Burma

We had a good flight to Burma from Calcutta. When we were in India some people told us to buy duty free Johnnie Walker Whiskey to trade for things in Burma because the government was not allowing booze into the country. So we bought the maximum each in hopes of trading it. That was sure a smart move. We ended up trading the booze for enough cash to pay for our entire week in the country. We actually had to work to spend it all before we left.

Arriving at Rangoon we went through a stiff no nonsense customs and immigration. They were not friendly or helpful and they seemed to want to find trouble. We stayed out of trouble with them. There were some current events with a popular politician put under house arrest that were causing some riots in Rangoon and in some other parts of the country. The Military rulers were cracking down hard. We were warned to stay away from any conflicts and to never take pictures of any of them or we would be killed. I took it seriously for a change. After we traded our booze for cash we started acting like rich tourists and took off to see as much of the country as we could in our seven day visa limit. The temples were so numerous and so large and almost gaudy with gold and extravagant designs that we were blown away by it all. We toured all the pagodas in Rangoon then bought a round trip airline ticket to go see Inle Lake and Pagan and everywhere in between.

Our first stop after we got out of our little puddle jumper airplane was Inle Lake. I fell in love with the nice people and the good food. We met a family that asked us to stay in their house with them and we did. Two of their sons were entering the Buddhist monastery to do their time as monks. They were having a huge celebration to send them off on their journey and we were invited to participate with the family. We really enjoyed it. There was a feast with so much great food that there was no way to eat it all. There was song and dance. There were speeches. The celebration went on for the entire three days we were there. The family was so polite and generous with us I truly appreciated their welcoming invitation to share their life with us like that.

Inle Lake was famous for its houses all being on stilts over the water and for the one legged way they propelled their boats. The lake itself was huge and looked spectacular in its tropical green colors. I watched the men working their boats while standing on one leg and moving the huge oar with the other leg to propel the boat. I wanted to learn how to do it and one of them offered to teach me. I am not usually such a klutz but I could not get it down. The balance and strength needed was too much for me to learn to do it in just the few minutes I had to learn it. Don't get me wrong. I learned the technique needed I just did not have the coordination to actually be able to control the boat. It would have taken me weeks of practice to get it down. We went for a ride on the lake and that was it for me learning to drive like they did. Here is a wiki link to see some pics and background on the lake:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inle_Lake

After spending as much time at Inle Lake as we could afford to we sadly left to go to Mandalay up in the far north of the country. We took a puddle jumper to Mandalay. The flight was kind of rough but we survived. We expected the people around Mandalay to be as nice as all the other people we had met so far in Burma but we found them to be distrustful of us and nowhere near as friendly or helpful as the people we had met so far. Then we ran into a Chinese man who befriended. He offered to drive us around the area in his Landrover because he was going around anyway and he wanted some company. He would not accept any money from us.

Our couple of days with him were unusual to say the least. His tour involved going around to all the Chinese owned houses and or businesses that he could find and taking photos of them and writing down notes about the people and places we visited. I am pretty sure he was a spy working for the Red Chinese government. China unofficially controlled much of Burma and they were spreading their influence into the nearby areas and this man was doing research trying to find out who was a friend and who was a potential foe for them. We got some great hospitality out of it. He treated us to amazing Chinese meals at some of the restaurants he visited and we slept in very nice houses at night.

One of my favorite things we did with him was go to a country farmers market that was huge. There were dentists working at the market that would fix your teeth right on the spot with no pain killers and using medival weapons as instruments. They advertised by laying out a bunch of teeth they had pulled and other teeth that they had made that they could insert while you waited. I wanted to watch them work but we changed our minds and moved on. There were farmers selling poppies and opium, marijuana, prescription drugs, animals, farm goods and supplies, clothes, weapons, you name it here, and there too. It was a mixture of tribal people working and buying at the market that did not always get along so well so there were a lot of armed guards present too. It was definitely the best market I had ever been to since the market at Fez in Morocco. That night we ate in a Chinese restaurant that made the best Chinese meal I had ever eaten. There was course after course of food and drinks then multiple desserts until I thought I might explode. This restaurant finally, could have definitely fattened me up. Then our time was up the next morning and we headed to the airport for a flight to Pagan, Burma, now called Bagan, Myanmar.

We took another small puddle jumper to get there. It was the worst flight I had ever taken to that point in my life. It was worse than the flight to Bombay from Copenhagen. We got in the little plane and the seat belts were broken. Then we found out how they got broken when the plane took off and immediately started to bounce all over up and down back and forth and sideways I swear. We were bouncing off the ceiling one minute the slamming down on the floor the next then bashing into the walls only to start it all over again. When we finally landed we were bruised and battered but with no broken bones. The views from the plane were gorgeous when we could look out the windows as we bounced past them. There were so many temples and pagodas and shrines visible from the air that it was hard to believe. We walked around the Pagan area but only had one last day here in Burma. Some of the shrines we walked past looked to be a thousand years old with vines growing through them and trees popping out of them. Snakes and lizards crawled around the undergrowth. I think some of the snakes were cobras but I don't know what some of the other ones were. We left them alone and they left us alone. We climbed up to the top of one temple that had a tall tower. When we got to the top there was a view overlooking the area with all the spires sticking up from the thousands of temples, pagodas and shrines. We took some pictures until Kirsten took a picture of a young man that might have been fourteen or fifteen years old who was dressed up in full military gear. He looked to weigh about seventy five pounds and I bet he had almost a hundred pounds of armaments on him. He had an ak47 rifle, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, grenades and rockets to go with them, a knife, two pistols, a back pack and everything else to go along with these items like ammunition. He did not want his picture taken. Kirsten took it anyways. with no emotion on his face he turned toward Kirsten and started lifting his rifle. I could see he meant business. He intended to just shoot her right then and there. I jumped between them and grabbed the camera from her. She started screaming at me for doing it but I ignored her and turned to face the heavily armed and angry young guard. I opened the camera and pulled out the film and exposed it to light by stretching it out with my arms. Then I handed it to him and turned around and slapped her. I made it look like I hit her hard but in fact I faked it. Kirsten still got angry at me. But the guard loved it when I slapped her. It saved him from having to shoot her and he started laughing at her in her angry state. I convinced her to walk away and just go back down the stairs before he changed his mind again and killed both of us. She reluctantly complied. We lost a few pictures that day but I am sure that he would have killed her and probably me too if I had not done what I did. Kirsten fumed about it for days.

I have a hard time understanding the Asian people. They all seem so sweet and nice all the time but there have been so many wars and battles going on in this area for the last few centuries at least that it just does not make sense to me. Why are they so nice and yet so evil at the same time. Does there have to be evil to balance out their sweet side? I really really do not understand this. It isn't just Burma but also Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia and Viet Nam. They all seem like such nice people but there are always vicious wars going on in these places, WHY?

We flew back to Rangoon that afternoon. We still had quite a bit of cash we had to spend so we went and blew it at the big hotel in downtown Rangoon. We ate a big meal and slept in a nice bed to try to recover from our flight to Pagan from Mandalay. The next day we would fly to Bangkok Thailand. Kirsten was still mad at me over the camera incident. Such is life.