In case you haven’t been following Asian politics, Burma’s military dictatorship has been relaxing its control over the last year. The government freed Nobel Laureate and political opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi from over 15 years of house arrest, and it has relaxed control and censorship of media, freed over 200 political prisoners, allowed the formation of labor unions, expanded dialogue with ethnic insurgents, and halted a controversial and environmentally damaging Chinese dam project. The country has been relatively isolated for 50 years, and tourism is now growing rapidly. All of this, in conjunction with the fact that Burma (Myanmar) is a predominantly Buddhist and partially Himalayan country, made it irresistible for a short vacation on my way home from Nepal. I was on vacation–I didn’t blog and I didn’t check email, but I’d like to share a small slice of the travel with you.
See the journey in pictures here.
From the first evening, when I crossed the capital Rangoon to visit Burma’s most famous wonder, Shwedagaon Pagoda, whose massive golden spire glitters day and night, I was struck by how reverent the local people are. The myriad of temples and altars were teeming with people at worship. During the 2+ weeks I traveled, I saw constant deference and respect to monks, flowers spilling off altars, lay people meditating before 15-foot Buddhas, front row plane and bus seats given up to traveling monks, lines of monks begging daily for their food, and Buddhism ingrained into people’s lives. It is a tradition that every Buddhist Burmese boy (and sometime girls, if they choose) spends a week living in a monastery as a monk, begging for food and chanting prayers. Many men seem to have returned to a monk’s life for a week here and there through their adult life.
Sidewalk tea stalls with kindergarden-sized plastic chairs are ubiquitous and serve up tea with sweetened condensed milk (highly addictive) and ethnic food–Shan noodles, fish soup for breakfast (delicious actually), fluffy indian breads, chicken or lamb curry, hot chilies with dried prawns, soups, and and the staple of any good meal: an assortment of fermented “salads” (sometimes the famous tea leaf salad). Streets are a chaotic crowding of vendors selling food, kitchen utensils, clothing, posters, jewelry, and flea market piles of foreign artifacts from the last 50 years. Nothing has ever been thrown out it seems.
Burma still engages in many handicrafts, one of the most impressive being the pounding, by hand, of gold into thousands upon thousands of micro-thin gold leaf squares for the faithful to apply to Buddha statues. I visited silversmiths, lacquerware production, jade cutters, and cloth weavers–everything done by hand.
Women wear tanaka, a wood paste, on their cheeks to protect their skin. Half the population chews intoxicating betel nut, spitting out mouthfuls of bright red saliva. Fishermen in the early morning mist of Inle Lake wrap a leg around their oar to paddle and maneuver so their hands are free for fishing nets. Floating villages and gardens are built on stilts. Hundreds of 11th-13th century temples spill out across the plain of Bagan. Massive pythons are housed, bathed, and fed (by me) at a temple outside Mandalay.