A Harvard Traveler's Seven Burmese Days

Burma Air Corporation is an experience in itself. The plane we flew on was a Fokker propeller plane, an old East German number--remember World War I? Half of the seats in the aircraft fell or crumpled forward and the ones which didn't fall forward generally collapsed backward when you sat down. Needless to say, there were no safety cards or safety announcements. In fact, there was no boarding announcement, either--just a sort of spontaneous herding to the door.

We had heard some stories. The scariest was about a couple of tourists who were sitting in the front row of a BAC plane when the aircraft began to take dips of several hundred meters at a time. As they nervously fastened their belts, they saw through the open cockpit door that the crew was frantically prying open the floorboards with screwdrivers, possibly looking for the safety instructions. When they landed back in Rangoon, a group of Japanese package tourists thought they were in Bangkok.

Yet we arrived safely in Rangoon, armed, like all the other tourists, with a liter each of Johnnie Walker Red Label and a package of 555 cigarettes. As soon as we deplaned, the whispers began: "Whisky cigarettes? Whisky cigarettes?" The arithmetic is simple: a dollar is worth seven Burmese kyats at the official rate, but on the black market buys thirty, and $14 worth of duty-free whisky and cigarettes sell for 500 kyats in Rangoon, giving a 36-kyat exchange rate.

Tourist Burma, your official hosts for seven days, try to discourage this activity by requiring you to fill out a bewildering number of currency forms, and have them stamped every time you change money, take a trip, stay in a hotel, or go to the bathroom. If your form says you only have 100 kyats but you come to the hotel with 500, they know you've been playing dirty, slap your wrists and send you back to "Go," do not collect $200.

So naturally, we were a little surprised to find ourselves approached for this illegal sale by the baggage handlers in the airport and even by the Tourist Burma representative himself. But, as we were soon to discover, in Burma the bureaucracy is half the fun, since nothing really works anyway, and nothing is on time. But who really cares, because the people are the friendliest and nicest in the world, and time stopped a hundred years ago anyway. If you're late enough for everything, maybe you'll miss your plane and get to stay another week...

After hot, smelly, noisy Bangkok, full of pollution and sordid massage parlors, Rangoon looked like a blow-up of a nineteenth-century cameo. The last time we drove in a car was the taxi from the airport. First of all, they don't use lights at night--waste of energy. Second of all, most cars don't have starters or a clutch, so a couple of young gentlemen are needed to push the van off. In the city, you see no cars made after 1950, mostly just a few WWII jeeps left behind by Allied soldiers, horse-carriages, and bicycle rickshaws.

There are no skyscrapers or neon signs. The largest building around is the Strand Hotel, left over from colonial days, where you can get a lobster dinner for four bucks. But the city is really dominated by the Shwedagon Pagoda, a huge golden dome three kilometers above the city, surrounded on eight sides by smaller pagodas in resplendent red and silver. Both the men and women on the streets wear the traditional longgyi, a tube-shaped piece of cloth knotted at the waist and falling to the ankles. Even children, but especially old women, smoke sold everywhere on the sidewalks.

Burma may be the most devoutly Buddhist country in the world, but it is also the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma: this is the "Burmese way to socialism." In order to work out such a complex destiny, its leaders basically closed the country from its independence after World War II until, in the seventies, a 24-hour tourist visa was instituted. Now tourists are allowed in for seven days--the longest, busiest week of your life.

One of the main reasons they only give you a week is to make it physically impossible to visit the "forbidden areas" of Upper Burma. The government has no control over its border areas nor much of the northern part of country where hill tribes live. The famous Golden Triangle, where much of the world's opium is produced, is the intersection of Thailand, Laos, and Burma, and the area is primarily controlled by various guerrilla groups and drug smugglers. The most common smuggling route, now that many Southeast Asian countries are cracking down, is through Burma to Bangladesh.

At the Shwedagon Pagoda, my friend Tom and I were lucky enough to happen on a pwe, one of the Burmese religious festivals that go on all night and all day, held on various special occasions, like weddings. We stood at the door watching as two female dancers in elaborate face make-up and gold-embroidered longgyis danced to the rhythm of traditional wooden Burmese instruments. The dancers were encircled by small children at their feet and adults further back, all squatting on the floor.

When they caught sight of us at the door to the temple, one woman rushed to her feet and pulled us inside. We were seated at the front before the dancers, and she quickly brought us a pot of strong Chinese tea, and a plate of roasted nuts and dried seaweed. Everyone's eyes were fixed on the two freaks with the yellow hair, and then one of the dancers took my hand and beckoned for me to dance with her. Holding hands, I copied her steps: dancing with bent knee, flexed feet and palms, the effect was of marionettes courting each other with jerky movements. Then, all of a sudden, I realized that my dancing partner wasn't a woman at all, he was just wearing what we think of as woman's makeup: eye shadow, lipstick and mascara.

When I finally sat down, a little hot and more than a little embarrassed, the Burmese went nuts; this wasn't just a white person with yellow hair, but a white person making a fool of herself. Several of the women embraced me, and when the dance was over, they clustered around and yanked at my earrings. At first I didn't understand what they were saying, but then I understood "You give me present!" They wanted my earrings, and each expected a present of makeup or jewelry. Tom and I were a bit disconcerted that this wonderful hospitality should be followed by such blatant demands, but we gave the dancers some money and I left a pair of earrings.

Later in the trip, a monk explained to me that the Buddhist conception of charity encompasses two halves: giving and encouraging others to give, and neither is complete without the other. Thus, the Burmese dancers were really helping us along to nirvana by encouraging us to give them things.

Monsoon rains fall with astonishing force, beginning in the late afternoon, and flooding the streets. In Rangoon, I escaped into the People's Patisserie for tea and was accosted by a gang of exuberant youngsters calling out "Howareyou! Howareyou!" I found Tom at the teashop near our hotel, engaged in polite conversation with several Burmese men. Nightlife is next to nonexistent in Burma, but teatime is really more like Happy Hour, and the teashops fill up with carousing beer drinkers.

The man sitting next to us asked us where we came from and what we were studying. I told him "History" (You just can't say "Hist. and Lit., France and America" outside of Harvard) and Tom said "Political science." At this, our friend looked around nervously and then said in a low voice, "If I were you, I would not say to people here `political science'...our government...it is considered, how do you say, subversive." Tom kept asking, "I don't understand. Why?" But the man was visibly flustered and just turned to me, saying, "You understand, don't you?" as though begging me to shut Tom up, and then turned away.

That and one other experience convinced us that, even though about 70 percent of the Burmese economy is black-market and the government often appears hopelessly out of touch with society, people take it seriously. We went to the Rangoon train station to try to get a Burmese to buy us train tickets instead of doing it at Tourist Burma at the official rate. The same people who wanted to buy our dollars, Walkmen, cassettes, cosmetics, T-shirts and even underwear, wouldn't touch our money to break that rule. It's as though the government tacitly cedes certain areas to the black market, and the people steadfastly leave the other areas alone. So we were able to convince every hotel not to stamp our currency form, but for transportation we had to pay official dollars.

From Rangoon we took a night train to Mandalay. Burmese trains are kind of like riding a horse all night, only you're in a chair. In Mandalay, even the Jeeps disappeared, and the streets were empty except for horse-carts and rickshaws. We took a horse-cart out to Sagaing, "the spiritual center of Buddhism in Burma," where about 500 monasteries surround a pagoda on a hill. We were escorted up the hill by a group of uniformed school kids entranced by Tom's sunglasses (every little kid we met on the trip, in the smallest, remotest villages, yelled "Rambo!" when he caught a look at Tom's shades). They introduced us to U Revata, their English teacher at the East Gondalon monastery on Sagaing Hill.

U Revata invited us back to the monastery, a peaceful brick structure where we ended up spending the night. The children gathered at his feet in front of the blackboard, where were written the words "DUTY TASK PERFORM" and several other related concepts. During the lesson, U Revata would read a phrase like, "The dog bit the man's toes" and then the children would chant it back in unison between 25 and 50 times: "Dogbit-man'stoesdogbitman'stoes!"

Between Mandalay and the "pagoda-studded plain of Pagan" lies a 27-hour boat trip down the Irrawaddy River. We had a choice between "cabin" and "deck" and for an extra dollar chose the cabin. Well, the deck looked like steerage, every square inch filled by a body or a basket of smelly goods. The cabin, however, was not much better. It consisted of three wooden bunks and a table, and we shared it with a wealthy Burmese family, their electrical appliances, and eight or nine monks with shaven heads and long orange robes.

The Burmese monks are supposed to lead a very ascetic life, one meal a day and only six belongings and lots of chanting and of course celibacy, but they didn't act much like it. At any one time, three or four of the monks would seat themselves in a circle around me and just stare. The trip was quite pleasant; off the boat you could see pagodas in the middle of nowhere, clusters of thatched huts on stilts, and old-fashioned fishing boats. The only thing was that the monks insisted on smoking cheroots while keeping the windows closed, we figured so that they could really feel the difference from the deck and get their money's worth. I locked horns in a head-to-head battle with one old padre, opening my window every time he shut it, and finally leaving one arm hanging out. Hell, I paid my 30 kyats same as the next guy.

At night the boat stopped in Pakkoku. Tourist Burma had told us we had to sleep on board, but that turned out to be another official lie. We guessed that since Pakkoku wasn't on any of our maps, it must be a tiny village; it turned out to be a city of 200,000. We stayed at a family inn called the Myayatanar, where innkeeper Tint San spoke impeccable English and his son played "Ob-la-di, ob-la-da" on the guitar. They took us into town to the festival that was going on that night. We expected another pwe, but instead it was a huge carnival with a ferris wheel, Kung Fu movies blaring, and enormous garish posters everywhere--so much for quaint village life.

No one can ever describe adequately the unearthly peace of Pagan and its 2,200 pagodas, and maybe that's why everybody uses the guidebook phrase about "the pagoda-studded plain..." The village has just one paved road, but everywhere you look is a white spire or a crumbling red-brick bell, completely silent but for the occasional children running out from among the weeds calling "Peace! Peace!" and holding up two fingers in a peace sign. That and "Rambo!" seem to be universal.

The last sight I remember on leaving Burma is 2,000 dots on the landscape as the plane rose out of Pagan, good old Burma Air. I'd only changed $15 with Tourist Burma, but I had three bags of Burmese lacquerware and a full-size traditional puppet, and I don't know where I lost all my tapes and T-shirts. Must have been those crazy Burmese--an especially tricky people.