,000 people. Weird.  But the ones I’ve met have been awesome people.

Anyways, Fedde was his name, and he was quite nice; I instantly took a liking to him. I went out with him and his friend David for a beer, and I had my first every Myanmar beer experience. Not a bad tasing brew, but nothing to write home about…or on a blog, for that matter.  I moved into David’s double room today, while Fedde is out trekking, so I could save $4 by splitting the cost of a double instead of paying $11 for a single. David is another lovely Dutchman, who thinks the world of his girlfriend, and would be likely to shout that sentiment from any given rooftop. I borrowed his Lonely Planet book, and the first page I opened had a slew of pictures of her taped inside.  How sweet!

Well, I have been realizing lately that traveling, in itself, is exhausting. It can, very quickly, wear you out. And frankly, I’m tired of it. I’ve been doing nothing but moving around, day after day, bumpy train ride after freezing aircon bus ride. So I had been looking for a town like this where I could just chill. Just stay, for a couple of days, and relax. And this is it. I love this town, and I’ve met the greatest bunch of other travelers in my stay here. I lazed around yesterday morning, then grew tired of being lazy and decided to go for a walk. I got incredibly lost, but ended up wandering through rice paddies, banana plantations, a Muslim cemetery,  and ending up at an incredible waterfall. The walk was such a wondrous thing, and the cemetery was amazing as well (I’ve always had a strange affinity for cemeteries).  But the waterfall: it was incredible. And it was so nice being alone. Away from the crowds, the camera flashing, the pointing, the demanding foreigners who are sometimes just outright rude. I was alone. I could sit there as long a I wanted, or not sit there, if I wanted. I am lucky, I kept thinking. The luckiest I could ever hope to be.   I didn’t see another person the whole day.

Tomorrow, I am going to hike out into the mountain with two new friends: one from South Africa and the other from Israel. They claim to have a map and an idea of where to go…so I am going to follow them into the mountains for 3 days instead of paying insane amounts for a guide, which is the thing to do here.  Miss Step certainly does not pay for guides into mountains.  Oh no, certainly not. The idea of paying someone to walk in front of me on a trail is really one of the most unpleasant things I can think of paying for–the other unpleasant things that come to mind include luxury cruises and tickets to a Glenn Beck lecture.  So I am excited for this un-guided adventure.  I will sleep on the Dutch boys’ floor tonight, as the hostel is full up, and Fedde is back from his trek and has reclaimed his bed.  There is now a big friendly group of travellers that consists of the Israli, South African, two Dutchmen, a British girl, an Austrian, and an Aussie.  It’s a fun crowd.  And there’s so much to learn from other travelers!  I’m having a blast.