Rachel Edwards
The humour and grace of the people of Myanmar is remarkable.
Hours spent in a pick up truck crammed with thirty people did a lot to confirm this.
On Lake Inle, near the Shan Mountains, there is a place called Nga Hpe Chaun (literally Fish Canal Monastery).
It is known to the Lonely Planet toters as Jumping Cat Monastery and, as one of those toters, I was not disappointed. My cat, Growley Superstar, had advised me that I would only be permitted to visit Myanmar if I visited this monastery.
The monastery is on stilts over Lake Inle. Wi Mo, the driver of the Le Gyi (long boat) cut the outboard and it glided towards the teak jetty. Gilded Buddha images shimmered gently in the darkened sim.
Inside, cats were lounging all over the floor, with no regard for the request to have their shoulders covered and to not point their feet at the Buddha.
An old monk was splayed over a chair, dozing, with his coke bottle glasses falling down his nose. A man dressed in a longyi (the strangely masculine sarong that most Burmese men wear) appeared and shook a container. The cats began purring around his legs. He produced a hoop and the cats jumped languidly through hoops for him.
I was elated at this point, as the land up to my visit to Nga Hpe Chaun had been a trial.
Three days of travel — two of which were in an immobile train that sat in Myingyan (rhymes with whingin’) as we waited for the train tracks which had been washed away to be repaired.
Fighting pigs
It was good that there was still access to a toilet on the immobile train. That the toilet was a direct hole onto the tracks and a few meters from our seats was not so good.
Flocks of sheep and fighting pigs snuffled around the tracks as university students trying to get home for the weekend rapped in Burmese and local kids laughed their way through the carriage.
In Mandalay a young man carrying a plate of orange cooked crabs got on the train. He placed them gently on the table opposite and they remained there for the next day, until he sold some on the platform at Myingyan. I am unsure of the fate of the remaining crabs.
The tracks weren’t repaired at 12 or 5 or 9 or the next morning so I found a pick up to get to Meikthila. A pick up is similar to a Toyota Hilux with seats in the back and twenty people sitting on them, ten on the top, three or four hanging off the back and four in the front.
The humour and grace of the people of Myanmar is remarkable.
All I could think of during this journey was crepitus and after 12 hours through the Shan Hills and roads crumbling into precipices I could hear it too.
On the road were trucks with top heavy loads that consumed the entire single land of the road and had horns enough to damage the eardrums of this flimsy white girl.
In Yangon there are women hunched over babies with their eyes rolling back, hands out and large darkened windowed vehicles rolling past and spraying them with mud.
There are highrises being built with bamboo scaffolding.
There are people hanging from shanty balconies with ropes hanging down yelling deals to the street vendors who walk the streets selling large grapefruits, batteries and water.
There is no free-range versus factory farmed egg debate here.
Car horns are banned in Yangon, there are signs that have a crossed out horn around the streets — I imagine that once things are overthrown that people get in their cars and start to beep.
A monk told me that meditation is good for personal freedom but then asked what good is that when his country is not free.
