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From exotic Burma to mystical Myanmar

By John Wright

I WAS a small boy when I first heard the word "Irrawaddy". I remember bedtime stories, an envelope stuffed with black-and-white photographs, an army paybook and a silken Rising Sun flag.

In the photographs there were soldiers lounging about in dungarees and singlets, my father with a field gun in a jungle clearing near dome-shaped buildings. He didn't have to tell me they were pagodas.

It was called Burma then, the country in the photographs. It looked hot and exotic and far from the working-class streets of postwar England. Burma. The Irrawaddy. Gold pagodas. Five words laced with magic and adventure.

Fifty years later, a middle-aged man called Ko Soe is handing me his business card. All it has on it is his name, boldly printed in one corner, a small etching and the words, "Horse Cart-57. Old Bagan, Myanmar". I notice there's no telephone number.

"Take a few with you," he says, as I climb down from the buggy. "Your friends will find me when they come."

I press money into his hands and he takes his horse and cart home in the gathering darkness as I turn towards the mystical river of my boyhood and walk down to its bank and the lights of the waiting ship.

Burma's Big Four

Ko Soe is used to people like me – travellers doing the Big Four sights of a country now known as Myanmar: Bagan, an ancient royal city backed by a vast plain of temples and pagodas; Yangon, once known as Rangoon and home of the beloved Buddhist landmark, the Shwedagon Pagoda; Mandalay and Amarapura, the last royal capitals; and pristine Inle Lake, a mountainous backpacker base and a soft adventure frontier of sorts in a country that still lies well off the beaten track for most package tourists.

And joining an organised tour remains the easiest choice for those intent on seeing a country in which independent travel, especially on a first visit, can present considerable organisational challenges. In my case, I left those challenges to the Orient-Express group, which runs tours along the Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady) River on a converted former Rhine cruiser called the Road to Mandalay.

I joined the vessel, which has been plying the famous river for 11 years, at Mandalay. The tour had included a flight from Bangkok to Yangon, a busy city of about five million people and a perfect cultural acclimatisation stop for most tourists.

Two to three days is enough here to check out and be impressed by the gilded Shwedagon Paya, to look around numerous other Buddhist temples and pagodas, to revisit the British colonial era in some of Yangon's impressive 19th- and early 20th-century buildings and to get among the Burmese people in the city's vibrant streets and markets.

On to Mandalay

Mandalay, about an hour's flight north of Yangon, is dominated by the imposing, 4sq km, 19th-century moated compound of Burma's last royal palace – now a military headquarters and consequently not a major stop on the tourist trail.

But Mandalay's neighbouring, much older former royal cities of Amarapura (the "City of Immortality") and Inwa (once known as Ava) are in serious tourist territory – a fact advertised by the legions of trinket and postcard-selling children who wait to pester travellers at the major sites.

This low-level entrepreneurship can be an irritation if you are not used to such things, but, like the plastic litter that appears to have overrun Myanmar, it seems an inevitable by-product of the country's increasing exposure to the West.

There is serenity in Mandalay, though. I will not forget the image of devotees at the Mahamuni Paya pressing new layers of gold leaf on to the now grossly enlarged image of its central Buddha figure. Or monks at prayer at the Shwe in Bin Kyaung (teak monastery), and the mystical view from the Ayeyarwady of Sagaing – its hilltops studded with monasteries and golden stupas.

I had figured that serenity might be a large part of the Road to Mandalay experience and, as it turned out, I wouldn't be disappointed.

The luxury riverboat was originally named the Nederland. It was built in 1964, bought by Orient-Express Hotels, Trains and Cruises in 1994, refitted and refurbished in Hamburg and moved to Myanmar on the back of a transport ship in 1995. In Mandalay, it was given a traditional Burmese touch with the addition of fine local furnishings and antiques before its inaugural voyage to Bagan early in 1996. Its first guests included Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, Princess Marina of Greece and actress Helena Bonham Carter.

The shallow-draft, 100m vessel now plies the winding and seasonally unnavigable Ayeyarwady through the heart of Myanmar on three to seven-night cruises between Mandalay and Bagan and on extended cruises between Bagan and the upper river town of Bhamo. The cruising season is from July to April, with most tourist traffic from October to March.

The river has a personality that imposes itself on you, even if you're in a cocoon of comfort and elegance on a vessel like the Road to Mandalay.

I find this on my first evening on board. There are small luxury touches in my airconditioned ensuite cabin – personalised cards, fresh fruit, maps, reading material, television and videos and a connection to a satellite telephone that costs $US4.50 per minute. Upstairs there's music in the piano bar, a "jacket and tie, please" restaurant serving European wines and a beautifully furnished observation deck.

The floating life

But right next to the cruiser on the riverbank, a woman is washing clothes, and further out into the stream there are teak barges, fishing boats, passenger gondola-ferries and tiny, prow-like vessels with enormous engines and long propeller shafts of the type you see on the canals of Bangkok. After nightfall, they're still plying from side to side of the river like clacking insects, and I think, yes, this is what I came to see and hear.

Downstream the next day, near the confluence of the Chindwin River, there are bamboo-thatched villages, all of them with gleaming pagodas, and itinerant fishing communities camped out on the riverbank flats, taking territorial advantage of Myanmar's dry season but ready to move with the rains. The beauty and simplicity of their connection with nature humbles me, a casual visitor in a timeless land. But it is the Burma of my childhood stories.

And then we reach Bagan, the first great city of Burma and the capital for a long line of kings before the Mongol Kublai Khan overran it in 1287.

We anchor upstream for the night and witness a light show on the river, organised by the ship and local villagers. In the morning, the ship weaves its way south through swirling mist towards the old capital and my date with Horse Cart-57 driver, Ko Soe.

Bagan rival to Angkor Wat

Bagan is a remarkable place and a rival to Angkor Wat both for the religious fervour and industriousness that created it and for the "wow factor" impression it leaves. Rising like termite nests on a 42sq km plain east of the Ayeyarwady are thousands of temples and pagodas, many crumbling but some beautifully preserved, dating as far back as the 11th century.

The ship's passengers disembark and join an organised tour to the Ananda Temple – an architectural masterpiece finished in 1090 which houses priceless Buddhist treasures – and the colourful covered markets at Nyaung U. Later, when I spot the horse and cart among the postcard sellers back at the ship, I run the gauntlet and ask Ko Soe to show me what he can in four to five hours. In Bagan, that's like asking a Parisian to show you the Louvre in 15 minutes.

But we take in the gilded, bell-shaped Shewezigon Pagoda, famous for relics of the Buddha, Shwe San Daw Pagoda, whose steep steps I climb, shoeless, for a brilliant view of the temple-strewn plain, and the imposing red pyramid of the Dhammayangyi Temple.

Finally, his horse labouring on Bagan's labyrinth of dusty tracks, Ko Soe leads me to Phya That Gyi Pagoda, one famous sunset-viewing spot among many in a land where viewing sunsets is an almost obligatory tourism experience. High up on the viewing platform, visitors are setting up cameras. One is meditating, seated and cross-legged, with a monk. When it comes, the sunset is brutally swift and almost disappointing. But it seems irrelevant. After 50 years, my journey is over.

John Wright travelled to Burma as a guest of Orient-Express Hotels, Trains & Cruises.

News Limited

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Quote:Myanmar Completes Charter Guidelines Email this story to a friend
4:57 AM EST September 1, 2007
The Associated Press
YANGON, Myanmar

Myanmar's military government marched ahead Saturday with its much-criticized plans for a new constitution amid U.S. pressure on the United Nations to condemn the junta's iron-fisted treatment of protesters.

A national convention to draw up guidelines for the new constitution completed its tasks Friday, and was to formally end Monday, delegates said.

Details of the gathering have not been released, but it is the first stage of a so-called road map to democracy implemented by the junta in this Southeast Asian nation to lead to elections at an unspecified date.

Critics call the process a sham because the junta hand-picked most delegates, and because opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi _ who remains under house arrest _ cannot attend.

The convention was wrapping up its work as anti-government protesters scattered into hiding to dodge arrest after a wave of protests over fuel price hikes imposed by the military leadership.

The junta has detained scores of activists involved with the rare displays of public opposition, which began Aug. 19. The government acknowledges detaining about 60 people, but opposition activists say the number is closer to 100. Some have been released.

Some detained activists started a hunger strike Thursday to demand medical treatment for a colleague, who reportedly suffered a broken leg during his arrest Tuesday, according to an associate who insisted on anonymity for fear of official retaliation.

President Bush has urged Myanmar's government to heed international calls to release the activists, while the State Department has said U.S. officials will work to raise the subject of Myanmar at the U.N. General Assembly meeting in September.

First lady Laura Bush called U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Friday to urge him to condemn the junta's treatment of dissidents and to press for the Security Council to prevent more violence in Myanmar, which is also known as Burma.

On Aug. 23, Ban called on Myanmar authorities to exercise maximum restraint in responding to protests and encouraged all parties to avoid provocative action, a statement critics of the junta considered weak.
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In Geneva, the U.N.'s independent expert on human rights in Myanmar, Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, said Friday that he "received allegations that the detainees have been severely beaten and tortured."

Pinheiro also said the crackdown's timing was especially bad in light of the junta's efforts to promote its road map to democracy and an upcoming visit to Myanmar by U.N. Under-Secretary-General Ibrahim Gambari.

The next stage in the road map is supposed to be the drafting of the actual constitution, but it is not clear who will be entrusted with the task. The document then would be submitted to a national referendum.

In 1988, public protests over rising rice prices were a prelude to a burst of major demonstrations, violently subdued by the army, that sought an end to the military rule that began in 1962. But the recent protests, at most involving a few hundred people, are nowhere near the scale of those in 1988.
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