March 2013

This is a record of our fourth visit to Myanmar. Friends ask why we returned to Myanmar so many times. We are fond of Southeast Asia. Since the mid-1990s I have spent short blocks of time in most of the Southeast Asian countries -- the longest being 6 months in Cambodia. Myanmar is a poor, undeveloped country and I believed we would see SE Asia as it was two-thirds of a century ago. Until 2011, the country’s reclusive (and abusive) military government kept it in a cocoon ever since World War II. The country is now opening and will quickly commercialize, losing its innocence, gentleness and centuries-old traditions. The time capsule aspect will soon disappear. We hoped to see it before it before this happens.

After a first writing, I found I had included pithy details that made a long story even longer so I put some of it in appendices. Readers can skip the appendices without breaking the flow.

Myanmar is still known as Burma to most Americans. As far as I know, the U.S. government still retains Burma as the country’s legal name. The U.N. calls it Myanmar.

Don Simonson

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MYANMAR FOUR

1. To Yangon (Rangoon)

November 23 - 28, 2012

En Route to Myanmar. In late November, Marsha and I traveled to Myanmar (Burma) for the fourth time in as many years. We flew from Albuquerque to San Francisco to Beijing (12-hour flight and 7-hour layover) and then to Singapore (another 6 hour flight). Flying west (against the sun) we actually cycled through two full days of sunshine. We laid over several days in Singapore to see friends and to get our bodies into an Asian time zone. From there we made a short hop on Singapore Airlines to Yangon (Rangoon) in Myanmar.

Transiting through the Beijing airport is a grind. We stood in long lines through immigration and customs even though we were only in transit and never entered sovereign Chinese territory Immigration made us produce our old boarding passes as proof that we had arrived on an international flight. Where else would we have come from?

We much preferred our past non-stop trips on Thai Airways (a United Airlines partner). The Thai Boeing 747 flew 17-hours non-stop Los Angeles to Bangkok. After a short stay in Bangkok we would continue on Bangkok Air to Yangon.

When I booked this year’s itinerary through Beijing and Singapore back in May, the United agent told us that Thai could no longer afford the long non-stop to Bangkok. I didn’t get it. Wasn’t it cheaper than making stops along the way, burning more fuel on extra landings and take offs? The agent said it was because of the rising price of jet fuel. On the nonstop to Bangkok the plane burned too much fuel just carrying the enormous fuel load required to stay in the air for 17 hours. It’s like running a marathon where the rules require the runner to carry her own water. The couple of gallons of extra weight makes the runner inefficient but she wouldn’t make it without the hydration.

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Tuesday, November 29, 2012

Yangon (Rangoon). On our earlier trips, Myanmar’s iron fisted military government had basically closed the country to the outside world for fifty years. The economy had collapsed and was one of the poorest and most corrupt countries in the world. It still is. But in those trips it seemed like we were the only Caucasians in sight, anywhere in the country.

In foreign countries you become sensitive to how people react to you. You can usually break the ice if you appear comfortable and don’t look too stern. That didn’t work on previous trips through the Yangon (previously Rangoon) International Airport where I almost felt like the immigration and customs agents resented our coming into their country. Also, the Lonely Planet guidebook and other travel books warned against bringing in seditious materials under the government’s tough censorship regime. At the time I carried several books that might have been deemed politically sensitive or even banned. We actually considered that the agents woud refuse our entry into the country.

On our latest visit all this had changed. The airport people actually looked friendly. Myanmar began to open in late 2011 under a new constitution, a more or less openly elected reforming president, economic pressures by Western nations and, not least, the inspiration and courage of the democratic icon and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi (Kyi is pronounced “Chee”). The government freed some of its political prisoners, legalized labor unions, began to lift censorship and allowed civil protest. As a reward for improved human rights, the United States and Europe began to remove long standing economic sanctions, highlighted by state visits by Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama in fall 2012. All of this good news means, for better or for worse, Myanmar is quickly becoming a destination for trendy Western tourists.

Johnny Niery, our friend, guide and interpreter, and Dyann, his 12 year-old son, waited for our exit from Yangon Airport customs. Johnny had steered us over much of Myanmar in our past visits. We last saw Dyann and him 14 months earlier so we enjoyed a nice reunion. Dyann had grown less childlike and stepped up to help with our suitcases. Johnny grabbed our driver and the two of them loaded the luggage -- too much of it we decided later -- into a big black SUV.

On the highway to the hotel, Johnny talked about the many changes in Yangon. Tourists seemed to be taking over, filling the very few westernized hotels in Yangon. Driving to our hotel it looked like tens of thousands cars had been added, gridlocking Yangon’s streets. New overpass constructions at major intersections

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slowed traffic to a crawl. For the first time we saw new automobiles with left-hand drives, most of them Korean. In the past, the fortunate few that could afford them, imported five to ten year old right-hand drive automobiles (usually Toyota) from Japan, a right-hand drive country.

The Governor’s Residence. We would stay at the Governor’s Residence (GR) for two nights in Yangon. During the colonial period the British governors of Burma (the country’s previous name) lived in this old teak home. It is a comfortable and green refuge from the normally hot and dusty city. The Governor’s Residence has a large swimming pool, full buffet breakfast with fresh fruit and a first rate restaurant. I started mornings in the pool before we hit the road for the day of exploring. The staff’s young people are obviously unaccustomed to such luxurious surroundings and are eager to please. I have heard travelers say they think in Thailand that service people fawn but scowl when you aren’t watching. I’m convinced that in Myanmar service people really want to please you. It will be interesting to see if this charming attitude survives future exposure to the surge in tourism.

Wednesday, November 30

The morning after our arrival Johnny took us to the National Museum. It’s a dusty place with few visitors but it has treasured historic artifacts. An interesting exhibit traces the development of the Burmese language. Written Burmese started in the Pyu period, about the 11th century and later merged with ancient Pali from India and Sanskrit from China. The characters look like parts of a circle and the writing didn’t seem to have breaks for separating words.

There are rumors that the generals of the late military government sold many invaluable historic artifacts that should be in the museum, to the Chinese, including stone and bronze Buddhist images from many centuries past. Johnny said the common people are outraged by this loss of their priceless heritage.

Aung Myo Lwin. In the evening at the hotel I met for a cup of tea with Aung Myo Lwin, a manager with the Ayeyarwady Bank.1 He had left the bank in early afternoon in order to meet with me. Aung speaks good English -- he was educated in Surinam, Indonesia and Singapore. Myanmar has too few talented young people educated abroad. I am interested in the military’s role as Myanmar tries to democratize and asked what he thought. Surprisingly, Aung spoke openly and

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1 I added more about Ayeyarwady Bank in Appendix 1A.

candidly. Not long ago the people worried about government spies listening in. I suppose he worried less in this upscale hotel for Westerners.

He said the generals see the citizens as children and themselves as the parents. They think people are not capable of running things so the army has to direct them. The new president, Thein Sein (an ex-general), is a good and gentle person. Aung says no one knows who really has the power over the military. The new Commander-in-Chief Myint Aung (separate from the presidency) is not part of the old autocratic hierarchy of generals but comes from the younger generation of generals and keeps a low profile. Many think the old Commander-in-Chief, “Senior General” Than Shwe still runs the show despite being aged and ill. Than Shwe is the product of a Stalinist-like personality cult and had an iron grip on Myanmar for over twenty years.

Many think that Aung San Suu Kyi and her National Democratic League party will be elected to power in the elections of 2015. If so, her party would name Suu Kyi president. Aung doubts that she and her party can run the country. He thinks the military would not allow the present quasi-miitary government to give up that much control. He probably has a good point although, over the years, Suu Kyi has proven to be a politically shrewd lady. She might pull the American card which is to say she could persuade the U.S. to apply new pressure on the government if it fails to keep its commitments. Where Myanmar is concerned, the U.S. has been taking all its diplomatic clues from her.

Thursday, December 1

Yangon Center. We spun through the city center looking for changes in Yangon’s cityscape. Gardeners were planting new shrubs and walkways around the Independence Monument in Bandoola Garden, the big park in the city center. The old British colonial structures still survived including the 3-story rambling court house building in red brick with old fashioned towers on the corners and a grand soaring clock tower over the entrance. The exterior of the old City Hall, still functional, had been painted a light purple. The change in appearance seemed OK and, in fact, left a colorful imprint in the city center.

Johnny said Chinese businessmen want to tear down the old colonial buildings and, in their place, build commercially slick hotels and offices. It would be a great loss to Burma’s history because the British built many of them more than a century ago. The government previously occupied many of the old buildings but basically abandoned and neglected them since it moved lock, stock and barrel out of Yangon

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in 2005 to the new capital Naypyidaw 250 miles away. A Wall Street Journal reporter recently commented that the dying old colonial structures were strewn about like a cemetery for giants.

“Sophie” and Thein. In late afternoon I met “Sophie” (her real name is Thida Htun Pe) and her brother Thein Htun Pe in the Governor’s Residence bar. Sophie is an attractive young woman in designer jeans. Thein is a slight, pleasantly hyperactive older brother with a cell phone always glued to his hand. They both ordered an exotic fruit drink that looked a lot more interesting than my tea. Sophie and Thein were open and honest. We were all on our best behavior: they were eager to have contact with foreigners, especially Americans, and I wanted to learn more about Yangon businesspeople. I regretted that I frequently could not understand Sophie and Thein’s heavy accent and rapid speech. I made them repeat almost every statement.

Sophie and Thein call their IT business “Cytron”. They offer computing and multimedia services specializing in building websites, mostly for several government ministries. They showed me the website they created for Myanmar’s President. They wanted to make it clear that their business was legitimate and did not depend on cronyism with corrupt generals and politicians.

Sophie completed business short courses at M.I.T. in the U.S. and at Nanjang University in Singapore. Their younger brother has been successful in the U.S. working with Deloitte, Haskins & Sells and will soon take over Deloitte’s strategic management practice for SE Asia in the firm’s Bangkok offices.

In answer to my questions they were uncertain about the military’s intentions. They thought the NLD would move ahead in 2015 elections. They didn’t know how the military would respond but then, who does? I’m sure they had their own thoughts about the military. They are conditioned to keep such thoughts private.

Later, Marsha and I had a curry buffet for dinner. Too much to choose from but there were a lot of terrific and tasty salads -- it’s hard to beat a good sliced beef salad with lemongrass and other mild Asian spices. And unlimited beer -- a choice of either Tiger Beer or Myanmar Beer.

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2. To Shan State

Friday, December 2

Air Bagan. Next morning we departed the GR (we would return in two weeks plus) for the airport to catch the Air Bagan flight to Heho Airport southwest of Mandalay. From there, after a night in Kalaw, we would drive into Kayah State, an area restricted by the military. The flight to Heho took one hour and ten minutes. We flew in one of Air Bagan’s two Fokker 1000 regional jets. The rest of Air Bagan’s fleet consists of six ATR-40 and ATR-70 prop jets.

In an alarming back story we learned after we returned to Albuquerque that one of Air Bagan’s two Fokker 1000s had crash landed in a rice field near the airport. Two people died -- a tourist guide and a farmer in the field where the plane came down. It’s a 50-50 chance that the crashed plane was the one we flew that morning three weeks earlier. We were alarmed by the report of the death of a tourist guide and I wrote from home to see if Johnny was OK since he flies that route a lot. He wrote back to calm our concern. We later flew a couple of their ATR-40s and ATR-70s without incident.

The security check on domestic flights is a joke. We put our luggage on the metal detector conveyor that was attended by no one. Then I walked through the detector doorway and set off the alarm bells. The security agent then passed the wand all over my body setting it beeping like crazy (belt, ballpoint pens, keys, wristwatch, etc) but he just motioned me to move on without checking where all this beeping came from.

Heho Airport is in Shan State and is the gateway for travelers to famous Inle Lake. Shuttles drive the arriving tourists east about one hour to Nuang Shwe at the north end of the lake where they hire a longboat on a channel to motor down the lake to their chosen hotel. Our itinerary was different. A new driver, Maung, met us when we landed and drove us west to spend the night at Kalaw, an old British hill station. Kalaw city still uses some of the old colonial structures for government offices. It looked like the government had not maintained the old buildings since the British left 65 years ago.

Heho Market. En route to Kalaw we visited the Heho town market. It seemed a small town but Johnny thought the place had 50,000 people. In our experience, Johnny sometimes gets confused about numbers. The market stalls in Heho sold long beans, onions, cabbage, pea pods, potatoes, watermelon, cucumbers, eggs, bamboo mats, bamboo baskets and more. Two-wheeled carts pulled by single

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horses and a few open cab trucks with noisy outboard Chinese engines packed the market’s parking area. The clunky Chinese engines looked quite unsafe with their unprotected flywheels that spin at 2,000 rpm. One truck owner had a pot set on top of his engine’s hot radiator (also uncovered) to boil water for tea. I counted 15 passengers on the small bed of a pickup truck powered with the open Chinese engine. The Burmese call these trucks “Chinese Buffalos”. They are gradually taking the place of those big work animals.

We watched a pickup truck loaded with either cabbage or sweet potatoes in big cloth bags stacked several times the height of the truck with a young man balancing himself at the top of it all. The driver was lurching the truck up a mud embankment when the front end lifted into the air. For a moment it was touch and go whether the truck was going to go over on its back and the guy on top almost fell to the ground. The embarrassed driver just laughed.

Aungban Town. We drove to the larger town of Aungban (Johnny says 600,000 people -- but I’m skeptical). The town is a major consolidation point for all the vegetables grown in the area. Farmers bring in their harvests of beans, cabbage, sweet potatoes, garlics and tomatoes. These are consolidated by wholesalers, stored in large bins and eventually loaded in large trucks for shipment to Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan and other large population centers.

We stopped to talk with a tomato wholesaler who owned two large bins, each about 10’ X 25’. He had filled one bin with green tomatoes several feet deep and the other with ripening half red and yellow tomatoes. A young man packed tomatoes from the ripe tomato bin in boxes for shipment. He wore a black tee-shirt with “England” across the front and his forearm was tattooed with “F___er”. I doubt this modest young man understood how coarse this tattoo looked to westerners. I don’t think this shy young man is some kind of Burmese gang-banger.

The wholesaler boss came to greet us, a robust fellow, jolly and eager to talk with foreigners but struggling with limited English. He explained that the young man was his cousin and that he attended the local university. His program required a month in residence at the university every year ending with an intensive exam at the end of the month. Afterward graduation the young man wants to remain in AungBan in this family business. The boss’ brother had left the business and moved to Singapore so the young man was the future of this business. It left us wondering if the young cousin quietly thought about the lure of a big city’s lights and getting away from this dull agricultural town.

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Kalaw. We headed for Kalaw and the Pine Hill Resort for the night. The clerk assigned us to a small room with a bathroom lighted by a single bulb. Luxurious it was not, but it had adequate twin beds. We ate dinner in the hotel restaurant served by local girls from a Palaung community. These shy but eager girls wore traditional Palaung attire with bright red longyi (sarong), green jackets and colorful woven hats. We ate spicy Burmese curry with big, tough chunks of beef. Later, we both had, to put it delicately, certain “negative” gastronomic effects from this meal.

Kalaw is over 4,000 feet in elevation and we felt the nighttime cold coming down on us. Toward bedtime one of the young women on the staff brought us heated bags to put at our feet in the bed. What a great idea. Temperatures in the winter months in Kalaw drop to 5C (40F) at night.

3. Loikaw and Kayah State

Saturday, December 3

“Brown” and “Black” Kayah. Few outsiders travel to Kayah State, a state populated by various ethnic groups, most prominent of which are Kayah, Kayan and Pa-O people. The area around Loikaw, the capital, is classified a ‘brown” area meaning the military restricts or else monitors visitors’ travel and requires permission to enter. The military and local police requires travelers holding permits to register with them. Brown areas have had past periods of rebellious activity including open combat between rebel and Myanmar army units but, at the time of registration, these areas did not have such activity. Much of the rest of Kayah is classified “black” because of actual or perceived imminent fighting. Black areas are under what we in the West would call martial law. The Myanmar army still closely watches all of Kayah.

To us, the restrictions meant the tourist agents had not yet “discovered” Kayah. It remains in its natural state in the sense that peoples’ behavior and activities are not conditioned by visitors from the outside because very few outsiders visit. As Caucasians we were unique which was an advantage because the people are intensely curious about Westerners and not burned out on boorish tourism.

Johnny: Friend and Guide. The real reason we ended up traveling to Kayah was at Johnny’s instigation. Well, that and the fact that our first plan for this trip was to visit Kachin State in the far north. That plan was rejected by the government because large scale fighting was erupting in Kachin between the Kachin

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Independence Army and the Myanmar forces. As a result, Kachin had been classified a black area.

Johnny’s tribal group is Kayan (near cousins to Kayah). He born and raised in the small Kayan village of Doroku in south Kayah State. He is the oldest of nine children and, like most people in Kayah, is Christian (Roman Catholic) although there remains vestiges of animism in Kayah villages including Johnny’s.

When he first introduced himself as “Johnny” several years ago I thought he probably used Johnny for foreigners but his real name was some complicated (to us anyway) tribal name. It turns out that the Italian Catholic priest in his village christened him Giovanni, a nice Italian name that became Anglicized to “Johnny”.

He went to the village school through the fourth grade and then to the upper grades and high school in Loikaw (the government only pays for education through the fourth grade). From Loikaw he entered advanced studies in Pyin U Lwin (previously named Maymyo) where he met an elderly English gentlemen, a holdover from colonial days. Johnny negotiated a deal to work for the Englishman in return for English language lessons. Today his facility with English is outstanding so his mentor must have taught him well.

Later, Johnny enrolled in a tourist agent training curriculum at Inle Lake and the rest is history. He is the only one among his siblings to break away from rural Kayah. Johnny is smart and highly disciplined. We are lucky to work with him because he is in great demand. He says he prefers traveling solo with us and not have to manage a large tour group of Westerners with unpredictable demands.

Departing for Loikaw. We departed Pine Hill Resort early on a cold morning to start the 100 mile drive south requiring nearly six hours of driving time to Loikaw, located in the north end of Kayah State. On our way out of Kalaw we stopped to watch children arriving at school. The kids were in jackets and warm sweaters to deflect the cold of the morning. Oddly, many shrubs and small trees had become laced overnight with elaborate spider webs that glistened eerily with condensation in the morning sunshine. Actually, they were beautiful to see. The spiders in some webs were as much as two inches long.

Myint Ma Hti Cave. Leaving Kalaw in the early going we drove through yellow fields of “Japanese Sunflowers” that the farmers grow for cooking oil. Along the road we stopped first at the Myint Ma Hti cave. Throughout the cave pious local people had placed more than a thousand different images of Buddha. The people earn karmic merit by placing these buddhas. Some images honored deceased family members. A string of light bulbs provided the only lighting in the cave.

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Water seepage keeps the walls and floor wet and we had to remove our shoes to wade through pools of water at a couple of points. We had seen “Buddha” caves before and this one was less than spectacular.

As we exited Johnny pointed out a wasps’ nest about the size of a washing machine high in a tree. People don’t survive an attack from a wasp colony like this one.

Driving out of the cave area we passed a field of small stupa (or zedi) alongside a large truckload-sized pile of manure. Farmers had collected the manure to be sold for fertilizer. Alongside the pile a young man leaned on a bullock cart and seemed to be in charge. We asked him about the price. He said the pile was worth about $500 which I thought cheap and Johnny thought expensive. Farmers probably spent weeks accumulating this big manure pile.

The Pa-O: Land of Red Chili. We drove through a region occupied by Pa-O people, a proud tribal group that spreads over large parts of Shan State. The women wear colorful cloths -- they are partial to yellows, reds and blue -- wrapped around their heads. The head wraps reminded me, not disrespectfully, of colorful beach towels. The rest of the Pa-O dress is black pantaloons and black blouses.

In villages along the highway, we began to see large red patches on the ground. The villagers had spread blankets of red chili on bamboo mats in the sun in front of their bamboo houses to dry. The chiles were those slim red and explosively hot ones. They take about 20 days to dry in the sun. Some villagers spread out the chiles on the roofs of their houses.

In one village we left the car and approached two young women standing outside a bamboo house. A blanket of chiles covered the front yard. We introduced ourselves to one of the women with an infant propped on her hip. She asked where we lived. We told her about the American southwest but I don’t think she understood where our country is located. We asked questions about the chili. She pointed out that they had been sorted to separate the good ones from the spoiled ones. There had been rain at the most inopportune time and it spoiled many from this crop.

The young woman asked if we had children and grandchildren. We answered one of each and she brightened and said how lucky we were. I thought this was strange for her to say because Pa-O have large families -- the more the luckier! In answer to our question about her children she said “Only this one”. She had adopted the 4-month old girl on her hip. She and her husband were not able to have their own children.

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The mother of the adopted baby had died in childbirth. Her death had something to do with a twisted umbilical cord but there was no doctor available for many miles so the woman died. The young woman before us was the same age as the deceased mother -- about 20. The village was planning a big ceremony to recognize her as the new mother. There are no legalities like a court-approved adoption; the village just expresses approval of the adoption. That was the custom and good enough for all concerned. The baby seemed lethargic -- she may have had a hard time in her 4 months of life -- but she was baby-plump which was a good sign.

Further along the highway we spotted about ten Pa-O farm women in a field squatting or sitting in lotus position wearing conical hats to defend against the sun and sorting through a huge mound of the red chiles. They used their fingers to pick out the bright red ones and to discard chiles with brown spots. The discarded ones went for animal feed. These hot chiles, you would think, would drive the animals crazy -- at least, it certainly would affect their digestive tracts. One woman worker of about 30 years was the proprietor whose fields had grown the chiles. Through Johnny she expressed unhappiness with the rain damage to her crop. She would sell the good chiles for 2,000 kyat (about $2.40) for 6 kilos (13.2 pounds). I suspect the middlemen up the marketing chain make much larger profit than she does even though she has all the work.

We asked Johnny to tell her that our state (New Mexico) specializes in (Pablano) peppers. She said that hers’ were much stronger (translated: “hotter”) and we did not argue. I think her chiles were akin to the habanero chili and they can be painfully hot to eat if you are not used to them.

Later we drove past two large factories with signs that designated them as the Dragon Cement company. A powerful Pa-O businessman privately owns the factories. A few years ago this owner headed a rebel Pa-O group that fought against government soldiers. The military government negotiated a ceasefire deal that granted him rights to develop businesses without government interference. He is now both at peace and rich.

The highway jarred us with its narrow and rocky surface. The road building crew -- women mostly -- constructed the road base with rocks that they tried to fit together by hand. The women tote the rocks to the worksite in bamboo baskets carried on their heads (on a previous trip I asked Johnny why men don’t carry loads on their heads like the women do and he replied they don’t want to be “lady-boys”; it sounded like a comment Arnold Schwarzenegger once made). The women brush smaller gravel into the cracks between rocks -- again by hand.

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We moved along the road at about 18 mph in our old 1990 Toyota Mark II. Maung said the car had well over 300,000 hard miles on it. The highway was paved the width of one lane -- 10 to 12 feet wide -- right down the center. When an automobile approached from the opposite direction (there were very few of them) it forced both of us to drive with our right wheels off in the mud or rock shoulder (unless the shoulders were broken up in which case we had to wait until the other vehicle passed); only the left wheels stayed on the “pavement”.

Remembering Shan royalty. We stopped in the major town of Pin Laung. A small reflecting lake spread in front of a field of pagodas, making a pretty picture with the light reflecting off the lake surface. Each pagoda’s gold spire tried to outreach the others. The town featured the ruins of an old teak palace left over from the rein of the “Sawbwa” of Pin Laung. Thirty-six sawbwas -- the people in India would have called them maharajas -- ran Shan State as local kings until the early 1960s. Each ruled a specific region. Some regions were quite large -- some much smaller. The Sawbwa of Pin Laung’s kingdom looked about average size. The military ended Sawbwa rule with its coup in 1962.2

Now, fifty years later, the last Sawbwa of Pin Laung’s widow and queen, in her late eighties, continues to live in a house next to the ruins of the old teak palace. Johnny wanted us to meet her but we were not too eager to disturb her lunch. If this place catches on with the other tourist guides in the future, her life will become hell. She still keeps and visits a small Buddhist shrine inside the old palace. A piece of blue canvas covers the window to prevent rain entering but it didn’t look safe because the palace is crumbling to the ground everywhere. I doubt she will ever give up this shrine. It’s an attachment to her glorious past.

Back on the highway we stopped for a lunch of rice and soup in a restaurant called “Green Tree Forest”. We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the toilets -- fancy green colored toilet fixtures and Western style -- the cleanest yet outside of the big towns. Funny how you miss the little conveniences. The restaurant itself displayed a lot of professional photos taken by the owner. Some of the photos had earned awards in international contests -- a famous one featuring the Padaung long-neck ladies earned an award from a major Japanese museum. Because of the presence of these valuable photographs, the restaurant manager did not allow me to bring my camera into the place to shoot our own copies of this photographer’s work.

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2 I added more about the sawbwas in Appendix 3A

The Suu Kyi Incident. The photos reminded Johnny of an incident involving a photo taken during the recent election campaign of Aung San Suu Kyi (she had been released from house arrest by the then military government and the military cleared her to campaign for the new parliament. The parliament was seated in early 2011 under the new 2008 Constitution). Suu Kyi spoke on democracy during her election campaign and a soldier in her audience was so moved he reached out to touch her hand in a gesture of solidarity. A photographer captured the moment in a charming photo that appeared worldwide. Myanmar people say that when this soldier returned to barracks his captain ordered him tortured. The military still reviles Suu Kyi.

Censorship. I don’t know if the torture story is true. The people tell many stories about the military’s abuse that seem fantastic but I tend to think many are true. The truth seldom surfaces because censorship is near total even though it is said to be easing up. So the people report incidents like this by word of mouth, afraid to write anything down.3

Long day To Loikaw. The day was becoming tedious with the grind of the rough highway and frequent stops for visiting places of interest. We now approached the western shore of the famous and magical Inle Lake. On our final stop of the day we climbed up some rough rock stairs to a high rock outcropping with an overlook among a cluster of pagodas and ubiquitous Buddha statues. As a religious site we were required to remove our shoes before clambering up the rocks but the view was refreshing. We reached the top and there it was! Beautiful Inle Lake stretched below us to the north as far as we could see.

Finally we closed in on Loikaw, capital of Kayah State and our destination for the next three nights. I estimated Loikaw’s population at about 25,000. It’s the biggest town in Kayah State. The government classifies the State a “brown zone” which means it is on the military’s watch list so visitors must secure a permit (if you have the right contacts) to enter. Apparently our agent in Yangon knows the right Kayah (the Kayah are also known as Karenni) people and had secured permission for us to enter several weeks before our trip. A gate across the highway blocked our entry at the checkpoint where we left the Shan State border to enter Kayah. Johnny presented our permit and multiple photocopies of our passports.

We stayed the following three nights at Hotel Loikaw. A local heavyweight named Htun Kyaw, once a leader of Kayah insurgents, is developing the hotel after

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3 I added more about censorship in Appendix 3B.

warring for years against the Myanmar army. He signed a peace agreement in 1996 with Myanmar’s now deposed ex-general Khin Nyunt.4

The site plan for the hotel provided what in New Mexico we would call “casitas” -- individual little houses for each guest. Our room was not spacious but the air conditioner worked and it had a TV with a Chinese station that ran Hollywood movies in English with Chinese subtitles so you could follow the action. In the evenings we sat on the front porch overlooking a small lake that was choked with water hyacinth and lotus but pleasant in the twilight air. We wound down from the day’s action with a glass of wine before going to the restaurant.

We discovered rather good wines called Red Mountain -- at least we liked the Sauvignon Blanc and the Cabernet Sauvignon. The winery operates near Inle Lake. In Yangon the Governor’s Residence charged $40 per bottle for Red Mountain wines but Johnny knew a place on the highway were we could get it for 10,000 kyat or about $12. It is surprising to find decent, certainly not great wine in a place like this. We remembered the Chinese wines sold throughout China -- like “The Great Wall’’ (naturally). They were terrible.

Sunday, December 4

On our first day in Loikaw the morning started bracingly cold and a mist rose off of our little lake. We were at the 20th parallel -- about the same latitude as Hawaii -- the high altitude made the difference. Kayah State averages 4,000 feet above sea level so I guess it figures. The hotel clerk had said that from December through February temperatures drop to 5-10C (40-50F) at night. The hotel staff wore heavy jackets waiting for the sun to get stronger later in the morning.

To our surprise, two French couples checked into Hotel Loikaw the previous night. They would be the only Western -- non-Asian -- faces we would see in Kayah State. Maybe they were considering investing there.

The Animists. The next morning Johnny somehow arranged for us to meet the local leaders of the animist religion (Ta Gon Daing). Maung drove us to the outskirts of Loikaw where we motored across an open field toward a simple building with wood siding that looked like an army barracks. On the porch two rather slight and elderly gentlemen greeted us. Phoe Reh, a Kayah, is President of the Ta Gon Daing and the other man, whose name I didn’t get, is Kayan and

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4 I added more about this important figure in Appendix 3C.

“Secretary” of the operation. They invited us to sit with them inside the building around a large table.

Later, a robust younger (around fifty years old?) fellow, built like a fullback, joined us. The animist community elected Ngai Rie to serve as a sort of spiritual leader for its 52,000 followers that are spread over 154 villages. The others introduced Ngai as the “headman” (or chairman). His job requires him to visit the animist villages and encourage religious practice. Politician-smooth, he came from the main animist village of Htee Ke. I asked, with Johnny interpreting, if he was the Kayah Obama. Ngai took this as a great compliment and with a wide smile leaped to his feet to shake my hand.

We asked questions about animism. Animists believe that everything in nature -- trees, rivers, mountains, animals, the sky -- has a spirit or soul. They believe in the primacy of nature and peoples’ personal relationship with the spirits of the universe. Zoya Phan, a Karen raised as an animist, writes that at her birth her father took her umbilical cord high into the mountains and buried it beneath the biggest teak tree where he assumed the most powerful spirit must reside.

The animist god is Pitalu and his “secretary” -- like a disciple -- is Sauk Pra. Pitalu created the earth 2,700 years ago. Our hosts made a point of telling us animism is older than Buddhism (the Buddha lived 2,500 years ago). Actually, animism probably existed in some form a lot earlier -- like from the dawn of civilization. In their tradition, they believe that after the creation Pitalu saw the barrenness of the earth so he ordered Sauk Pra to plant the earth’s first tree. Animists call it “The Victory Tree” (Thabyae) which is actually what we know as the Eugenia tree. Pitalu trod the earth and saw it was covered in rock. His steps drove the rock underground which explains why there are rock strata (geology) beneath us.

Aside from the mythology, animism has a sincere humanist theme. Their god Pitalu commands these four principles of life:

1. born in simplicity 2. live in purity (true to yourself) 3. work with honesty 4. bring peace to the world

These make sense in any system of belief.

Animists’ worshiping and praying take place around a “condeit” which is a pole built to incorporate unifying symbols. From the top of the pole down it

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incorporates objects to represent the sun, moon, stars, the armadillo (animal life), fish, rice kernels, the abode of the secretary Sauk Pra and leaves of the “Victory” tree. The pole represents the trunk of the Victory tree and the rock base represents how it is all set into the earth. Later, out in the field we saw a whole array of these poles. The animists erect a new one every year.

We made a donation to support the animist group’s education of young villagers. With handshakes and smiles all around we left these extraordinary folks. I won’t forget the message of these modest emissaries of animism. They rally their villagers in common belief and common cause to create strong community cohesion.

The Last Kayah King. We stopped at the old teak palace of the last Kayah “king”, a royalty much like the Sawbwa of Pin Laung in Shan State described earlier. And like the Shan sawbwa, Ne Win’s 1962 coup deposed the Kayah king and likely no one ever heard from him again. A Buddhist monastic order occupies the palace now. We spoke with the head monk (also called an abbot) while sitting on our haunches with feet pointed away from the monk, a protocol we followed carefully in audiences with a monk.

The head monk sat lotus style slightly higher on a shallow platform. This fellow scrambled for years raising money to rebuild and remodel the old 1912 palace structure. He feared that if the monks did not actively occupy the palace the Myanmar military would confiscate it, probably as a residence for themselves. The monks in residence, likely well educated, make themselves valuable helping overworked lay teachers to educate the children of Loikaw.

The daytime weather was becoming warmer -- rising toward 80F. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant in town called Ya Than Mun. It is situated over the Pilu River with plenty of shade trees and a pleasant deck for outdoor eating except the proprietor of an automobile engine shop next to us was testing car engines by revving them at 5,000 rpm. The noise and smoke exhaust messed up a nice lunch. We ate dinner at this same restaurant a couple of nights later and had an excellent meal of tiny prawns with vegetables, chicken with snow peas, complimentary soup and a couple of beers all for 7,700 kyat ($8.80) for two.

At the same dinner we sat next to a couple with a 3-year old boy. In the cool evening air -- probably about 60F -- the woman wore a coat with a big fur collar and the father and boy wore jackets zipped up to the neck. An active group of men imbibed freely in an adjacent room and one man clearly dominated in a booming

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voice. Their event finished, the raucous group exited the room and, feeling confident, approached our table to try the few English phrases they knew. They addressed us respectfully and seemed to say they were so happy we were visiting their city. All in all, a good group of men. They don’t see many Caucasians.

The Long-Neck Ladies. Johnny arranged for a visit to the homes of “long-neck ladies”. Members of the ethnic Padaung tribe, they live in their own bamboo houses with large families around them just outside of Loikaw. Some had been raised in Johnny’s village of Doroku in south Kayah. The three women we saw were in their sixties and for most of their lives had worn layers of heavy brass rings around their necks. As children, their parents kept adding new rings as they grew older. The rings make the neck look distorted and elongated when, actually, the heavy brass depresses the shoulders and increases the distance from the head to the shoulders. The women cannot move around without the rings because they don’t have adequate muscular support for the head and neck. I think they may remove them for sleeping.

Enterprising businessmen typically display the long-neck ladies in tourist areas like Inle Lake. We had seen them several times before in such a setting and we were uncomfortable gawking at this disfiguring tradition. But Johnny said it would be unique to see them in their homes and I suppose he was right. We visited two of their bamboo houses. Two of the ladies waited for us at the first house. So we gawked and Marsha bought a scarf or two that the women had made. One woman posed for photos in different postures. It was obvious she had a lot of experience posing and knew all the right angles for photographing. For the photos she carried a large bamboo basket on her back which she hung from her shoulders as the women do traditionally. She wore heavy silver bracelets and anklets and walked in a field looking very authentic.

At the second house the long necked lady offered us her homemade rice wine. She makes it with rice blended with corn and yeast and fermented in large crocks or jars stored under her bamboo house. Fermentation takes about two weeks. You sip the wine through a straw from a half cocoanut shell shaped as a cup. The deeper you dip your straw into the wine, the stronger it gets. Rice wine can set you on your backside quickly so I drank in slow, small sips. After all, it was only early afternoon.

This lady posed for another photo-op feeding rice and curry to her beautiful year-old grandson. Soon, she had to leave for an appointment to display her “long neck”

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at a festival in town. The lady’s daughter in her late teens also wore the rings. Marsha bought another scarf and we took off.

The long-necked women seemed content with their lives. Two of the three ladies had 10 children but they did not know how many grandchildren they had. The third lady had “on;y” 8 children. Slacker!

Aungban-Pinlong-Loikaw Railroad. We headed back into Loikaw from the outskirts and crossed the rather new railroad tracks of a line running from Aungban to Pinlong to Loikaw. The government used impressed labor to build the rail line through some particularly dodgy terrain. Rumors say that many workers died building the section that ran along cliffs above Inle Lake. It is well known that the government often impresses railroad building crews -- no pay, no benefits and minimal food.

The Pagoda Hill. Loikaw boasts a famous religious landmark called the Thiri-Mingalar Taung-kwe Pagoda Hill. The Buddhists built a series of pagodas and a monastery high up on a rock outcropping overlooking the surrounding city and terrain. The stairway up the rock formations frame some perilous passages that would never be approved by OSHA. We took an elevator up near the top and then climbed around the pagodas and got some photos including some novice monks in their teens that agreed to pose for us. I don’t know how the young men felt about this. I will never be a great portrait photographer because I hate pushing the camera into peoples’ faces but the persons we “shoot” seem to obey without resentment.

Johnny is an outstanding photographer. He has placed photos on several tourist agencies’ promotional brochures. His camera with its huge telephoto lens dwarfs our little “sure-shot” Sony but those little cameras like ours sometimes produces amazing photos.

Monday, December 5

”Black” Area: Denoso. Early the next morning we drove east out of Loikaw en route to the town of Denoso. We were headed into a black (the most restricted) area. Johnny passed 20 copies of our passports to one of several officials manning a gate across the road as we entered into the black. I hoped our passport photocopies properly entertained the military, local police, town administration, state administration, agricultural ministry, immigration authorities, customs

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officers, forestry ministry and who knows who else. After some consultations, bureaucratic buzzing and paper shuffling the officials waved us on.

We drove to the market near the center of Denoso with its sales stalls in a large field. Shoppers had parked their motorbikes and bullock carts in a long line on a grassy area outside the marketplace. Brahmin bulls quietly grazed around their bullock carts on the perimeter of the field near the only two automobiles. In this place especially, people saw us as objects of curiosity. A good natured woman vendor sitting in lotus position with her cohorts around her offered us cups of a kind of coffee poured from a large jerry can. She had brewed the “coffee” out of grains and ingredients we couldn’t identify. It tasted sort of musty on the palate but it was a warm beverage you could probably appreciate when you got used to it. Not expecting us to pay, she handed us the cups with a big smile and as we drank her smile became even wider.

People smiled shyly at us strolling through the market. Smiles permeated the place. We are never bored visiting market places in Myanmar. Vendors offer a surprising variety of foods and household items. Vendors amply stocked the Denoso market with condiment type foods like garlic, chili, turmeric, cardamom. ginger, cloves and a wide choice of herbs. We saw jack fruit, dragon fruit, pomelo, bananas, bok choi, morning glory and more.

I spotted a a tea house set up in a shelter with a canvas roof supported by wood posts. We sat next to two burgundy-robed monks and their “civilian” friend on a low bench at a makeshift counter covered with a blue plastic tablecloth. We ordered tea and chatted amiably with the young monk seated next to me. His manner was very open and masculine. He spoke English clearly enough for us to understand and obviously was delighted by talking with us. He smiled engagingly. He and his fellow monk, a rather shy younger man, served in a monastery in Denoso and appeared to be well educated.

A middle-aged Kayah woman served us behind the counter, obviously interested in our camaraderie with the monk. She just stood by to enjoy the banter. I doubt that she understood English. The talkative monk had a good sense of U.S. geography and could locate our New Mexico region. We shook hands and departed with, again, wide open smiles. As I rose to leave I fished for my roll of kyat from my jeans to pay for the tea. The woman proprietor refused to take my money. She was happy that we had come to her teashop. I suppose money is not the be-all and end-all after all. At least not among these very human Kayah people.

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As we reentered the Loikaw area through the highway gate the guards asked Johnny if we had seen anything suspicious while traveling the black area. I thought to myself: “well, only if you consider generous and gentle people to be suspicious”. In the guard’s defense, I’m sure they are instructed to carefully monitor what is going on in that black area.

“Father-in-Law”. In late morning we arrived back in Loikaw but then steered toward the rural outskirts again, this time for an extraordinary opportunity to meet with some of Johnny’s relatives. First we visited the home of a gentleman Johnny called his “father-in-law” which he really wasn’t. He was actually Johnny’s sister Sabina’s father-in-law. I think Johnny called him father-in-law as a way to show respect for this older person -- a pretty old-fashioned virtue that Americans dropped a long time ago. It may sound prickly but we Americans seem to find great fun in mocking older people and their failing faculties rather than honoring them.

In any case, this gentleman had lived a fascinating, if perilous, life. We sat around an old wooden table in his bamboo house with its compacted dirt floor and asked about his experiences. Sabina sat with us busily peeling and sectioning little mandarin oranges which she then passed around.

For background, in the early 1990s the Burmese military conducted a hot war against Kayah rebels (also Kayan, which is a related but different tribal group -- Johnny is Kayan). The soldiers forced this gentleman to work as a porter for the Burmese Army on 20 different occasions. Somehow he survived. The soldiers often would come into his village and grab the village men for portering duties carrying the soldiers’ food supplies and ammunition through jungle terrain. They assigned two porters to each eight soldiers. They fed them very little -- just enough to keep going -- and, of course, gave no compensation. Worst of all, the soldiers made the porters walk through fields ahead of them in case there were mines. In other words, they used the porters as human minesweepers.

The porters accompanied the soldiers to other villages. If the people had fled into the forest and abandoned the village, the soldiers simply forced the porters they already had to continue portering. Our host saw many friends from his village die of overwork and from stepping on land mines working as porters. Later, he became the headman for his village which excused him from portering but the army then made him responsible for rounding up other porters. The soldiers would form a ring around all the men in the village to prevent escape. Both the army and as well

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as the Kayah and Kayan insurgents, who soon also learned to impress porters from the villages, ordered him around.

Finally, to avoid further danger, he moved his family several miles away toward Loikaw. He now has four children and 6 grandchildren, He is a skilled carpenter and has been building houses with a crew of five. The houses are valued at 2,500,000 kyat or about $3,000 of which he earns $500.

More Animism. Johnny’s “father-in-law” practices animism (Ta Gon Daing). Chickens help him with important decisions. For example, he will decide if a plot of land is a good location for a house or if his family will have problems with their health, he consults a chicken. He first kills a chicken and extracts its thigh bones. Then he forces a stick through the thigh bone marrow. Where the blood is emitted from a tiny hole in the thigh bone, he forces a thin stick the size of a broom bristle. If the bristle stands erect it is a good omen; if bent, a bad omen.

His son (Johnny’s sister’s husband) is working in Malaysia and has not been home for two years. Every month the son sends $100 via a Malaysian agent to an account in a Myanmar bank. The same is true for Johnny’s younger sister Veronica’s husband who has been home for only one year since 2008. He will return home in February 2013.

Veronica’s Farm. Johnny’s youngest sister Veronica invited us to lunch at her farm. We walked across the fields from our car to get to her house. She did not have running water. Her facilities consisted of an outdoor privy.

Veronica made a great lunch of soup, curry, rice and, of course, rice wine. We ate alone while Veronica and her daughter, about 10, and son, about 8, watched. The children had come home from school to eat their lunch. Both dressed neatly for school. I asked Johnny if he thought we should offer a donation (for the kids) and he thought it was up to us. This turned out to be awkward because we embarrassed Veronica by asking. In effect, she said, gently, “No way!”

Don’t get me wrong. I love the way Johnny helps us to interact with Myanmar’s people. He often knows the answers to questions we ask people but he carefully translates our questions and reports the way the people answer. This way we get to understand the person we are talking to. He respects our questions and respects the person answering. The guy has a great sense of propriety.

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New Friend, Sai Soe Thiha. Back at the hotel I took my computer to the lobby to access the hotel’s supposed internet connection. Good luck! It took ten minutes for the browser home page to open. While there, I met another internet hopeful. Sai Soe Thiha is a Health Services Officer working for an NGO (non-government organization) in Taunggyi, capital of Shan State, and a personable fellow interested in meeting a Westerner.

We had a friendly talk. He spoke clear English. He seemed very professional and dedicated to his work. He thought it unusual that we were interested in Kayah State and I explained that we enjoyed that the Kayah people have not been affected by foreign visitors. Sai had come to Kayah to check on malaria cases. Apparently malaria is active in the southern part of the state. He said malaria is always a concern although Loikaw has not had cases in the last year or two.

We exchanged our business cards. I thought to myself: how often we meet interesting people in our life, establish rapport and never make connect again. I would have liked to know about this polished gentleman’s childhood. Who opened doors for him to study medicine? What are his hopes for a better life for Myanmar’s people? What keeps him plugging ahead in his impoverished homeland? I should send an e-mail to him to see how things are going and to summarize my impressions of Kayah. I’ll see to it. At least, I should do so.

4. Inle Lake

Tuesday, December 6

The Road Again. After a quick breakfast we settled our bill at the reception and Johnny and Maung picked us up. We said good bye to Hotel Loikaw. We got back on the “rocky road” and headed for Inle Lake where it should be warmer than we had been experiencing. Three days before, we had come down on Highway 54 from Kalaw and now we headed back north the same way.

A little north of Loikaw we passed a huge reservoir and hydroelectric plant built by the Japanese in the 1970s and ‘80s as reparations for the grief they brought to Burma during World War II. The Japanese feel a close connection with Myanmar because they lost so many soldiers here -- hundreds of thousands -- in fighting the British and Americans in 1944 and ’45.

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To assist them during the war the Japanese trained a Burmese force under Aung San, the titular father of Burma and biological father of the iconic Aung San Suu Kyi. Aung San inspired the political activists who wanted to throw the British out of their country. These young rebels dominated the Burmese force. After WWII the Japanese and their investments were by far the strongest supporters of Burma up to the 1990s when the Chinese awakened to the country’s great natural resources and began investing a lot of their capital.

Rice Farmers. Further on we left Highway 54 and took a new cutoff across the low mountains to the northeast in the direction of Inle’s eastern shore. A new cutoff maybe, but the road remained rocky. The terrain rolled with hillocks but farmers could plant paddy in the patches of flat lowland.

We stopped to watch a group of nine farmers working a half acre of paddy. They came from a Pa-O village half a mile away. We watched as they threshed dried-out rice plants the old fashioned way -- by hand. Myanmar has very little farm mechanization. I remembered in Viet Nam, rice growing also involved a lot of labor but when it came to threshing they fed the rice plants into a crude machine or else they spread the rice along the highways to dry on the hot asphalt where passing vehicles would run over and “thresh” the rice. Here, these farmers threshed by swinging clutches of rice plants over their heads and bringing them down violently against a plank. The resounding whack separated rice from chaff. It was hot and dusty work.

The farmers saw us gawking at them from up on the highway as they worked and waved us down to the paddy to meet with them. They included six women, three of whom were in their twenties and three middle-aged. Of the three men, one was old and toothless, one middle age and the youngest was in his early twenties.

The young man’s mother owned the rice paddy. Recently, he had graduated from the economics university in Taunggyi about 100 miles to the north. It probably meant he had been in residence one month out of every school year over a four year period. Higher education in Myanmar is pretty weak. You hear stories about the poor official pay for instructors. They need to earn extra pay by unofficially tutoring their students after the school day just to survive. Of course the students are more likely to get good grades if they pay the instructor for this extra “tutoring”.

As we walked down to the farmers they stopped their work and one of the women produced a bamboo tray with little porcelain cups, a pot of hot tea and a bowl of

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fried snacks. As she poured tea, two of the young women promptly went about nursing babies that had been sleeping in coddling sheets in the shaded area alongside the paddy. I passed around some sweet and salty peanut brittle we had carried with us from home. There were smiles all around.

One of the middle-aged woman -- a real extrovert -- eagerly engaged us. She sat with Marsha on the piece of canvas spread for our comfort in a corner of the rice paddy. Soon these two women, in many ways their worlds far apart, chatted like old friends with Johnny interpreting. She asked as she poured more tea: “How old are you?” It’s one of the first questions country people in Myanmar ask in all innocence, unconscious of possible offense. Our physical condition, at what to her was an advanced age, impressed her. She wanted to know about our food -- do we eat rice? We told her we ate bread made from wheat and we cooked fish.

Marsha’s new friend admired Marsha’s complexion. She offered innocently: “With such lovely pink skin you must have been a beautiful virgin”. The women around them tittered. She apologized for her own dark brown skin. We tried to explain that the U.S. president had skin colored like hers but she had not heard of Obama.

This forty-eight year old woman had four sons and one daughter. She did not mention a husband and it is likely he had died as men in the country often married significantly younger women and life expectancy is short. Two of her sons remain at home and two work in the nearby Dragon Cement factory owned by the Pa-O leader. Her persistent questions and good natured answers to ours got the others laughing so she must have a reputation for good humor. She said she would tell her sons about us as encouragement for them to acquire education. Her village’s school ends with the fourth grade.

The farmers exchange labor: the owner of this paddy will work on the others’ lands when needed. Compensation is simple: the owner provides lunch and in the evening puts on a substantial dinner including rice, vegetables and a meat (probably chicken). The others will reciprocate with big meals when the work shifts to their lands.

We walked out of the field to the road and our car with hand waving and “good-byes” on both sides. Johnny said these farmers probably had never met Europeans or Americans before. The farmers had said some visitors stop their cars on the road and take pictures of their group from the road but never come down to visit. Whether or not we intended it, we made a great impression.

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An encounter like that gets you to think about the great difference in peoples’ lives. Yes, these Pa-O farmers have a tough existence but you will never meet more dignified people. Their openness and honesty is a breath of fresh air. And they have community -- they support each other. There is not the yearning for the material goods our commercial world creates with nonstop advertising and marketing hustle. At least they do not yearn yet.

This cannot last. As the country awakens to the 21st (make that the 20th) century big businesses will make consumers out of them. Already Pepsi-Cola is crowding in. Walmart is next. I read that Carlsberg, the Danish brewer is setting up shop in Myanmar. The Carlsberg people discovered that the people of Myanmar average drinking only 4 liters of beer annually. The average Thai drinks 25 liters and the Vietnamese 30 liters. I have never been accused of disliking beer, but to Carlsberg these are not people. They are consumers and potential big beer drinkers.

To Inle Lake. We stopped for lunch at a roadside restaurant just ahead of a new bridge that crosses the main channel that flows south from Inle Lake. The lake feeds into the channel. Inle Lake itself is a north-south sliver of water about thirteen miles long and as much as seven miles in east-west direction.

We ate comfortably out of the sun under an awning next to a monk who sat alone (the restaurant fed him free of charge) and near another table with a young man who was traveling on his motorbike. He ate quietly and alone, looking very solitary. He never looked up. Maybe it embarrassed him to sit next to Western visitors. After lunch we crossed the bridge and headed north on the road that parallels the lake’s eastern shore. The old Toyota rattled along another rocky, half-paved road.

We reached our lodging at Aureum Palace Resort and Spa located on the eastern shore of Inle Lake. It was quite an upgrade from Hotel Loikaw. The hotel had a fine restaurant, large rooms, a fancy shower and bath and a nice Olympic-sized swimming pool that I used each afternoon before the air got too cool. We would stay in another casita (separate house) type of arrangement except this one was much larger than the one in Loikaw. It had a nice deck built over a channel that led to the lake. We really could not use the deck. The afternoon sun made the deck too hot and we couldn’t use it after sunset because the mosquitoes launched their attacks on anyone sitting around outside at dusk.

We ate Western food in the restaurant that night -- local butterfish that is light and flaky, with steamed vegetables. After dinner we turned in early, tired from another

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long day. After Hotel Loikaw we welcomed a good bed. But we had to deal with the mosquito netting. When getting up in the middle of the night it’s hard to find the opening in the netting to let yourself out.

A message on our pillow read: “He alone is great who turns, the voice of the wind into a song, made sweeter by his own loving. Have a good sleep.”

This was a classy place.

Wednesday, December 7

The lodging at Aureum Palace was much more the upscale tourist hotel than our lodgings in Kalaw and Loikaw. The large cavernous, high ceilinged restaurant had a huge breakfast buffet -- egg dishes, a make-to-order omelet station, many types of meats and cheeses, every kind of tropical fruit imaginable, soups, casseroles, Japanese specialties, pastries and more.

On Inle Lake. After breakfast Johnny waited at the dock with a longboat and motorman. Longboats are long and narrow -- one-person wide and not made for wide persons. We saw this type of boat all around the lake. It is made entirely of teak and many of them include a rugged Chinese outboard engine mounted at the stern. When the boat runs out on the lake the engine is loud and clunky with a metal on metal noise like it has a loose piston. The motorman sits in the rear, hand on the tiller with his face a few inches from the spinning open flywheel and drive belt. The length of these boats is about 30 feet although for a group of tourists or hauling freight or motoring a bunch of kids to school, the boat may be as long as 45 feet.

Inle is a magical place, especially when you are out on the water. On this day we would revisit some of the sites we had seen in previous tours. Underway, the first thing that strikes visitors is the Intha fishermen standing on the very prow of their boats manipulating either a net or a conical-shaped frame wrapped with netting. They usually fish alone in their longboats (without motors) The fisherman drops the conical frame into the water and the open face settles onto the lake bottom where he hopes to trap a few carp. The bottom is only 10 - 15 feet deep.

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The tribal Intha (meaning “people of the lake”) arrived at Inle about the 14th century. They are famously known as leg rowers. The fisherman stands on the prow on one leg and curls the other around an oar held upright in his hand. He moves the boat forward by sweeping the oar leg backwards through the water. He focuses on fishing while at the same time maneuvering the boat.

Another unusual feature of Inle is the floating gardens. The Intha grow crops on fertile floating sod that they cut from around the shore and float out onto the lake. They drive long bamboo poles through the sod to anchor it into the lake bottom at a depth of ten feet or less. The farmer plants vegetables or flowers on the sod. They grow mostly tomatoes followed by beans and squash. The floating sod gradually erodes but should last up to twenty-five years.

Some farmers grow flowers on the sod. They sell them to religious pilgrims who, to gain karmic merit, donate the flowers to The Buddha when they visit a pagoda or a Buddhist temple. We walked across some of these sod gardens and they bob down a few inches and pop back up. When the Intha farmers harvest the tomatoes, middlemen buyers come down from places like Aungban (page 8) to negotiate with the farmers. They fill up whole longboats with the tomatoes.

A third fascinating aspect of the lake is the villages of bamboo and teak stilt houses. The Intha hunker these houses down right on the lake level. They literally live on the lake and depend almost entirely on their longboats to get around because the bottom floor of their houses is the lake! Most of the houses have a boat ready to go at the bottom of a stairway that descends from the upper floor where the families actually live. They really are “people of the lake”.

Nga Phe Chaung Monastery. Our longboat headed directly west across the widest part of the lake to the famous “jumping cat” monastery, formally known as Nga Phe Chaung Monastery. This widely known monastery boasts an unusual collection of Buddhist images. During World War II the abbot serving this monastery collected the Buddhist statues, made of stone or wood, from monasteries in the region to protect them from destruction in the intense and wide-spread fighting between the Japanese and the British and Americans. The statues represent different styles of Buddhist imagery including Shan, Bagan period (10th - 14th C.) and Ava period (before the Bagan) so it’s a historically valuable collection.

The monastery’s monks and staff train cats to jump through wire hoops. The cats receive a snack for successful jumps. My camera was too slow (or I was too slow)

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to catch them in mid-flight. The cats attract a lot of Western visitors who often are more eager to see the cats than the Buddhist artworks. We saw the cats on previous visits but this time a monk told us his head monk decided the practice should be discouraged. I suppose it lacked dignity. Too bad. We like to watch cats in motion.

Although the camera didn’t keep up with the cats in motion, I want to commend my simple Sony “Sure-Shot” camera. It sometimes cranks out photos that are spectacular. With digital you are not inhibited from shooting anything and everything. I am not an accomplished photographer so to get a handful of good photos I take more than a thousand pictures on a trip like this. In this way I can hardly avoid getting occasionally great pictures. I just insert a 16 gb high capacity memory card. The camera fits in my jeans pocket so I can produce it instantly when a photo op appears.

The Boat Builders. We motored south on the lake to a settlement where the longboats are built. It is obvious that the Intha people need their longboats for fishing, farming, transporting goods and families to market or children to school. Basically, they need the longboat to survive.

Kyaw (pronounced “Chaw”) Moe manages his family’s business of boat building. This business was the only shop producing longboats on Inle Lake. Kyaw’s great grandparents started the business a century ago. They build the boats with teak. A family-sized boat of, say, 30 feet costs about $1,200. The large 45 foot version is for tourist groups or for hauling commercial or agricultural loads and costs about $2,000. Adding the Chinese outboard motor increases both prices by $1,000.

The family buys the teak on the black market. Smugglers cut and transport the trees at night in secret. Most of Kyaw Moe’s teak material comes from central Kayah State, priced at $600 per ton landed at Loikaw or $1200 delivered to Inle after bribes are paid to the forestry ministry, the military, immigration and customs officials and local authorities.

Teak is an endangered species. Smugglers over cut and deplete the teak forests. Corrupt government (military) officials contract to sell teak to Thai or Chinese businessmen and then hire the smugglers to deliver the teak. The boat builders of Inle use a trivial volume of teak compared to what foreign buyers take.

They need one ton of teak to build 2 to 3 boats. This family business completes a boat in 2 to 3 weeks. The eight family workers build the boats by hand using no

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power saws, planes or drills. We watched Kyaw, his brothers, sons, cousins, sisters and brothers-in-law use hand saws and hand jack planes to shape boat parts.

To form the hull they hand-saw each of the long boards from teak timbers about 15 inches square and twenty to thirty feet long. The cutters rip inch wide boards from the timbers. They use a 2-man rip saw with a vicious looking blade about seven feet long to saw a timber suspended on a platform. One cutter stands on the timber about six feet off the ground and drives the cutting stroke down through the timber, then pulls up on the return stroke. His bare feet are a couple of inches from the huge shark-toothed saw blade. The other cutter stands on the ground below the timber, pulls the cutting stroke down and then pushes the return stroke back up.

To finish the boat hull, a worker joins the sawed boards with long wood pegs and wood screws, screwed in by hand. Thet Htun expertly uses a putty knife to seal the joints. He seals the joints with a paste made of tree sap (creosote?) and saw dust. Thet is either Kyaw’s brother or cousin, I couldn’t figure out which.

Thet seemed to enjoy our watching him work and talked freely about his ideas. He complained that the lake administration asks them to build huge ceremonial canoes for the various villages on the lake at a discount. The administrators use the boats only once per year at festival time. Meanwhile families that need a boat every day for their work must pay full price. Also, Thet would like a system that sets a fixed price for teak to cut out the bribery and corruption. The authorities, he said, should grant a teak quota to legitimate businesses like theirs.

We shook hands with Thet and Kyaw. The cousins and nephews smiled their good-byes. Not to sentimentalize, but in my mind, what this extended family does is noble work. I don’t think they fill their heads with politics or envy of others. They opened themselves to us freely although we must have appeared rich to them traveling from the other side of the world. They focus on doing their best.

Phaung Daw Oo Paya. Our boatman steered us down a channel through another of those stilt-house villages en route to an important monastery. Along the way, several people waved to us from their windows. They don’t use glass or even screens on the windows. They cover some windows with shutters which I imagine comes in handy when there are storms and sheets of rain coming down during monsoon season.

We motored a little further south from the jumping cat monastery to the Phaung Daw Oo Paya (paya means holy place, in this case a temple or pagoda), the most

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ornate and holiest site in Shan State. It houses five small Buddha images that are plastered with gold leaf applied by worshippers. You cannot make out the original shapes because of the globs of gold. Men parade these Buddhas around in a ceremonial longboat to the lake’s villages once a year as part of a major festival. We attended the festival in October 2011.

A sign in front of the platform where the images are on display -- I suppose it could be described as an alter -- says “No Women Allowed”. Most Buddhist shrines we have seen everywhere in Myanmar display a sign like that. Women can not step up to the alter and are not allowed to get in on applying the gold leaf to Buddhist figures. Certainly this is discriminatory. Such discrimination is not strictly a Buddhist thing. Many Muslim societies force women to stay out of sight. Remember too; the Catholic religion omits women from the priesthood. Feminists’ would consider all such cases as “gender discrimination”.

We stopped for lunch at Mr. Toe’s Restaurant just across a channel from the Phaung Daw Oo Paya. We had been there on previous visits. Diners eat lunch at tables on a pleasant deck overlooking the channel and watch the impressive volume of longboat traffic. However, those loud Chinese outboard engines produce plenty of noise pollution.

It was time for a cold bottle of Myanmar Beer. I ordered a chicken curry instead of the carp dish I ordered the last time we were there. Fishermen provide fresh carp from the lake but carp tastes bitter to me. Americans consider carp a poor man’s fish. We never see it on restaurant menus in the U.S.

We returned to the Aureum for a brief nap after which I swam in the hotel pool while the sun was still reasonably warm.

Thursday, December 8

Free Day. We told Johnny we wanted a free day to just lounge around the hotel and rest after our sustained travel nonstop for more than two weeks. I think he felt guilty because he gets paid even when he is not working. He likes to be busy and is inexhaustible when we travel together. He wants us to experience everything.

“The Most Reliable Newspaper Around You”. That’s the banner on the New Light of Myanmar, the government’s daily newspaper mentioned in Appendix 3B. The hotel had a bunch of recent issues so I sat a couple of hours catching up on

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Myanmar happenings. The New Light previously focused exclusively on the activities of the junta’s leading generals. It was a public relations organ and still is but less so. It used to report news of some General or other opening a new hospital ward, presenting an award to students, receiving a foreign ambassador, making a donation to a Buddhist shrine, addressing an army regiment and so forth. What has changed is the generals stay out of sight and civilian politicians (actually a hybrid of civilian/military men) go for the publicity.

The newspaper is changing gradually under the democratizing influence of the new government. The issue of December 1st reported an address by Dr. Sai Mauk Kham, Vice President of the Union of Myanmar about improving the coordination of finances and revenue between Union government and the region and state (r/s) governments. Power between the central government and the states and regions is not fairly distributed. Of all the tax revenue the government collected, the Union gets 96 percent, the regions and states 4 percent. Expenditures are Union 93 percent, regions and states 7 percent. It is obvious where the administrative power lies.5

I enjoyed the pure luxury of time for reading and thinking instead of being steadily stimulated touring new venues. In the afternoon I left the hotel and strolled down the road a mile or two and found a mosque in this Buddhist country. The mosque had little telltale minarets on the corners, nothing elaborate, and, of course, it had an onion dome over the center hall. It got really hot walking the road in the mid-afternoon sun so I returned to get into the swimming pool which was oddly empty. This upscale hotel probably attracts few families with kids. Kids usually fill a good swimming pool quickly.

After a glass or two from our stash of wine in the room, we had a dinner of butter fish with steamed vegetables in the hotel restaurant. I enjoy Asian food but we had been getting it for every meal. My gastronomic condition is happier breaking up the pattern with some familiar Western cooking.

5. Our Road to Mandalay

Friday, December 9

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5 More on The New Light in Appendix 4A.

For most of my lifetime I thought the road in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, The Road to Mandalay (where the flying fishes play...), probably was a muddy elephant track through tropical jungle to exotic Mandalay. I concede now that most people probably always knew the “road” was the Irrawaddy River (now Ayeyarwady). I didn’t. What’s more, Mandalay is not particularly exotic.

Water Route to Nyaunshwe. Three eager young porters from the hotel hauled our suitcases down from our Aureum Palace Resort casita to the dock. I gave each a 1,000 kyat note. Too much luggage. I need to learn to pack resourcefully. As it is, we had left a bag of unneeded items back in Yangon for pick up on our return there in the next week.

Johnny waited in the longboat. Every day he sets the time for starting and I swear he always shows up a half hour before the agreed time. He is one of those people who think life is wasting if they are not in constant motion.

We were leaving the enduring rhythm of Inle’s floating gardens, stilt houses and boat-dependent lake people. We have traveled to Inle three times and felt like we owned a piece of this delicately magical place. The magic is at risk. Inle is an ecologically fragile place. As Myanmar opens to large scale tourism, international developers are rapidly planning a spate of new hotels at Inle.

The boatman fired up the clunky Chinese engine, motored us along the channel leading away from the hotel and then pointed the boat north across the open water to the much longer channel that runs up to Nyaungshwe a mile above the lake proper. We were motoring against the tide of new tourists. Visitors arriving by bus or automobile from Heho Airport transfer to longboats at Nyaungshwe to motor south by water to one of the rapidly increasing number of resorts on Inle Lake.

Maung met us on our arrival in Nyaungshwe and we quickly transferred our gear from the longboat to his old Toyota Mark II for our later ride to Heho Airport. Nyaungshwe was the Shan capital in the 18th century. Over the intervening centuries middlemen have always operated small warehouses in Nyaungshwe for consolidating the crops produced at Inle Lake. Last year we examined their open warehouses full of tomatoes like the ones in Aungban I described earlier.

Also, last year in Nyanugshwe, we walked down a long road past many wealthy peoples’ homes. They were likely owned by Chinese who dominate the wholesale produce business, as well as most other businesses in town. Their houses show the characteristic tastes of Chinese merchants. They are narrow and multistory with

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high ceilings, usually with ceramic fascia and always those glossy architectural balustrades supporting highly polished railings that line the decks of the upper floors or exterior stairways -- some are made of marble but more often polyurethane or PVC. Those balustrades are a show of wealth.

This time, however, we drove to an extensive pagoda complex. The pagodas were Shan but I don’t remember what distinguishes Shan pagodas from, say, Burman. There was one fine gold-gilded pagoda that featured condeit or standalone columns with animist-like symbols like we had seen in Loikaw. Normally you don’t find these outside of Shan and Kayah States. The condeit symbolize how Buddhism among the Shan accommodates -- at least recognizes -- ancient animist beliefs.

In the nearby complex many of the pagodas were of 16th Century vintage and sorely neglected. They were crumbling in front of our eyes, exposing their brick cores and looking totally defrocked. The restoration people had more or less clumsily rescued many by rebuilding them with modern concrete work and painting them in brilliant white all of which destroys their historic value.

We needed to restock our wine and Johnny had scouted a shop in Nyaungshwe that carried Red Mountain wines. The shop had the right price at 10,000 kyat ($12) so we bought the sauvignon blanc and cabernet sauvignon -- two bottles of each. It sounds like a lot of wine but we didn’t know where we could stock up over the next week. To pay the clerk Marsha fished out the requisite crisp and pristine one hundred dollar bill. We had examined our bills carefully for blemishes before we left home. They reject bills that have been folded or have the slightest marks.

Amazingly the clerk rejected this perfect bill. It turned out that this bill had a serial number beginning with CB. Printed in 2001, the CB series bills over the years apparently had been more easily counterfeited than later bills. The proprietor had instructed the clerk to turn down those suspicious “CB” bills. Fortunately we had other $100 bills without suspect serial numbers.

We walked on to a mid-sized Buddhist temple (shoes and socks off on the temple grounds). The interior had the usual four sides. The inside end walls on each side featured an impressive statue of Buddha, each one in a different posture (mudrå) and each with a golden face of highly polished bronze. Also on each side were cabinets containing strange collections of articles. One had only old teapots, another had little wooden and bronze elephant figurines, another old sewing machines and another old dinnerware of porcelain china. These collections seemed

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out of place. I suppose the monks attempt to combine the temple with a museum of sorts. No one else was there and the place had a sterile feel to it.

Outside we encountered an elderly woman and younger woman -- probably the daughter -- with a slightly Mongoloid baby girl, her forehead and nose coated with thanaka. The young woman sold incense to visitors. We bought her incense and photographed her hugging the little girl like the prized possession I’m sure she was.

My empty stomach began to grumble so Johnny steered us to one of the rare pizza restaurants in Myanmar. He called it “the Italian place”. The restaurant’s actual name was “Golden Kite”. Whatever. Pizza and a good salad sounded great. It’s not easy to find pizza anywhere in Myanmar. Believe it or not, mine excelled; ample cheese (despite the fact that Asians ordinarily do not eat cheese -- or any dairy products for that matter) and tasty sausage. Sadly, for an “Italian place”, I did not see any Italians. But we were beginning to see many Western tourists.

The Gurkhas of Myanmar. After lunch we hit the highway for Heho and our flight to Mandalay. Along the way Johnny wanted us to meet a family of Gurkhas. The Gurkhas have a vital history as subjects of the British colonial forces all over Asia. The ancestors of Johnny’s friends came from Nepal in the colonial days in the service of the British at the old hill station of Kalaw (where we.stayed the week before).

During the 20th century wars many Gurkhas fought in Europe. They were legendary ferocious fighters and on the battlefield they struck great fear in Britain’s enemies. Toward the end of the war in Burma they fought the Japanese valiantly. In a decisive 1945 battle the “Queen’s Own 6th Gurkha Rifles” liberated Mandalay Hill and drove the Japanese out of the ancient, moat-surrounded citadel. For a time Japanese soldiers in Burma died by the tens of thousands every day. Their leaders commanded them to fight to the death: no surrender! And no one did. It’s impossible to imagine their hopelessness and suffering.

Johnny’s friends owned a house in part of a compound of thirty-five Gurkha families that numbered about 300 people. The father, a nice man about forty years old, greeted us outside of the house. The father built the family house with mud block and set it back from the highway about fifty meters. Gaudy yellow and turquoise paint colored the exterior walls of the house, accented by several large hieroglyphic symbols. I forgot to ask what the symbols meant. They certainly weren’t graffiti but probably had Hindu religious significance.

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The low main doorway was low enough that I ducked my head as I entered the house. The family lived in three rooms: one for storage, the second a kitchen and sleeping area and the third a main room. The kitchen stove had a cement block top and sides with an open pit underneath for wood burning. The floor was a composite of hard mud and cow dung. In the main room indirect lighting and a string of flashing Christmas lights lit a Hindu shrine. Obviously the family had electricity. We recognized an image of the Lord Vishnu.

The family gave us the only chairs in the main room while they -- including eight children and the wife -- sat on the floor to chat. My insides cringed initially at the intimacy of entering this family’s most private space. We were foreign invaders, American intruders. But when Johnny told them we were American the father smiled and said “Ah, America!” Not sure if that was approval or not. Some people in undeveloped countries still have the traditional image of the U.S. as the City of Oz where everyone is successful, happy and democratic and the country only wants to help and dignify the rest of the world. Maybe that’s what our new friend was thinking. True or not, you can’t help but be charmed by that perspective.

The family makes a living owning cows, growing corn and selling cow dung which they also used to stucco the house for insulation. As we departed, I noticed a little shack close to the highway with movie posters out front. I assumed the family sold DVDs to highway passers-by. A big padlock secured the front door of the DVD shop probably because the family was occupied by a certain two highfalutin American visitors. We were impressed that the parents and older kids have to scratch every day to feed that large family. We left a small contribution -- about $12 worth of kyat.

Our Air Bagan ATR-40 prop jet flight to Mandalay departed at 4:55 pm and arrived in Mandalay at 5:30. (Looking back, I am happy it wasn’t the ill-fated Fokker 1000 jet). The flight took 35 minutes. We barely got up to altitude at 7,000 feet, before we began to descend.

6. Mandalay Town

The drive to Mandalay from the airport droned on much too long although our new driver Seng drove the Toyota sedan smoothly. Seng also drove during the next three days and proved a savvy and businesslike local man. The airport, located near

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the town of Kyaukse (pronounced “chalk-say”), is too far out of Mandalay. Kyaukse is the birth city of Myanmar’s all powerful strongman and ex-Senior General, Than Shwe. The general located the airport there, despite the distance to Mandalay, to benefit his home town. Evidently, pork is not part of “American exceptionalism”. It is practiced everywhere.

We checked into the Rupar Mandalay Resort at about 6:30 pm. I liked it immediately (the hotel’s card reads: “Warmly, Natural & Privacy”). It was not a casita but a comfortable, not elaborate, room with warm brown wood paneling, soft lighting and TV that carried CNN, BBC and a zillion Sky channels. The resort had only 30 some rooms but it sprawled with lawn areas and well-trimmed vegetation. A Christmas tree graced the reception; plump, tall, heavily decorated and lit. Good grief, it was almost Christmas! The olympic sized swimming pool back of the main building was at least as fine as the one at Inle. I resolved to be in the pool in the morning.

We didn’t stop to unpack but had a pleasant glass of wine in the room (first things first) and headed down to the open air restaurant. We were comfortable at night wearing just a sweater. Happily, Mandalay was warmer than places we had been the past week. We unpacked after dinner, relieved to be in one room for the next three nights.

Saturday, December 10

I swam before breakfast. Three middle-aged women bobbed and socialized together in the pool. They greeted me and as I swam they smiled a lot. I asked what was their country. They were Thai and it turned out they had the massage concession with the hotel so I interpreted some of their friendliness as good marketing. Whatever. The early morning greeting was pleasant.

Ancient Temple Discovery: Tamoke Shwe Gu Gyi. Marsha subscribes to Asian Arts, a beautiful, glossy monthly magazine, published in Hong Kong, that is the bible on the arts of Asia. A recent issue carried an obscure little article about the quite recent excavation of an 11th Century temple not far from Mandalay. The 11th century in this region immediately suggests it was built by Anawrahta, ruler of Bagan in 1044-1088. He was one of the -- perhaps the -- greatest king of Myanmar history.6 Would this be our Indiana Jones moment?

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6 Some more on Anawrahta in Appendix 6A.

Johnny had not heard of this new excavation despite being a thorough and astute historian. He was game to learn about it. However, I had to replace sunglasses I lost at Inle as our first order of business in the morning. We drove into Mandalay center and on a busy commercial street found a shop that specialized in sunglasses. I spotted a pair of the famous genuine (oh, sure) Ray-bans for only 3,500 kyat ($4). They probably were not polarized. The Ray-ban website lists them from $90 to $185 per pair so I got quite a deal. (If you believe these knockoffs were real Ray-bans I have a Rolex watch for you for five bucks.)

The shop adjacent to the sunglasses shop specialized in bicycle/motorcycle helmets. As an active bicyclist I had to check them out. They sold cheap military-style plastic molded helmets for $2 to $3 and more advanced hardshell plastic ones for under $10. A safe helmet in the U.S. goes for $45 and up. Myanmar requires cyclists to wear a helmet and the fines for violating this rule are legendary. Before the incipient democratization movement, I heard of penalties of up to 30-days in jail for violating the helmet law. So people bought the helmets to protect against traffic citations, not to protect the head.

To reach the excavation site of the Tamoke Shwe Gu Gyi temple we traveled about an hour or 12 miles to the southeast from Mandalay. It lies beyond the old airport road and borders on the village of Nge Toe. In the fields along the route farmers trudged with their plows behind pairs of brahmin bulls. The Mandalay region is part of the hot, dry center of Myanmar so is a struggle to raise crops. The stronger buffalos do not survive in such hot and dry regions. The brahmin tolerate this climate but are less powerful and less efficient than the buffalo.

At the excavation site, excavation workers actually were uncovering three ancient constructions -- one on top of another. The builders of an outer 12th century temple encapsulated the inner most temple -- Anawrahta’s temple -- from the 11th century. Fourteenth century builders had constructed a huge pagoda on soil fill over the second, 12th century, temple. By the time excavators began in ernest seven centuries later in 2009, the pagoda had crumbled and vegetation had grown over everything to conceal the old structures. By 2009, observers could only see a considerable, inadvertent man-made hillock.

Within the dig the excavators found remarkable Buddha statues that contained other Buddha images encapsulated within them. The chest of the larger Buddha contained an opening from which another Buddha head peered, It was an apt metaphor for the site’s temple within a temple phenomenon.

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We watched young men in a dig carefully scrape soil from the top of an ancient foundation and gently swing their shovel to dump the soil into a waiting bamboo basket. Then one of them lifted the basket into the hands of a confederate up at grade level. They were brain-surgeon careful whenever they touched the old constructions. Obviously, the workers needed years to complete this patient dig.

Kyaukse, Home of Strongman Than Shwe. On our return toward Mandalay we entered Kyaukse, birthplace and now one of many palatial homes of Than Shwe, Myanmar’s apparently retired leader and ex-Senior General. He is the poster child for the ugly military domination of Myanmar’s past and, some fear, its present. I wanted to see the home so we turned off and drove into the town. I got my camera ready but our driver Seng, a Mandalayan familiar with the area, warned that cameras were prohibited. So, we drove around the walls of Than Shwe’s vast walled compound estate. Than Shwe began life humbly. His parents were farmers so he undoubtedly built the present estate on his family’s land after he acquired ultimate power. In Myanmar, great wealth goes with great power. Although Than Shwe publicly stepped down from power in 2011 under the new 2008 Constitution and the installation of the hybrid military/parliamentary government, many think he secretly remains the master of a military that appears to defy civilian authority. At the time of our visit, the military was running amok conducting a hot war against the ethnic Kachins.7

Well past lunchtime we stopped at a small street-side curry shop in the noisy center of Kyaukse for a meal. We ate a simple meal: fried rice, stir-fried mixed vegetables, Myanmar Beer and a large portion of motorbike and automobile exhaust from the street. A TV mounted above us near the ceiling over our table blared a silly comedy show from Yangon. The TV transfixed the elderly lady at a table in back. When people paid their bills, the young man serving tables presented the money to this woman and we concluded she must have been the owner. But a stray dog from the street, sniffing around and under each table, seemed to be in charge.

Chinese Pipelines. On the road headed for Mandalay we saw construction workers laying a large pipe through a new concrete culvert under the highway. We knew immediately it was part of the ongoing Chinese construction of parallel oil and natural gas pipelines that start at Kyaukphyu (pronounced “Chalk-Foo”) port on Ramree Island in the Bay of Bengal in the southwestern Myanmar State of

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7 More on Than Shwe in Appendix 6B.

Rakhine. When completed in 2015 the pipelines will run in a northeastern direction through all of Myanmar (via Mandalay) to the city of Kunming in China’s Yunnan Province, a distance of over 500 miles. The natural gas pipeline will continue east and north beyond Kunming to Guizhou, making the total distance 1,700 miles.

At Kyaukphyu the Chinese will pump oil from tankers arriving from the Middle East and gas from offshore drilling in the Bay of Bengal. It’s a big deal because it allows China to skirt around the narrow Straits of Malacca where most of their oil shipments go. They fear the Straits could be blocked in the event of an international conflict (probably with the United States, the only country with the wherewithal to block). Also, since the Kyackphyu port shortens the sea route the Chinese will save money transporting oil from the Middle East.

So there we were, witness to one of the biggest projects undertaken in Myanmar this decade (OK, we only saw a small piece of pipe). Actually, I had seen some of the preparations in and around Sittwe in Rakhine in 2011.8

Sunday, December 11

I enjoyed another refreshing early morning swim before breakfast. It was too early for the hotel’s usual breakfast buffet so I sat in my wet swim suit with a towel around my shoulders and drank coffee. Beyond the pool and over a high cyclone fence workmen were breaking up concrete in an old tennis court. It was a jarring sound before 7 am but, hey, the economist in me observed that the men had jobs and the hotel was investing in its future.

Mandalay’s Sights. On previous trips we visited Mandalay’s major attractions for visitors. So as not to lengthen the discussion here, Appendix 6D provides a description of our earlier visits to the three most important ones.9

Some visitors are not impressed with Mandalay (despite the lyrical sound of its name, thanks to Rudyard Kipling who, incidentally, never travelled as far as Mandalay). Yes, it is hot, dirty and crowded. But crowded Asian cities like Mandalay fascinate me. You learn to appreciate the human ingenuity necessary for people to cooperate and create countless rules of behavior in order to exist, mostly on the street, in such a maelstrom of humanity. I like the place.

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8 How the pipelines are being built by corrupt contractors: see Appendix 6C.

9 See Appendix 6D.

I don’t think anyone really knows the size of Mandalay’s population. It has at least one million people -- it could be 2 million for all I know -- certainly enough to give it great energy. Of the assumed one million at least 100,000 of Mandalay’s population are Chinese who either arrived recently from China or whose families have been in Myanmar a generation or two. The local Burman people deeply resent the Chinese for their aggressive commercial behavior. The Chinese are terrifically resilient. Any individual enterprising Chinese man and his usually large family (Chinese men dominate the family) often build “family businesses”. These usually constitute formidable mini-corporate forces.

Chinese family enterprises drive out the Burmans’ small businesses. Burman life styles are more relaxed and the people interact in a softer -- and more charming -- manner. Lately, I have read stories of the explosion in Mandalay’s property values, driven up by Chinese who came to the city with their large families, financed with plenty of money borrowed from their extended families of brothers, uncles and cousins in China. They buy up the prime properties at central locations in the city and then bring their relatives into their businesses. One article in the Irrawaddy, a newspaper published by Burmese journalists in exile, reported that a certain Mandalayan, Lwin Maung, sold his property in 1996 to a Chinese entrepreneur for $21,250 expecting to buy it back when his business improved. He claims the property is now valued at $10 million, infinitely beyond his means.

Mandalay Market. We started our day driving into Mandalay center to visit the giant indoor market. I didn’t record the market’s Burmese name but it translates as “Good Price Market”. It must hold a thousand vendors, each with retail space ranging from a cramped hovel to a grand show space. We joined the many hundreds of customers who squeezed through the narrow aisles. I counted at least 50 vendors of sandals alone: of course in Myanmar all the locals walk around in sandals -- or bare feet. The sandals all looked pretty much the same to me. I suppose the vendors compete on price; they are not aggressive (unlike in China and India) but just wait for customers to show up.

Clothing vendors seemed to take up the most space with most of that devoted to clothes for women and children. At least 10 vendors sold brassieres. They all gathered in one location selling highly colorful brassieres. For some reason, bras come in a lot of colors. Another popular area sold bright cloth for longyi: all of it was arranged on dozens of shelves. Also, house wares for sale (pots and pans, dish ware, detergents, glasses and mixers) occupied their appointed spaces. A sign offered laundry service: “Mrs. Show. Launder your cloth” (sic).

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I got caught up in the excitement of this popular and energetic market even though I had no idea of buying anything. On the exterior, workers and customers parked their motorcycles and bicycles -- stashed them, really -- side by side and strung out longer than a football field.

Eindawya Paya. Another monastery, more pagodas and a temple: Eindawya Paya. At this 19th century monastery a major event in the history of the British colonial period occurred. Here, in 1919, the Burmese first demonstrated peacefully against rigid British colonial rule. British officials visiting the monastery had refused to remove their shoes and so the monks of Eindawya evicted them. Somehow the Brits had decided it would be demeaning for them to recognize the sacredness of Buddhist religious sites. The British arrested four of the Eindawya monks and sentenced the protest leader to life in prison. On that score, the monks lost. Still, monks continued their protests against British shoes in the other Buddhist locations during the rest of the colonial period. The British always lost face in these incidents so maybe the monks won after all.

The old teak monastery of Eindawya has lovely layer cake tiers of roofs and is well cared for. The grounds feature elaborate statuary depicting the main events in the Buddha’s life. Not to sound unappreciative but some of the statues are super sentimental. For example, a statue of the emaciated Buddha depicts his period of self-starving. His ribs protrude grotesquely from his body with certifiably ugly effect. I suppose that is what the sculptor intended.

We left the paya and stopped at Aung Nan wood carvers. We bought matching intricately carved teak screens that now hang in the family room. The salesman gave a starting price of $180 for the pair. We worked him down to $140 which just means we overpaid less than we would have overpaid at Aung Nan’s price. But we figured it would retail for $500 or more in the U.S. The shop put four men into wrapping it carefully (Johnny supervised) to prevent breaking it and so we could get it into the overhead bins on our flight home. The shop has an incredible stock of mostly teak carvings. We passed on a beautiful six-foot Buddha. Couldn’t get that on the airplane without cutting it into pieces like the Burmese did in order to ship the great Mahamuni.10

Sagaing Hill. We drove to Sagaing Hill a few miles outside of Mandalay and across the new bridge over the Ayeyarwady River. Sagaing is a holy site with

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10 As described in Appendix 6D.

countless pagodas arrayed randomly throughout the hill, embedded within a heavy forest. The local people say, as is told about many places we have been in Myanmar, the Buddha visited here 2,500 years ago. The pious claim there is evidence all over the hill that he was present so long ago. Of course there would have been no pagodas then.

According to Johnny, Sagaing Hill played an important role during World War II. He said the Japanese and the British agreed to keep it a non-combat sanctuary. During the war much of the population of Mandalay moved out here and took refuge among the pagodas and monasteries, especially during the fighting. In the end, the combatants never touched the place.

We stopped at Umin Thounzeh, a complex located in a crescent shaped colonnade high on the main hill. At the complex a line of 45 near-identical Buddhas, each about nine feet in height and in Bhumasparsa mudra (earth touching mudra -- seated in lotus position with the right hand extending down to touch the earth -- it represents a key event in Buddha’s life -- but too much to explain here). Mirrors cover the walls opposite most of the Buddhas. I saw a young woman -- Asian svelte and attractive -- standing in front of one of the mirrors, her back to the Buddhas, checking out her makeup. It looked less than pious but I have observed that young women and mirrors have an affinity for one another.

We stopped for lunch at the aptly named Sagaing Hill Restaurant where we had lunched previously in 2010. We took a pleasant table in the open air and under a pavilion. The winter weather becomes quite warm at mid-day but it’s nice in the shade. After lunch we drove to the top of the hill and the Soon U Ponya Shin Paya. It’s the most important holy place in Sagaing and includes a 97 feet tall stupa that a faithful minister of the king built in 1312 -- actually (well, allegedly) he built it in one night in an explosion of personal energy.

Before you enter the paya there is a sign ordering “NO SHOES, NO SOCKS, NO SHORT PANTS, NO SPAGHETTI BLOUSES”. A huge seated Buddha looms inside wearing one of those innocent smiles that seem to certify his compassion for his people. Worshippers appear dwarfed as they sit and prostrate. Observing the faithful at prayer before this imposing figure reminded me of the “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” (“this I know, for the Bible tells me so”) hymn I learned in Sunday School growing up -- “we are weak, but he is strong” (my recall is not 100% accurate).

Two large bronze figures of a frog and a rabbit stand just inside the entrance. Visitors pose with them eagerly. The figures are natural photo ops. The frog and

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rabbit represent two of the Buddha’s early reincarnations when he roamed Sagaing Hill.

That night we dined at Ko’s Thai Restaurant in Mandalay located along the moat that squares the old palace site. I found it one of the more interesting restaurants of the whole trip -- rustic tables and chairs, great energy, down to earth and packed with locals and visitors. To reach the toilets on the second floor I had to run a gauntlet of happy revelers standing around drinking from bottles of beer. We ordered prawns with vermicelli, pork in cocoanut milk, green papaya salad and, of course, Myanmar Beer. This mix oddly satisfies the digestion. Thai food is like that. Maybe it’s the lemongrass.

In the morning we would put Mandalay in our rear view mirror.

Monday, December 12

We were up before 5 am to finish packing. I didn’t have time for a morning swim. In a thoughtful gesture, the Rupar Mandalar set up breakfast specially by 5:45 so we could depart at 6:15 to catch our early morning flight to Bagan. The cook made a delicious Chinese breakfast soup of hot broth poured over fresh vegetables (bean sprouts, cabbage, etc.) and a few Chinese raviolis packed with mild spices and meat. And a lot of coffee. Johnny showed up with the car well before 6:15.

We drove onto the beautiful new 4-lane highway leading to Mandalay International Airport (the airport is now “international” since the administration recently added flights to Kunming in western China’s Yunnan Province). The wide lanes at that time of day carried almost no traffic but a weird design flaw dramatically slowed us down. A big bump or dip jars the vehicle where a joint between the road and the beds of short bridges that cross creeks, irrigation ditches, animal trails or local roads every half kilometer or so. The bumps forced Seng to brake down to 40-50 kph (25-30 mph) even though the posted speed limit is 100 kph. No way you can move that fast over bumps every half kilometer on this superhighway without tearing up the vehicle. So this fabulous wide open superhighway had a practical speed limit of no more than 50 kph.

In the early morning, burning crop fields generated heavy smoke that mixed with fog to create extremely thick air. The heavy air filtered the brightness from the rising sun leaving an unnaturally huge and deeply red ball about twenty diameters bigger than normal. With the softened light it is possible to look directly into the

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sun. It actually surprised me -- like something unearthly might happen. I had to do a double-take to believe it. Our spectacular sun: both life source and tormenter.

Our flight on Air Bagan W9-205 (I forgot to mention previously that Air Bagan is one of many businesses owned by the tycoon and crony of the junta generals, Tay Za) left at 7:40 am on an ATR-72. It took 25 minutes and we never flew above 8,000 feet. The flight attendant scrambled to deliver a snack and beverage to 70-some passengers and then she had to remove all the trash as we descended. Hardly worth it in the time allotted and the poor woman was frazzled well before we landed.

7. Bagan: The Ancient Kingdom

Thiripyitsaya Sanctuary Resort. At the Bagan airport a new driver introduced himself as we retrieved our luggage and loaded his car. Johnny and he dropped us off at the Thiripyitsaya Sanctuary Resort where we were able to check into our room at 8:30 am. We had stayed at this place three years earlier. The Japanese developed it in the late 1970s and at that time named it “Sikura” (which also happens to be the name of a big time breeder of thoroughbred horses in Kentucky).

Johnny thinks the military now owns the Thiripyitsaya. Myanmar’s army controls a vast holding company of profit-making enterprises. Do-good Western tourists (I suppose that’s people like us) try to avoid spending their money on businesses owned by the repressive military. But we found when we visited three years ago that the military also owns the alternative accommodations in Bagan. Else there are alternatives that are not convenient to Bagan’s temple sites.

In any case, Thiripyitsaya is a pleasant refuge that spreads over rolling lawns looking west over the Ayeyarwady River (more on the river later) and includes an olympic sized swimming pool. The small guest houses (casita style again) give plenty of separation from other guests. Our room’s dark woods had faded over the years but the slightly clunky furnishings were dignified and comfortable. Guest robes hang in the closet and testify that this is a classy place. Guests wore their room robes as they walked past our house en route to the swimming pool or the spa located somewhere near reception.

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Thatbyinnyu Temple. We had arrived early enough to unpack and rest an hour to recover from the ungodly early morning flight before starting out to explore the temples. Johnny returned before 10:00 and we headed for ancient Thatbyinnyu temple about a half mile away.

Bagan is a Disney World of more than 4,000 ancient stupa and temples. The Bagan kingdom built them during the 10th to 14th centuries and distributed them widely for miles each direction. They pop up unexpectedly everywhere over the dry plain east of the Ayeyarwady River. The larger temples, like parents, hover above the smaller ones that surround them. The brightness of the stuccoed browns, grays and whites of their walls and domes change in as the light level changes with the sun’s transit overhead. On our first visit to Bagan three years ago, far fewer tourists visited and, because the pagodas and temples are so widely spread we usually could explore alone. We were real explorers at each temple site. We felt personal ownership of the place. This time we found many more tourists.

The temples typically are open on four sides with Buddha statuary and in some it is still possible to see frescoed walls and ceilings. Inside you smell the dankness of a thousand years and you half believe a royal treasure trove or, at least, scrolls with the secrets of some thousand year old dynasty is yours to discover (again, Indiana Jones comes to mind).

The Bagan kingdom dominated central Myanmar from the time of King Anawrahta following his ascent in 1047 followed by his progeny (I discussed Anawrahta and the Tamoke Shwe Gu Gyi Temple near Mandalay in section 6 above).11 Its kings built the largest temples and pagodas. In addition, wealthy families of the era built nearly countless smaller ones. Builders of pagodas or temples gained them merit and assured themselves a more favorable reincarnation.

Historians think the Bagan dynasty ended under the hooves of invading Mongol horsemen in the late 13th century.12

Thatbyinnyu, the tallest temple in Bagan, stands on a stack of terraces. Its top half recedes in a pyramid of layered roofs. A 12th century king built the Thatbyinnyu. Legend says when the king was very old -- in his nineties’ according to the story -- his grandson, later the evil King Naruha, supposedly came to attend his feeble grandfather. Instead of caring for him, he suffocated the old man with a pillow.

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11 See Appendix 7A for discussion of Anawrahta’s legacy and other “warrior kings”.

12 Appendix 7B has comments on the pagodas and temples.

Naruha was jealous of the king’s magnificent Thatbyinnyu and it drove him to kill. Also, he wanted to take over the kingdom and would not wait for the king to die naturally.

Naruha tried later to one-up his grandfather building what is easily the most massive temple in Bagan (Dhammayangi Pahtyo). Kilns produced bricks continuously for decades just to complete this temple. Aside from its mass, the Dhammayangi has unusual double Buddha statues -- the Gautama Buddha worshipped in the present era and the Maitreya Buddha who will come in the future to preserve the universal values of peace and loving kindness.

One doesn’t often see images of the Maitreya Buddha. I discovered a bit of crass commercialism on the internet where a retailer of women’s platform heels borrows the future Buddha’s eminence using the name brand Maitreya Gold Shiki platform heels: They come in 9 strap colors and 30 platform colors. Is that crass or what?

Hindus in Burma. A 9th century Hindu temple, probably the oldest structure in Bagan, lies almost in the shadow of the Thatbyinnyu but is much smaller. Inside we found about 25 staff members of the Ministry of Archeology crawling around on scaffolding toting flashlights to spotlight small areas of wall frescos painted by the Hindus who moved here from India twelve centuries ago. An official from UNESCO supervised the Ministry people in restoration technique. He was Rudolfo Lujan, a short Spanish man in his forties with a heavy five o’clock shadow and sporting a blue work shirt soiled with perspiration.

Rudolfo presented himself as a modest man but no amount of modesty could disguise his intelligence. He kindly took time to explain to us the meticulous work of his students who stared at faded and disconnected thirteen hundred year-old frescoes on walls just inches from their faces and dabbed at the frescoes with little brushes. The work looked tedious and boring. I’m glad somebody is doing this but I concluded that archeological restoration will never be my thing.

We stopped for a vegetable fried rice and beer lunch at nearby Sarabha II restaurant and then walked through the government’s newly built, cavernous and half empty archeology museum. This massive public work must puzzle the locals living in little bamboo houses and scratching out an existence selling trinkets to tourists. Where did all the money come from?

The Sun Also Sets. Afterwards, we retreated to Sikura and our room to shower and unwind. Later, we took an evening horse and cart ride across the dusty roads

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and trails that twist around the great temple filled fields. A young man licensed by the Archeology Department drove the horse and cart. He was direct and friendly, in his twenties and Asian slim and short. He owned the horse and cart and the tourist rides supported his wife and two young boys aged 5 and 8.

The driver timed the ride so we could see the sun setting behind a few of the larger temples. Dust hung in the air, filtering the sun. As it fell to the horizon the sun became a big ball, although not quite as big as on its rising that morning outside of Mandalay. Looking westward, the spires on the roof of a large temple probed skyward like fingers across the face of the sun.

Ghosts of the old people filled the temples on that dusty plain. In life very few of them lived grandly. No doubt most of them suffered with hunger through each day. And, the crushing labor of building all these massive temples and pagodas must have broken their bodies.

The setting sun mesmerized. It was the same sun that those people saw setting ten centuries ago. Eons after them I was watching the same temples turn into sharp black silhouettes as the sun descended behind them like the New Year’s ball on Times Square. They witnessed these same temples with their ancient mysteries profiled in the sun.

Did those people consciously mark the earth’s circuit of the sun, ending another day. Did they tick off one more day of their short lives? What would their -- for that matter, our -- next day bring? Unlike us, 99% of them probably had to scheme urgently how to fill their bellies when the sun rose tomorrow. They must have wondered if they would stay safe and alive for one more day, dependent on the benevolence of capricious royal overlords. How many more days would the gods allot them?

Not to diverge too abruptly from this bonding with my ancient brethren but at this point a small glass of red and dinner sounded pretty good.

Tuesday, December 13

In the morning we walked to the open air breakfast tables on a large deck overlooking the lawns and river. Guests had abandoned the empty outside tables to the early morning cold air. The Thiripyitsaya offered a showy breakfast buffet but it was not as well prepared as in the hotel in Mandalay.

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Returning to our casita from breakfast I passed an American couple, probably in their late sixties, standing outside the entrance to the resort’s sales boutique. The inventory in the shop included artistic carvings and castings, colorful hand loom-woven dresses and scarfs. Clearly, the shop had caught the woman’s attention. Her husband’s face, unmistakably, wore a scowl. As I passed I heard him say to her: “No, I’m not going in! I’m going back to the room! Just give me the room key and you can shop to your heart’s content!”

Well, travel can wear you down. I imagine some long married couples exchange a similar dialogue several times every day. But, for that couple, the day started kind of lousy.

We started our own day with a visit to the ruins of an old and noble monastery, Sein Hyu Shin. Eight centuries ago it housed hundreds of monks all in eight square-shaped red brick buildings with soaring barrel vault ceilings. The monks got their water supply from an immense brick cistern that received the runoff from seasonal rains. Bagan enjoyed a wetter climate then than it does now. Today the cistern is totally dry.

Johnny told about the scandalous religious order of Aayegi monks in this location. The Aayegis predate the Buddhist monks of Sein Hyu Shin and numbered about 6,000 monks. These fellows decreed that, before they could sanctify a marriage, young brides-to-be must spend the night before the wedding in a monastery submitting to the six to ten monks occupying a typical monastery. They say recruitment to this order of monks was quite easy. Likely the monks had to turn applicants away. When King Anawrahta came into power he declared this pre-wedding ritual unlawful (and certainly lecherous). Anawratha decreed Buddhism the religion of his empire and so quickly shut down the Aayegi order of monks. For good measure, he then made slaves of all them. Justice served!

A Day for Temples. The day wore on with more temples and pagodas, each engaging in their own way. Somebody named one of them Temple 830. Not very profound. Whoever came up with the name probably is new to the Tourism Ministry. This clean and orderly temple is shaped like a Greek cross and has undergone extensive renovation, paid for by a monk from Singapore. Men can return to the monkhood (known as sangha in Myanmar, meaning Buddhist monastic order) in later life so this fellow must have made his fortune before returning to the monkhood.

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A woman guarded the temple and would unlock the gate to admit people. The four sides of Temple 830 run a gamut of Buddhist imagery. The Buddhas there are earth-touching (huge with Buddha in a golden robe), teaching, dying and birthing (nativity scene where the Buddha is born out of his standing mother’s side).

Exiting the temple I paid the guard woman and we encountered an eager young man selling sand paintings. The paintings portrayed classical Burmese scenes on paper with a sand finish. These can be rolled up without damaging them, good for toting on the airplane home. I asked the young man selling them how they were made and he said his family made them. The paintings repeat a few scenes over and over so I suppose family members get good at repetition -- maybe the father draws Buddhas, the mother draws animals, a sister draws trees etc. It’s a production shop, not a business of great creativity.

That’s OK. He smiled and promoted his paintings without nagging. We bought two for about 8,000 kyat ($9). But a couple of vendors saw us buy and marked us as rich Western customers. They followed us to the next temple (Dhammayangi) and tried to sell stuff nonstop for the next hour or so. That got tiresome. Bagan is one of the only places in Myanmar where you find aggressive vendors. Otherwise Myanmar has nothing like the nagging pressure to buy you get in China and especially India.

No trip to Bagan is complete without seeing the best known temple of all: the Ananda. It’s tall corn cob dome is shaped like an inverted wine goblet. Stitches of louvered bricks run vertically half up the goblet’s bowl leading to a golden spire above. The body of the temple is arrayed in layers of receding decks like a cruise ship stranded on a dry plain. Intricately carved facades and sculptures of mythical winged lions finish off the tops of each deck.

A team of Indian archeologists hung out in a large room cleaning off old whitewashing from tempura murals. A few years ago local people decided it would be effective to make the temple nice and white and so they whitewashed the whole place. In the process they violated some important original murals which the Indian team is busily trying to remedy.

The temple features Buddhas on four sides again -- on the east (main entrance), “protect against danger Buddha”; south, teaching Buddha; west, touching the robe Buddha and north, another teaching Buddha. By now I felt like Buddhas were watching our every move. Buddhas everywhere -- far more than the number of McDonalds in America.

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The day ended with lunch again at Sarabha Restaurant and a followup visit to the new Archeology Museum where we wandered through a vast room with hundreds of Buddha statues. Hundreds more Buddhas. Each one is modeled with its characteristic “mudra” or special hand gesture. No other visitors showed interest in that big room so I concluded that mudras are not on many tourists’ bucket list. A description of the eight most common mudras is in an appendix.13

Puppets. We arranged for a puppet show and dinner at Restaurant Bagan. It sounded like fun but it wasn’t. The restaurant filled up with large tourist groups of 20+ each -- mostly French that night -- seated at long tables. I think the food was prepared the week before -- well, at least the day before -- and was served in trays with 8 or 10 pockets for different items. Some were too spicy and the meats were decidedly old and tired. Puppet shows are often interesting but we could not get interested in these. The puppet theater was at one end of a gymnasium-sized room and we were at the other end and could not follow the action. To top it off, it took a couple of days to properly digest that meal. My advice: don’t go to a Bagan puppet show.

The Sun Sets Again. Earlier that night before the puppet show we sat on the deck of our casita and watched another sunset, this time beyond the darkening ridges of the mountain range behind the Ayeyarwady River. The river formed a gently twisting strand slightly downhill from us. It reflected the sun’s weakening rays turning its waters into a ribbon of mercury.

It is odd how time becomes frozen at certain sunsets. Only a few moments pass but, believe it or not, the earth stops rotating. Your vision sharpens and your mind compresses random and jumbled thoughts about your life into some kind of clarity. Then the sun slowly descends -- another New Year’s Eve ball on Times Square. Before you know it, the horizon gradually rises up and swallows what remains of the sun.

The Ayeyarwady -- the Irrawaddy -- makes sunsets special. I am totally romanced by this river. Appendix 7D, written several years ago, contains my impressions from our earlier travels on the river.14

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13 See Appendix 7C

14 Appendix 7D.

Wednesday, December 14

Johnny had talked for a couple of days about visiting the rather obscure village of Pa Kok Ku further up the Ayeyarwady. I got in an early morning swim and then we met Johnny and the driver at reception at 8:00 a.m. Pa Kok Ku offered several formal attractions (pagodas etc.) but I was more attracted to the idea of visiting a village outside the range of the tourist agents.

Love a Parade. We had to drive north through Nyaing U, a sort of sister town to New Bagan. A procession of about 40 school children on the highway stopped us. They marched toward the monastery behind us to donate money collected at the school over many weeks. The children marched in single file with their teachers and carried the money in the form of currency bills clipped to ten or more triangular six-foot tall wood frames with the bills fluttering in the breeze. Behind the kids, a group of village men pushed a big loudspeaker on rubber tires as one of the guys raucously exhorted the crowd to follow. Another man danced and twirled in front of the group. The kids were excited. This march had great energy.

This community had made a real effort, all on behalf of their town’s monastery. Early on in life the community teaches those kids to respect the monks. I had to wonder how long these traditions will continue as Myanmar’s new market economy revs up. Something about free markets seems to make people more selfish and to separate them from community.

Pa Kok Ku Town. To get to the town we drove another hour north which is not very far in miles. I enjoyed the road. Brahmins, an occasional horse and farmers were scattered around the fields and gave the area a timeless pastoral feel. We crossed a brand new highway and railroad bridge over the Ayeyarwady (in a burst of inspiration they named it the Ayeyarwady Bridge. I wish they would go back to calling the river Irrawaddy. Kipling is rolling in his grave -- how alluring is a name like Ayeyarwady?). We had seen the bridge under construction a couple of years ago on a boat cruise up the river. It’s probably only the third or fourth bridge to cross the river in a thousand miles.

We drove into the town and were just about the only automobile on the road. People walked down the center of the roads without regard to traffic other than gaggles of motorbikes. They looked at us with curiosity and some waved. The people of this town don’t see white faces often and they seemed friendlier than in Bagan. We found our way to the ancient Thihoshin Pagoda, home of the renowned Thihoshin Buddha image, a two meters high wood carving of Buddha and

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worshippers. The King of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) made a gift of the original carving to King Alaungsithu in 1115 AD. By 1900 the wood worms had destroyed it. An inspired and holy artist -- apparently guided by some supernatural power -- meticulously carved and replicated the present one in the early 1900s. He did it in amazing detail.

At Thihoshin Temple worshippers make a big fuss over a famous Buddha statue that previously had so much gold leaf applied by the faithful over many centuries, especially over the third eye, the eyes, nose and mouth, that the image got to be an ugly (but much loved) swollen blob. In the 1990s Prime Minister Khin Nyunt came to town and decided he would clean up the image and ordered the gold shaved off, melted down and cast into a new ten inch high Buddha. It yielded 6 kilograms (13 pounds) of pure gold worth $400,000 at today’s gold price. To this day the PM’s order continues to upset the faithful. Later Khin wound up in jail (for other reasons) for many years. The people claim that his messing with the beloved Buddha image bought him bad karma.

Earlier, on the way to Pa Kok Ku we stopped at an obscure and somewhat hidden Buddhist site off a seldom traveled dirt road. We walked down a long flight of stairs to the small temple tucked away in a man-made cave with many stone-carved Buddhas in its rock wall niches. It was hard to find the place and, at first, it looked abandoned. During the war the British used this place to secretly store explosives.

An obscure little monastery in this no man’s land stands adjacent to the temple. It must have been the monks’ laundry day because they had hung a bunch of burgundy robes from a clothes line.

Once again, on our return to Bagan, we visited another pagoda -- the famous Shwe Zagon. It rivals the Shwe Dagon in Yangon for its scale and golden grandeur. Tourists flooded the plinth and surrounding area. I suppose I should detail all the attributes of this extraordinary pagoda but I will restrain myself. I expect to have to read this tome at sometime in the future and at this point in the story I would be off-put reading about one more pagoda. Suffice to say, if you visit Bagan, go see it. The bulging bell shape and soaring gold spire is like eye candy.

We ate dinner at Thiripyitsaya out on the big deck. Darkness took over before we got to our table but the little torches around us gave us enough light. I had a pasta with a not bad amatriciana sauce over penne pasta. Our meal choices were tilting increasingly toward Western food when we could get it.

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8. Home Again in Yangon.

Thursday, December 15

In the morning we flew Air Bagan again, back to Yangon. Our old driver friend “Sy” waited at the Yangon airport with the van. Sy accompanied us on every trip we had ever taken to Yangon. We love this guy for his constant smile and well-honed instincts to be at the right place at the right time and to do what’s needed. He grabbed our luggage amidst the throng jamming the airport’s main lobby and we headed for the van.

En route to the governor’s Residence we stopped at an old monastery we first visited in 2010. Much to our surprise we found about 400 novice Buddhist nuns in their standard pink robes with gold shawls neatly wrapped around their upper bodice and over the left shoulder, lined up outside the entrance. They each carried a big aluminum tray. American and Vietnamese agencies had teamed up to donate a special lunch for them. We watched as the ones who had been served exited the monastery and passed by us with their trays now filled with a meat, vegetables and a mound of rice as large as their heads.

No doubt those young girls appreciated a change from their usual lunch regimen (which, I believe, excludes meat) but it left me wondering if the money couldn’t have been better spent on books or something with greater utility. Incidentally, the nun’s heads are always shaved leaving them to appear, sadly, de-gendered.

Aung San House (Museum). After a simple lunch of fried rice we drove to the residence of Aung San, also called the Aung San museum. He was father of the country and father of Aung San Su Kyi. He lived in the home during 1943-1947. Su Kyi was born in the house in 1945 (which makes her 68 years old in 2013). As I wrote previously, a political rival had Aung San gunned down in 1947 at age 31. Two years old at the time, Su Kyi has no real memory of him. He did not own the house but instead rented it from a wealthy Chinese woman. Later, long after Aung San’s death, she donated it to the government.

For Burma he had quite a large, although not luxurious, home. The house occupies a large property with a pool and vegetable garden. One of Aung San’s two infant boys drowned in the pool. This house must have been like a memorial to the child.

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The house had a British styled plan, including the first floor with dining and living rooms, the second floor with a children’s bedroom, Aung San’s bedroom and a reading room, probably only for Aung San’s use.

Back to the GR. We happy to be back to the Governor’s Residence in mid-afternoon. I headed for the swimming pool with a book. An American family occupied beach chairs near mine with two kids, a girl about 13 and a boy of 10 or so. We never saw whole families traveling in Myanmar on previous trips and seldom saw many Americans. Kids usually aren’t turned on by pagodas, after the first one anyway, or temples and Buddhas everywhere the family goes.

This father and son invented a game where the father throws a ball up over the pool and the boy makes heroic leaps into the air to grab the ball before cannonballing into the pool with an eruption of water splashing onto the deck -- a bit unusual for the sedate GR. It would have been a great game at a Best Western out in Kansas somewhere with a pool full of kids, but not at the GR. Anyway, several times the water rained down over the deck including my chair and book. A couple of other guests were ruffled by it. The embarrassed mother tried to get them to stop but no deal. She and the daughter left soon afterwards. I usually enjoy kids but this became irritating and I said something to the dad on my way out which is not my normal style. Come on dad! Anyway, for the moment it really ignited my prejudices about ugly Americans in foreign lands.

We enjoyed a quiet dinner at the GR and turned in. The GR had set up a big live Christmas tree in the courtyard with 35 fat live candles that burned well into the night. I have seen burning candles on live trees in the movies but as far as I can remember I never saw them personally. A terrific sight and a reminder that the holidays were almost upon us. Between the holidays and that moment, we faced 36 hours of air travel home.

Friday, December 16

Yangon and Pa Hlaing Rivers. We planned a river cruise upstream to War Yone Sate, a slightly primitive village. After a quick swim and small breakfast in my wet swim suit I showered and we met Johnny at reception. At this early hour on the way to the Yangon River dock we drove through nicely shaded streets. We encountered a line of eight or ten novice Buddhist nuns walking on the street in their pink robes and the gold sash that wraps the bodice and left shoulder. They

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carried alms bowls although I didn’t understand the protocol. My understanding had been that nuns don’t collect rice donations like the monks, but there they were.

After a little confusion about the proper dock our boat would leave from, we finally found the boat waiting at stretch of docks further up the shoreline. We sailed on the Dora, a 50 feet boat built like a tug except it had comfortable passenger space inside the cabin as well as out on the deck. We saw two or three crew members but I wondered where all the passengers were.

It turned out that we were the only passengers. Our cabin attendant, an old friend from our cruises on the Road to Mandalay in 2010 and 2011named Kyu Kyu Soe (the Kyu Kyu is pronounced “Choo-Choo”). She is a fortyish, friendly woman with a beautiful smile and had been the desk manager on The Road. The Dora seemed a big step down from The Road but she had married recently and her husband works in Yangon so she moved there from Mandalay to be with him.

We cruised up the Yangon River passing loading docks and ships along Yangon on the eastern shoreline to the river’s intersection with the Pa Hlaing River. The drafts on the biggest ocean-going ships are too deep to sail this far inland on the Yangon with its shallow waters. We saw several barges loaded with teak logs. Johnny said the barges must wait for some kind of customs clearance before moving on. We concluded most of the teak was black market, sold by an enterprising and corrupt government (military) person to Thai or Chinese rogue businessmen who threw in a little “incentive” to cut and export the teak.

At one point we passed part of the Myanmar navy, a bevy of five river boats resembling houseboats and painted uniformly in the same grey. I must say they did not look very formidable.

As we sailed north, the western shoreline began to fill with bamboo houses on stilts and small boats. Local villagers built numerous bamboo platforms on stilts along the shoreline for drying chiles and beans. We finally arrived at War Yone Sate village and got in a small boat to transfer to a muddy shore. In May 2008 Cyclone Nargis hit this place very hard although no one here was killed. Elsewhere, especially in the Ayeyarwady Delta, Nargis killed upwards of 200,000 people.

The large, active village of War Yone Sate had no roads or vehicles but just bamboo houses along a center pathway that led to a monastery toward its farthest end. We appeared to excite the villagers as we walked through. Partly, I think it

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was because they knew some previous white visitors turned out to be benefactors who donated money.

The villager’s ancestors here had developed a large catch basin, like a small lake, halfway through the village about 100 years ago. They dug it out to capture rain water runoff that, at that time, they used for every need including drinking water. Now a well serves the village although villagers still use the catch basin to get water for washing and cooking.

Our village guide took us to the monastery school where we distributed composition books and pencils to about 18 kids. We had done this a couple of times on earlier visits. Local guides developed this book and pencil ritual to make foreigners feel good for helping kids that didn’t have much. All in all, we had a nice experience doing this.

We visited the monastery on the second floor above the school. The building is new because the 2008 cyclone wiped out the original. The monastery supports fifteen monks and normally the school serves about 110 children. We interacted, to the extent we could, with the young 27 year-old head monk. He was shy and seemed to feel awkward that these old experienced westerners were paying such attention to him and his monastery.

We made our way back to the Dora and the crew pointed the boat south. I wondered how this village, only a few miles from Yangon, would manage in the future. What prevents their young people from migrating to the big city looking for paying jobs? Menial jobs without much pay I supposed, but in the village it did not look like there were paid jobs of any sort for them. And the young women. Would they be content to look for husbands in this isolated place? What about the monastery school? Was there secular education or was it Buddhist teachings? Of course the precepts of Buddhism are grand but kids should get some science, world history, English, math -- its not enough to know the 112 lives of the Buddha -- they should get some algebra, geometry . . .

Ms Khin Saw Oo, Central Bank of Myanmar. In the evening we invited Ms. Khin Saw Oo to dinner at the GR. She is Deputy Director General of the Central Bank of Myanmar and Head of Bank Regulation and Anti-Money Laundering. Steve Carroll, previously at the U.S. Embassy in Yangon and now in Islamabad, had introduced me (by e-mail) to her. Ms. Oo and I met at the hotel reception area. She is a fiftyish woman, smart with a big smile and upbeat manner. She had returned that evening from Nay Py Taw on the bus which takes about 10 hours. She

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continues to live in Yangon with her family but has to commute to NPT ever since the Central Bank moved there not long ago (as did all the government agencies after the the government transferred the national capital there from Yangon in 2005). Ms. Oo is a cheery and fun person.

We discussed the problems of the central bank and considered the prospects for more private credit and investment under the new, more democratic, regime. She doesn’t worry about loan quality because the fledgling banking system’s non-performing loan (NPL) ratio is only 1% (the percentage of problem loans to total loans). I worried about the quality of loans to the SOEs (State Owned Enterprises), which account for most of the loans, and given a primitive accounting system, non transparent lending and some kind of blind faith that the government’s ventures will pay off. I saw the massive SOE loan problems in just about all the democratizing countries of Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall fell. Many had NPLs of 30% or more and eventually had to be rescued with big bailouts. Those people did not see the problems coming either.

Saturday, December 17

Wow. Our time was getting short. We would travel on the next day -- first to Singapore where we would stay overnight, then on to San Francisco via Beijing the following two days (again, a long 7-hour layover in Beijing).

National League for Democracy. After breakfast Johnny and Sy came and we drove through the city to the headquarters of the National League of Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party. The NLD is home to some real patriots. Those people put their lives on the line at times. For many years the military government persecuted NLD members, subjecting them to beatings and a not insignificant number of deaths. A couple of years ago we stopped in at a tea house near this NLD headquarters and Johnny had said the place was crawling with government spies huddled over a cup of tea but trying to listen in to our conversations. We dared not consider hanging out at the NLD headquarters in those days. I suppose we would have been safe but, given the times, it would have been risky for Johnny.

The headquarters opens onto a busy street. We just walked in and looked around while no one paid attention to us. Young people and seasoned party members milled around the offices. A couple of people sat at tables being interviewed. The place exuded a lot of energy and a slightly rebellious feeling to it. Political cartoons adorned the walls.

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A clerk in one section that faced onto the street sold Suu Kyi memorabilia including tee-shirts, photos, calendars, posters and note books all with her image. The most popular tee-shirt featured Obama with Suu Kyi. Obama had visited Myanmar only a couple of weeks before. One photo showed Obama with his arm around Suu Kyi. Everyone knows Obama is a hugger but this was way out of the ordinary for Suu Kyi. Burmese women are not used to having men approach them so casually and are especially sensitive about a man touching them. She was embarrassed if not downright floored.

We returned to the GR before noon. Sophie and Thein, my two guests from two weeks earlier, (they are the ones in the IT website building business) came by to pick me up for lunch. Sophie drove us to the My Garden Restaurant nearby. We had a pleasant time talking business. Thein’s again stuck his cell phone to his ear throughout lunch. We got the server to take our group picture. It was almost sad to say goodbye to this dynamic brother and sister. They want their lives to be full and will do whatever it takes ethically to find opportunity and to grow.

The Ayeyarwady Bank. Sophie and Thein dropped me at the GR at 2:30, just in time for Aung Myo Lwin, my new banker friend, to pick me up for a tour of his place of work. Aung manages the Ayeyarwady Bank’s main branch. I was absolutely amazed during the tour for the bank’s basic, almost primitive, operations.

The details of the bank’s operations may not interest the reader so I put a lengthier description in an appendix.15 Suffice to say the bank does everything in cash transactions. Borrowing or withdrawing customers bring in canvas bags the size of a large suitcase to carry bundles of currency out with them. They don’t have checking accounts. When they repay a loan they bring in those same canvas bags filled with bills.

The bank accounting system has no computers. Clerks write every customer transaction into journals and ledgers by hand. The accounting office contains eight or ten clerks doing nothing but manually keeping the books. I had no idea how they closed the accounting cycle every month.

Aung runs the foreign exchange operations for the entire bank on the third floor. His employees used computers to track customers’ currency positions. Aung hires

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15 Appendix 8A.

sharp, educated young people to execute currency transactions. The country’s new foreign exchange law, passed in summer 2012, requires currency transactions to take place at international market prices.

Aung introduced me to his boss, The Chief Operations Officer Mr. Moo Sun’s, daughter is in her third year attending the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is Malaysian and a fine gentleman.

Last Night: Johnny and Family. That evening, Sy picked us up at the Governor’s Residence and we drove across the city to Johnny’s apartment. There is no elevator so we had to walk up the stairs to the fifth floor. We had visited in the apartment last year but now the family had it decorated for Christmas with bunting hung from the ceiling and a Christmas tree. Johnny and family are Christian and they follow Western Christmas traditions.

Johnny had instructed the boys, Innocent (15 years old) and Dyan (12 years) to sit and talk with us. Johnny insisted that they behave like good hosts. Innocent is shy while Dyan is more outgoing. We asked questions about their school and studies. We were pleased to know that the boys read regularly. We brought them an Apple video game controller which was probably off the mark. They can’t afford I-pods and do not have a computer at home. I had picked up a couple of books for them including Jack London’s Call of the Wild.

Beatrice outdid herself preparing an exceptional meal with the help of a friend. The two of them were knocking themselves out in the kitchen while we enjoyed wine and appetizers. Eventually dinner was served and we ate with the boys and Beatrice. Johnny stands by as host. Over several years I don’t recall ever sitting down to a meal with him. Beatrice produced fried potato patties, beef curry, fish curry, deep fried prawns, fried pork ribs, spring rolls and more. Fabulous meal, fabulous hosts, fabulous friends.

Sunday, December 18.

We left the GR for the airport unceremoniously and at an early hour. Sy and Johnny drove us to the terminal and Johnny, as always, supervised the luggage and saw us to the screening where you enter the area restricted to passengers. He always hangs outside looking through the glass partition and watches us go up the escalator until we are out of sight. This is the fourth time we have traveled with

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Johnny, each time in close quarters for three weeks or so. That means we have spent upwards to 3 months together.; just the three of us. In that amount of time at close quarters either you learn to appreciate (tolerate?) the others’ idiosyncrasies or else it won’t work. He has to be a good and true friend. We will see him again.

And I admire and hope to see Myanmar again.

APPENDIX 1A

Aung did not discuss it but Ayeyarwady Bank, the bank he works for, is part of a consortium of business interests owned by Zaw Zaw, one of the country’s top tycoons. Some allege he was a crony of the military regime which he denies. Zaw Zaw’s business empire includes mining, trading, construction, hotels and 21 gasoline stations around the country. It books revenue of $500 million annually. He is under U.S. sanctions for using his contacts among the generals to grow some illicit businesses in the past. This blocks him from tapping into world financial markets to finance his business’ explosive growth. He is cleaning up his operations and opening his books to international auditing standards to make the case for the U.S. to drop sanctions against him. Aung is educated and intelligent and could prosper in the future of Zaw Zaw’s empire.

APPENDIX 3A

The Shan sawbwas thrived under the British but the majority Burman politicians never liked that the sawbwas enjoyed self-rule. For a while after national independence in 1948, the Burmese government limited the sawbwas’ power compared to what the British had allowed (the British always played the ethnic minorities against the Burman majority that make up two-thirds of the population). Finally, when the ruthless socialist dictator General Ne Win took over in a military coup in 1962 he outlawed the sawbwas. Some were absconded and never seen again. Others were jailed.

APPENDIX 3B

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I was impressed that the new government is beginning to allow privately run newspapers. I’m sure the papers are monitored closely even though censorship rules are softening. The old military attitude still carefully covers up incidents like the soldier who showed respect for Aung San Suu Kyi. Mostly people have to rely on the government newspaper The New Light of Myanmar which is full of happy talk and flattering P.R. about the generals and new civilian politicians. It has a slogan at the header of the front page “The Most Reliable Newspaper Around You”. Even it is easing up. The New Light used to print these Big Brother slogans at the header every day:

Our Three Main National Causes

1 Non-disintegration of the Union 2 Non-disintegration of National Solidarity 3 Perpetuation of Sovereignty

Now these have been removed from the paper’s banner.

APPENDIX 3C

Khin Nyunt had been the powerful head of Myanmar military intelligence, later prime minister and number two behind the all powerful strongman Than Shwe. Khin was taken down because he was dangerous to the generals for knowing too much about their corrupt activities and had gathered too much power. He was one of the more gifted and smart generals. He arranged ceasefires with many of the dissident ethnic groups and encouraged Myanmar to establish foreign contacts and to open up the economy. He seemed to court discussion with Aung San Suu Kyi which probably counted against him with Senior General Than Shwe. The Senior General detested “the lady”. Another negative for Khin was his lack of command experience in the field.

APPENDIX 4A

Dr. Sai wants a better balance to strengthen the regions and states -- a good sign. He noted that in other developing countries, states and regions receive as much as half the revenue and make as much as half the expenditures. The Union minister

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for Finance and Revenue U Win Shein agrees there is a need to increase budgets for local governments consistent with more “decentralization of executive power and fiscal autonomy”.

Their attitude toward devolving some of the power from the center is quite revealing. Under the oppressive military regime the junta generals were obsessed with maintaining centralized power. Central power was the governing structure in Myanmar for its known history of more than one thousand years. The warrior kings of times past always projected their empire and power in mandala fashion (widening concentric circles), conquering everything on their expanding periphery.

Another issue of The New Light discussed the government’s “rural development and poverty alleviation scheme” including agricultural development, livestock breeding, upgrading fisheries, industrial products manufacturing, micro-finance works, rural cooperative works and so forth. The previous military regime, or the New Light of Myanmar for that matter, never had such issues on their radar.

APPENDIX 6A

Anawrahta, the great warrior king, unified the powerful kingdoms around Bagan to establish the first Myanmar dynasty. He more or less appropriated Buddhism from the Mon king and spread it throughout his kingdom. Legend has it that a Mon king refused to send Anawrahta the sutras (lessons) and scribes to teach Buddhism to his subjects in Bagan so Anawrahta invaded, enslaved the Mon people, as was the prerogative of victors in those days, and captured their king.

APPENDIX 6B

Than Shwe was named Senior General and Commander-in-Chief in 1992 and managed to hold on to exclusive power over the country by playing off his competitors against one another until he stepped down in 2011. For twenty years nothing was done without his approval. A junta of army generals tightly and ruthlessly governed Myanmar after the military coup in 1962. Under the military government, Myanmar withdrew from the world for 50 years while the economy languished in shambles and human rights were denied.

Than Shwe is a recluse but still was able to rise to the top by showing his loyalty and deference to the paranoid dictator General Ne Win (1962-1988) and not by any

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military prowess. He hated Aung San Suu Kyi (despite her lineage as the daughter of Aung San who is widely revered as the nation’s father, but that’s another and quite extraordinary story). Than Shwe placed her under house arrest for 16 of the years since her return to Burma in 1988. Her “crimes” were her annoying habits of questioning the generals’ corrupt deals, encouraging Western sanctions against the generals and their cronies and inspiring the people to believe in a democratic future.

APPENDIX 6C

The contracting for constructing the pipelines was controversial. The contracts went to two of Myanmar’s wealthiest businessmen, Tay Za, owner of Htoo Company, and Tun Myint Naing (aka Steven Law). Both men have close ties to the military leaders and are under U.S. sanctions that prohibit Americans from doing business with them.

APPENDIX 6D

Mandalay Hill is the prime attraction. You climb up a covered walkway to a huge paya (temple) on top of the hill and an also huge Standing Buddha with his arm pointing to the royal palace down below. The Buddha is said to have climbed the hill 2500 years ago (Buddha sightings rival in number with Elvis sightings). An ogress (female ogre) severed her breasts and presented them to the Buddha. It so impressed him that he gave her authority over the future development of Buddhism in Mandalay. One of Burma’s last kings (Mindon: reigned 1857-1878) believed he had been the ogress woman in a past incarnation and that he inherited responsibility for developing Buddhism in Mandalay.

Mahamuni Paya. An even greater attraction is the Mahamuni Temple or Paya. It is one of the greatest pilgrimages for the people of Myanmar. The main feature is the bronze Mahamuni (Buddha) figure that pilgrims have so plastered with fine gold leaf (donations to gain karmic merit) that the statue’s head is just a blob and all of its body looks sort of lumpy and quilted. Every visitor, and especially Buddhists, go to see this figure. They claim the Mahamuni dates back to Buddha’s time 25 centuries past when the Buddha visited in Rahkine in the southwest near the Bay of Bengal. The Mahamuni was captured as booty by a Burman king that conquered Rahkine in the 18th Century. It was too large to transport so it was cut

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into sections and reassembled on arrival. It first resided at the old capital of Amarapura and was relocated to Mandalay when Mindon moved the capital there.

Royal Palace. The last notable place to visit is the Mandalay Palace and Fort. It is the vast square center of the city surrounded by a wide moat on all four sides. The palace was destroyed by British bombs in 1944 and later when they drove the Japanese out of refuge there in 1945. The government has built a replica of the old palace. It looks too perfect and not very authentic. Legend has it that three step-brothers of King Thibaw were buried alive in the old palace and their spirits guard the palace. Thibaw, Myanmar’s last king, was deposed and exiled by the British on 1886.

On the palace grounds there is an army compound (the army is proudly called tatmadaw meaning the armed forces). Foreign visitors supposedly are restricted from entering but you can still cross the bridge on the eastern leg of the square and enter the Oo Htate Gate. Soldiers guard the entrance which has a sign that reads: Tatmadaw and the people cooperate to crush all those harming the Union. The strident message is meant as a warning to the ethnic states to knock off their rebellious tendencies.

APPENDIX 7A

Myanmar’s military leaders credit Anawrahta (1015-1078) and two other “warrior kings” of history (Bayinnaung (1516-1581) and Alaungpaya (1714-1760) for inspiring and guiding them even today. One veteran Burmese journalist says of Than Shwe, a recluse but still rumored to be the nation’s strongman: “he sees himself as a modern day version of Burmese warrior kings”. Statues of the three heroic kings stand ten meters high in Naypyidaw. Another set of these statues resides over the entrance to the Defense Services Academy in Pwin U Lwin (Maymyo).

One supreme leader of the early 1990s deliriously proclaimed himself the reincarnation of yet another courageous king, Kyansittha, of the eleventh century Bagan kingdom. When he became displeased with his subordinates he threatened to shoot them.

APPENDIX 7B

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The pagodas and temples have brick cores. Originally they were stuccoed over and white washed to create dazzling white surfaces. Now many are crumbling. After a devastating earthquake damaged many of the structures in the mid-1970s, the military government’s Archeology Ministry embarked on a rescue mission, tearing down original structures and pouring concrete to make them resemble the originals. The clumsy demolitions and restorations destroyed vital clues about the ancient kingdom that dominated the region many centuries ago. The government’s fumbling and, until recently, Myanmar’s isolation, probably explains why the temples of Bagan are not on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites (although an application to UNESCO is now pending).

The Dhammayangi Pahtyo temple discussed in the text was constructed with extremely fine masonry. It is said that whenever King Naruha inspected the construction of his temple and found he could slip a small splinter between the bricks he would order the workman killed for his sloppy workmanship. Apparently there were no unions at the time!

The Dhammayangi features a double Buddha statuary -- The temple has long corridors on all four sides. Bricks are strewn all over the Dhammayangi site. The sheer number of them is staggering -- surely in the many milllions. I asked about the kiln and factory space necessary to manufacture so many bricks but, oddly, there seems to be no traces remaining.

These days the old constructions are connected with a network of rough dusty dirt roads that really test the suspensions of vehicles crossing them. Many tourists rent bicycles to travel the roads or else hire a horse, cart and driver.

APPENDIX 7C

The Buddha’s most common mudras:

Earth touching (highly prevalent) Bhumasparsa Preaching to the 5 arahats (disciples) Dharmacakra Meditation, hand posture Dhyana Protection of Dangers for all Beings Abhaya Holding the Robe Civara Hasta Holding alms bowl Patra Hasta Compassion Attitude to all Beings Maha Karunikar Prince Siddharta Cutting His Hair Kesa Hasta

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APPENDIX 7D

The Ayeyarwady River. Written in February 2010:

“In the dry season the Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady) drops to a very low level. In February most of the river’s 400,000 km2 watershed has not had rain for four months. Great sand bars surface and opposing shore lines draw nearer to one another as the river subsides. The snows in Northern Myanmar Himalayan foothills that feed the river’s headwaters will not melt until spring.”

“The Irrawaddy’s water level varies tremendously. When mountain snows melt and the monsoon rains come the water will rise more than 30 feet from the present level in Central Myanmar’s port cities of Mandalay and Prome. But for now, the largest boats do not venture much beyond Mandalay and small boat navigation is limited to the stretch of water flowing from Bhamo, about 200 miles north of Mandalay and south to the great Irrawaddy delta where it breaks into nine fingers before emptying into the Andaman Sea. The Yangon River on which the city of Yangon is situated forms one of the nine fingers.”

“The Irrawaddy is Myanmar’s Mississippi and much more. It runs north and south virtually the whole one thousand plus mile length of the country, dividing the country down the middle. A constant stream of barge traffic carries timber, sand, cement, grains, vegetables and fruits. The Irrawaddy is nothing less than the country’s life line.”

“I am sailing on The Road to Mandalay, a luxury boat with more than 50 air conditioned cabins and space for over 100 passengers. It is the kind of facility where the staff fluffs the eight pillows on the bed several times each day and brings a fresh supply of huge soft bath towels twice daily. I am told the boat has only 40 or so passengers in this low river period. We are sailing south from Mandalay toward Began, the fantastical site of thousands of stupas and temples built in the 11th to 15th centuries.”

“I am completely romanced by the river. In this winter low water period, the people come down from the surrounding hills and build temporary bamboo shelters along the river’s edge. For four or five months of every year their lives take on the rhythm of the river. The men fish, the children swim, the women wash clothes and bathe. When the rains come and the river rises this shoreline will be deeply

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submerged. The people take down their shelters and move to high land where it is cooler in the hot season.”

“I watch a woman preparing to wash her family’s laundry at the river bank. She is doing her work in the identical way her people have done it for 10 centuries – maybe longer. The woman totes a bundle of clothes on her head in a palm woven basket. Her two small children –about 3 and 5 years old, the little one completely naked – hurry ahead of her to the river’s edge where they plunge excitedly into the muddy brown water. The woman soaks the clothes and, one piece at a time, spreads them on large flat rocks. She grips a bunch of the tail of a shirt and violently slaps the water-weighted shirt against a rock ten to twenty times. After beating all of the clothes she rinses them once more and piles them wet into her basket. She lifts the basket to the top of her head, calls sternly to her children and, with straight back, trudges back up the embankment. Further down the river bank a father squats on his haunches a couple of yards from the water and watches his children splash and dive.”

“I see a few large dredges pumping sand and figure their purpose is to remove accumulated silt from the navigation channels. One of the boat staff explains: ‘The pumps are actually dredging sand for export to be used for making glass. The foreigners prize the pure silicon sands of the Irrawaddy for their glass making.’ ”

“Away from the dredges and nearer to the shore, several men from the shelters dig in the sand alongside their canoe-like longboats. My boat friend says: ‘They will sell the sand to a broker man. You see, the poor man digs the sand with his shovel, the rich man uses the big pump.’ ”

“The sun is touching the horizon. The river, twisting snake-like around the intruding sand bars, has turned from brown to black in the twilight. Cooking fires appear among the bamboo shelters along the shoreline. There is a golden glow in the western sky dotted with a few luminous ruby clouds. These common river people seem contented. Maybe they are buoyed by the regularity of their lives. What do they know – or care – about the problems of state? What does it matter if this military government rules with an iron hand?”

APPENDIX 8A

The main feature in the bank’s small entry lobby is a cash counter stacked with currency bundled in blocks of 100 items (100 - 1,000 kyat bills, 100 - 500 kyat

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bills, etc.) Stacks of bundled currency on the counter were two and a half feet high, 4 or 5 stacks wide and several stacks deep. They only serve business customers; the retail banking market does not exist. To get cash, customers first go to a desk staffed by four young female clerks to check in and to get authorization for receiving cash by withdrawing from their deposit accounts or else drawing on their loan agreements with the bank. If customers want to deposit cash they also need an authorization. Armed with an authorization, customers go to a second desk with five or six women behind computers to receive a voucher for a cash transaction. Withdrawing customers take the voucher to the cash counter where young men bring their cash in bundles from stacks on a table located against the back wall to the counter. Understand that all of this is in lieu of a simple electronic debit to customers’ accounts.

At that table against the wall one clerk sits on top of bundles of currency and hands the required number of bundles to a carrier who delivers the stacks to the cash counter. Customers haul currency into the bank in large canvas bags for deposit or else carry cash away in these same bags for withdrawals.

We took the stairs to the second floor where eight accounting clerks were hand writing transactions in ledgers from tickets produced in the cash section on the first floor. Aung thought they averaged about a little more than 100 transactions daily. Obviously this meant they didn’t have retail business. Aung said the bank planned to expand the accounting office to make room for desks for more entry clerks. The room had no computers.

Aung ran the foreign exchange operations for the entire bank on the third floor. The savvy appearing young staff ran computers for trailing foreign exchange transactions. One operated as a dealer buying and selling on customers’ accounts and hedging the bank’s open positions in Euros, US dollars and Singapore dollars (called “Sing dollars”). A young woman outside Aung’s office manages the marketing desk where she promotes FX products. They don’t conduct Letter of Credit activities because two Singapore banks have cornered that market although Ayeyarwady Bank does serve as a confirming bank.

With the International Monetary Fund’s help Myanmar developed a new foreign exchange law eliminating its previous multiple exchange rate regime. The previous system required foreigners to purchase $200 of “Foreign Exchange Certificates” (FEC) at an exchange rate of 450 kyat per dollar (compared to about 1,000 kyat per dollar at the time). From now on FX transactions in Myanmar will all take place at prices established in the active market.

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