Just Catching Up

No attempt at creative writing today, just an update on my whereabouts because I haven’t written anything for several weeks.

I spent a total of 30 days in limbo in Yangon, waiting for the wheels of dharma, the Shwe Oo Min center, and the Myanmar guvmint to move just enough to approve my visa application. It was frustrating at times, but I was rewarded with an extension of almost seven full months instead of six, so I am free to stay here until November 21. At that time I start the application process all over again.

Why did I cool my heels in Yangon instead of exploring upcountry? The reasons were one part not knowing when the approval might come, one part Myanmar New Year’s, one part not being in possession of my passport while my visa application was being processed, and one part the logistics of Myanmar travel.

I had heard that Myanmar New Year’s was a lot like Chinese New Year’s in two important aspects: getting tickets for planes, trains, and buses is pretty much out of the question during the last few weeks leading up to the holiday, and everything in the way of businesses and restaurants shuts down. The difference is that Myanmar New Year’s lasts a full week—for four days I had to schlep way crosstown to eat at a Thai joint or one of several Muslim/South Indian tea houses. True, some sidewalk tea operations were open for business, but I’ve been super careful about eating street food on this trip. Seeing pots of cold, barely soapy water filled with utensils and bowls worries me a lot more than it used to.

I spent the whole month at the Three Seasons Hotel under the kind and always smiling supervision of Miss Hla Hla, the owner; “Hla” means “pretty” in Burmese. During the New Year’s shutdown she served free dinners to all guests in addition to the normal free breakfast. On two nights it was me, myself, and I. And once she discovered that I actually liked mohinga—the fish and noodle soup that is the national dish of Myanmar—she made that for me every morning instead of eggs and toast. It’s hard to walk 20 feet in Myanmar without running into a mohinga stall on the street, or a regular restaurant with mohinga on the breakfast menu. Miss Hla Hla’s is by far the best I ever et. She also demanded that I give her two of my shirts to launder so she wouldn’t have to look at my ring-around-the-collar anymore.

Two days after the New Year’s holiday ended I decided to take another bus trip to Shwe Oo Min with the thought in mind that seeing me in person might get the staff to move faster on my visa application. When I entered the monastery grounds I saw Dta Dta (the woman with the best English in the front office and who suffers mightily because of it) taking a short break outside. I did a double-take: I’d never seen her anywhere but behind her desk, sitting in a chair that’s way too low for her. Standing outside she was an absolute knockout in a beautiful electric blue traditional Myanmar blouse and ankle-length skirt. Breathtaking, really. Then she looked in my eyes and said the words that any man would want to hear in such a situation: “Come inside and get it,” meaning my visa. On top of that I got a $30 refund for overpaying the application fee.

I took the bus back to town, booked a flight to Heho in central Myanmar, said my goodbyes to some people in the neighborhood I had made acquaintances with, bought some fancy chocolates for Miss Hla Hla, and was out of Yangon within 36 hours of retrieving my passport. Talk about liberation.

That was April 26. Since then I’ve spent four days at Inle Lake, followed by a ride with sixteen others in the back of a late 70s/early 80s Toyota pickup truck to the town of Kalaw, where I did my second retreat of this trip, this time for ten days. In many ways it was a much richer experience than the one I had at Shwe Oo Min in Yangon, I’ll save the details for later. Kalaw is up above 4,000 feet, meaning cool nights just short of needing a blanket, broad vistas from the meditation center, and hiking on mountain trails! From Kalaw I traveled to the lowlands to see the ancient stupas, payas, and temples of Bagan, most of them built in the 11^th-13^th centuries. At just a few hundred feet above sea level and at the very tail end of the dry season, daily temperatures in Bagan were 100-103 degrees F. I rented an old, heavy steel bicycle and rode about 20 miles/day seeing the sites, 10 in the morning followed by a long midday nap, then a return pedal in the late afternoon. Inle Lake and Bagan are two of the “Big Four” sites that the large majority of Myanmar visitors visit. And you can tell the difference in the way that locals in those places treat foreigners.

Next stop was Pyin Oo Lwin, a town that used to be called Maymyo, named after a British Colonel May or General May or something militarily May when Burma was a British colony. In British English it’s known as a “hill station,” a place for the colonial rulers to escape to when the temperatures in Mandalay hit the 90s and 100s. Leafy green, cool, with a cheap but clean guest house, several wi-fi locations, and, because of a big military presence, the most reliable electricity I’ve encountered yet in Myanmar. The “National Botanical Gardens” are in Pyin Oo Lwin, and I visited them on a nice, Seattle-like drizzly day. I spent mornings exploring and afternoons working on editing projects that had piled up.

I’m writing this entry in the northern Shan state city of Lashio, where things are very different. Some background: ever since I first heard about this town back in Seattle, during the first lecture of a ten-week lecture series on all things Myanmar sponsored by the Seattle Asian Art Museum and the Gardner Center of Asian Art, I’ve had the idea in my head that Lashio would be the place where I would hang my hat for a while and revive my long-dead ESL teaching skills. Lashio is 100 miles from the Chinese border. It is 400 or so miles from Kunming, where I taught at the Yunnan Province National Minorities Institute in 1988/89. All of my students were non-Han Chinese , and a large percentage were from ethnic groups that live along the China-Burma border.

But right now there’s a war going on in the northern Shan state between the Myanmar army and a mix of Shan and Kachin rebels. Not too far away is a pipeline that will soon transport oil and natural gas from ships offloading in the Bay of Bengal all the way across the country to China. The pipeline may be a target for local insurgents, which means things could get messy here. There is also speculation about the Myanmar army’s interest in attacking the local Wa Army. The Wa are an ethnicity known for two things: their complete success in never being controlled by any state, Chinese or Burmese, and for producing the second largest crop of opium poppies in the world, surpassed only by the Afghans. They’ve used a lot of their drug money to buy top-of-the-line and state-of-the-art arms from various sources. According to a recent article in one of the world’s most respected journals on military matters, the Wa have purchased three attack helicopters from China. Now, why China would want to sell attack helicopters to an already heavily armed insurgent army that could potentially blow up parts of a gas/oil pipeline that it owns and controls is beyond my comprehension.

As are many things in this country. At least for now.