Tuesday, June 21, 2011

INDIA - ASSAM & BENGAL


Kaziranga


The duration of my bumpy low-altitude flight down from Paro in Bhutan to Guwahati in India was only 25 minutes. But the contrast between the country I had left and the one I was entering was stark. Gone was the clean silence of Bhutan and the cool serenity of the mountains, replaced by the dirty chaos of India and the sticky humidity of the Brahmaputra valley.

It's a good thing I'm an Indophile. It's impossible to have mixed feelings about the country; you either love it or hate it. Indeed dichotomy is at its heart - Hindu and Muslim, rich and poor, past and future, youth and old age, urban and rural, east and west, tradition and technology. Whole books have been written on all of these themes. It's this diversity, and the unity that somehow manages to transcend it, that fascinates me.

I could only speak a little of just one of the eighteen official languages. So to compensate I had been practising the universal Indian head waggle. This is an essential skill to master in order to negotiate the country effectively. Highly versatile, in different situations it can signify: hello; goodbye; OK; yes; no; please; maybe; definitely; later; immediately; too expensive; what a bargain; I don't care, and so on. The nuances of the waggle are subtly conveyed by the eyes and the eyebrows.

So as I elbowed my way to the front of the immigration line and waggled furiously at the clerk, I was getting excited at the prospect of a long journey taking me right across the north of the country from the lush jungle of Assam through the dusty plateaus of Madhya Pradesh to the encircling mountains of Kashmir. Unlike in Bhutan I could go wherever I wanted at my own pace, and make all my own choices, for better or worse. On the other hand, it would be hot. Astonishingly, relentlessly, sleeplessly hot.

My prearranged driver was waiting outside Guwahati airport and with a big red smile he loaded up the cab. After an hour we finally found a functioning ATM. Stocked with wads of rupees I began a seven-hour 250km drive eastwards along the Brahmaputra to Kaziranga National Park - home to several thousand wild one-horned rhinos which, in a rare success for the Indian Parks Service, have been successfully nurtured from the verge of extinction.


***


We stopped on the dusty outskirts of Guwahati in a tiny dhaba, or roadside truckstop, for my first taste of proper Indian food in three years. I had been dreaming of this moment. It was the food that prompted my first trip to India in 2004; since then, all of my attempts to replicate the local dishes at home have been palatable to various degrees, but very few have actually tasted authentic. So when the modest thali of spicy dhal and watery aloo gobhi was served up I attacked it like a starving convict until my fingers and chin ran with turmeric butter.

Indian roads are in a permanent state of semi-construction. Traditionally, a road is built from the beginning to the end, or perhaps from both ends to meet in the middle. This is not the case in India, where the construction contracts seem to have been awarded to different groups every ten kilometres. These teams appear to work at their own leisurely pace, none communicating with any other - nor with the bridge-building guys. Another example of the functional chaos that is dragging India into a semblance of modernity.

The resulting journey would have been be comical if it wasn't so uncomfortable. Bursts of manic speed along newly tarmaced stretches of motorway were followed by twenty minutes' bumpy crawl along a dusty side road, and then back onto the opposite semi-complete lane for another 140kph burst. Traffic hurtled in both directions on a collision course, lights flashing and horns blaring, only swerving to one side at the very last second. Trucks overtook trucks that were already overtaking other trucks. I loved it. I think I was high on the danger.

The trip was also broken by several chai stops at rural towns in which I rapidly attracted flotillas of gaping children. Midway we left the motorway and waited at a railway crossing as an endless cargo train trundled lazily past. There must have been two hundred bogeys. A heady aroma of jungle and woodsmoke filled the air as we drank coconut milk and watched the wallah hack apart the nut expertly and carve out the delicious flesh with a giant machete.


***


It was getting dark when we finally approached Kaziranga, and it was hard to read the safety warnings painted on rocks by the side of the road. 'Be Mr Late Not Late Mr'. 'If You Are Married, Divorce Speed'. 'Be A Careful Overtaker Or You Will Meet The Undertaker'. These well-intentioned signs seemed pitifully ineffective as we took the blind turns at terrifying speed, and it was easy to believe that 250 lives are claimed on Indian roads every single day.

I had hoped to stay at the Assam State Tourism lodges, but they were full, so I ended up at the grandly-named Kaziranga Wildlife Sanctuary. Apparently this was the first guesthouse at the park, established in 1973, but if so it hasn't been modernised since. The grubby room crawled with bugs and there was no shower, but the mosquito net functioned well once I had stitched up all the holes, and in the crushing humidity it was pleasant to douse myself from a bucket of cold water. For Rs250, or 4 euro, a night, I couldn't really complain.

After the endless sweaty drive I was looking forward to a cold beer. Off-licences in India are charmingly called 'English Wine Shops' or 'Imported Wine Shops' and are banished to the outskirts of town. This naming convention persists despite the facts that (a) the English didn't introduce wine to India (it was the Persians); (b) England produces no wine; (c) there is in fact no wine for sale; indeed at any location in rural India there isn't a bottle of wine within an ass's roar, and (d) all of the available rot-gut beverages are produced locally and consumed largely by locals.

The seeming intention is to emphasise that boozing is a foreign vice and that treasonous Indians who indulge should feel extreme guilt and penitence. Nonetheless the shops are always heaving with customers to such an extent that on several occasions I foiled a would-be pickpocket while waiting to be served.

At Kaziranga I was disappointed to discover that wine shop was closed because the state elections began the following day. Ostensibly this is to ensure maximum turnout, but in reality it's to deter the unrest and violence which often accompanies the election process.

The day before I arrived, my taxi driver told me, the local Communist/Naxalite strongman had been arrested nearby amid ugly scenes, and the road had been closed for several hours. And the following day, he continued, opening the driver's door at high speed to spit paan on the road, virtually every public vehicle and taxi was requisitioned for election work. So I was lucky to travel that day.

These crackdowns are noble in their intent to facilitate the exercise of franchise, but are infuriating to thirsty travellers. They're also somewhat hypocritical given the laughably transparent corruption and downright criminality of many Indian elected representatives.

Some entered politics to evade serious criminal charges including murder. Others have amassed enormous fortunes far beyond the means of their government salary; when questioned, with a straight face they attribute this wealth to 'gifts' sent by their destitute constituents. At election time these politicians' heavily armed goondas, or thugs, drive through poor villages throwing wads of cash from their jeeps, pausing occasionally to club supporters of opposing parties to death.


***




The park tourist complex was set back from the main road in the middle of a huge tea plantation. In the dead silence of a moonless night the aromatic bushes stood silhouetted by starlight, swarming with fireflies flickering on and off in ghostly waves. I had never seen fireflies before. It was as if the stars had fallen to earth and were dancing amid the trees. Or at least this was how it might have seemed had I had a couple of beers. Even distressingly sober it was still a magical sight.



On returning to my hotel I found a cadaverous young Swede with a wispy beard sitting on the veranda smoking a pipe. His companion was a rich and arrogant Californian girl dressed like a belly-dancer. I sat with them for a while until the tangents of their conversation became unbearable, then retreated to my room and lay watching the fireflies bat against the mosquito netting until I slept. The next morning we all rose at 5am and shared the cost of an elephant safari. India at dawn has a particular serenity and sense of expectant promise that's entirely absent from India at noon.

We mounted our elephant at the foreign tourists' enclave; the Indian tourists depart from elsewhere, and pay a fraction of the cost. Dual pricing is universal in India and is one of my pet peeves. The daily park entrance fee was Rs250; to bring my camera was Rs500. Our elephant ride was Rs750 per person; the jeep safaris, even shared with three others, were Rs600 each. Other irritating fees included Rs150 for an armed guard and Rs100 for road tax.

Assuming three safaris per day, the total cost for a foreigner is almost Rs3000, or 50 euro. Locals pay about one fifth of this amount. There's no way that (the largely young, backpacking) foreigners are five times richer than the plump Indian tourists who visit national parks in air-conditioned vehicles and, infuriatingly, make calls on their BlackBerrys while on elephant-back. And even if they were, there's no fair reason why they should pay so much more. But there was no choice.


***


We hadn't gone fifty metres on our loping elephant before we came upon a muddy pool containing two young male rhinos who twitched their feline ears and peered at us with tiny bright eyes. Soon they struggled to their feet, snorted and sniffed the air, and then emerged from the pool to reveal three-foot-long erections that caused uproar among the Indian tourists. Two-horned rhino, oh, ha! ha! Unperturbed the rhinos stretched and yawned and sauntered off into the grass. "Wino is going to the bathroom" our mahout said and, sure enough, after a while we encountered a huge patch of steaming droppings frequented by the local population. Walnut-brained but toilet-trained.



Later we saw many other placid winos who allowed us to come very close. They really are impressive animals, with their massive cylindrical bodies clad in folds of prehistoric armour plating and supported by surprisingly dainty legs. Like most previously unexperienced creatures, they are considerably larger than one imagines; the biggest bull we saw was almost as large as an elephant, must have weighed easily a thousand kilos, and had a razor-sharp horn over thirty centimetres in length.

We also saw some nursing mothers with absurdly cute and curious baby rhinos; elegant deer with enormous furry antlers; some slug-like wild boar; flocks of giant storks, and several herds of wild elephant. No glimpse of a tiger, despite fresh pug marks in the mud.



Our ride came to an end after a couple of hours. If you've ever ridden an elephant you'll know that this is quite enough time. With their wide backs it's tough on the human groin ligaments, and their bristly hair is like sandpaper on bare legs. Each of their frequent farts could inflate a child's bouncing castle. They also have huge smelly rubbery heads, periodically smashed by the mahouts with an iron bar whenever the elephant pauses to graze. This usually elicits a vocal complaint. Sitting astride a trumpeting elephant is a memorable experience.




***


Two additional outings by jeep later that day yielded multiple sightings of fat German tourists in safari suits sweating under the weight of zoom lenses so enormous they had their own handles (as did their owners). Still no tigers. Next morning, the Swede and his boss having left, I befriended two American couples for my final safari and we bumped along the sandy tracks exchanging the usual Western details, which always seem so disjointed and meaningless when travelling. One's background. One's career. One's post-travelling plan.



In deep jungle by a lazy river we passed another jeep with engine trouble, and stopped up the road while our guard and driver went back to assist. I got out and was stretching my legs beside the jeep when a large rhinocerous emerged onto the road from the trees ahead. Pleased, I raised my camera to 'click some snaps' as they charmingly say in India. But before I could hit the button the rhino sniffed the air, made a sound I had never heard before, lowered its horn and began to charge.

This was an interesting experience. Frozen to the spot, the image of the giant beast hurtling towards me was unforgettably etched into my mind in a moment of otherwise complete mental vacuity. As terror struck the Americans and I began screaming like schoolgirls. I scrambled back into the scant protection of the jeep which the rhino could have flipped like a playing card. Afterwards I discovered a large bump on my head where I had smashed it against the rollbar in my panic.

In the space of a few seconds the moment concluded. The Indians bellowed. Our driver came running back clapping his hands. The teenage guard fumbled with his rifle; later we learned it was loaded with blanks. At the very last moment, less than three metres away from me, the rhino got startled, heaved back throwing up a cloud of dust, and crashed off into the jungle. We were all a little jelly-legged for a while.




***


Tezpur

I had intended to stay several more days at the national park but the cost of the safaris was prohibitive. I chose not to submit to a seven-hour bus journey back to Guwahati, and instead broke the trip half-way at the town of Tezpur. So I sat by the deserted roadside at Kaziranga waiting for my bus, which when it turned up was packed. It has always amused and occasionally frustrated me no matter how rural and sparsely populated it might seem, every Indian bus and train is always absolutely jammed.

So it was with this journey. After slipping Rs20 to the skinny boy who tied my pack to the roof, I swayed in the aisle for two hours while the bus hurtled along blaring its earsplitting three-tone air horn. When I finally bagged a seat it was so narrow and uncomfortable that I wished I had remained standing. But at least it removed me from the centre of attention. The other passengers had been staring at me slack-jawed, as if expecting me to hold my nose and make rupees blow out my ears.

It became very hot. As the bus slowed children appeared from nowhere and ran alongside selling small plastic bags of water to the sweltering travellers. We crossed a long bridge over the Brahmaputra. Later I read that a truck had crashed off it the same day and sunk with the loss of many lives.

Approaching Tezpur the view changed as normal when entering an Indian town. First the roadside became strewn with trash and an almost tangible smell of sewage assaulted the nostrils. There followed several kilometres of empty enclosures with advertisements for underwear and cement painted on concrete walls. Then factories and warehouses. Then some slums of bamboo shacks. And finally the town proper.

At the bus station a nice young student of forestry management adopted me and insisted on seeing me checked in to a cheap hotel. The first place we tried offered a nightly rate of Rs2700, over 40 euro, so we left and found a cupboard room in a nearby flophouse for a tenth of the price.

This was what might be expected. The dark room was only slightly larger than the bed, but it was clean and there was a hot shower, a Western toilet and even a TV. All you get for the extra money is a bit more space, a window, a towel, a bar of soap and some toilet paper; since these three were in my backpack, why pay more?

Tezpur is a bustling town with a reputation as a centre of the arts. I must say it didn't make this impression on me, but it was a pleasant enough place to pass a couple of days. The Assamese new year was beginning and there was a festive atmosphere undampened by the frequent storms and power cuts.

Gautam, the owner of a tiny noodle stall, had served in the navy and recently returned to set up various businesses. He employed a ten-year-old chef who made up for his lack of culinary skills with an enormous toothy smile.

In the evening as it rained heavily Gautam interceded in an argument I was having with some drunk guys who in supposed friendship had given me a watered dram of parrafin whiskey and then tried to extort from me the price of an entire bottle. Eventually they were shamed into an apology. Gautam then presented me with a bag of delicious date-filled pastries baked for the upcoming holiday by his wife.

Can you help me? I asked the man in the laundry. Certainly I will help you, he replied, and then charged me three times the local rate - or 'thrice' as the Indians are fond of saying. When I collected my clothes the next day the ancient assistant fussed over folding them and was troubled to discover that they were not dry.

The latest IPL cricket match was blaring from the TV in the busy workers' restaurant where I ate. The unfortunate waiter had one arm and served me a cup of coffee at the bottom of which I discovered several dead ants.



***


As is the case with many places bearing evocative names, my first experience of the great Brahmaputra river was a bit of a let-down. I set out with a vision of drinking tea beneath a shady tree as hearty fishermen reeled in their catch and happy children frolicked in the shallows. But it didn't start well. The day was absurdly humid and the sweat ran down my legs as if I were incontinent. The local rabid dogs bared their teeth and barked ferociously at me.

Approaching the river I came upon a shrine to Kali. Such sites were nourished by human blood sacrifice until colonial times. The black goddess stood frozen in a grotesque dance, one leg curled in the air, glaring eyes wide and a long red tongue protruding from a gaping mouth of sharp teeth.

Multiple arms held implements of torture, and around her neck hung a necklace of severed heads with agonised expressions. Nearby I was shocked to see several horribly swollen human corpses lying amid piles of rubbish. They turned out to be papier mache idols discarded from the shrine, but the effect was jarring.



The riverside was dirty and smelly and offered no shade or refreshment. The main stream was a long way off in the distance and there was no sign of any fishermen. Below on the sand a group of surly naked boys washed a battered truck. A stinking drunk appeared and clutched at my arm, wanting me to accompany him somewhere, only wandering away after I ignored him steadfastly for several minutes. Downstream women squatted on the rocks flogging their laundry. Nobody offered a smile.

So I left and walked back towards the town. At the fence of a locked fun-park children stood staring wistfully at the big wheel and the paddle boats. A nice old man gave me a lift on his moped to the Assam tourist office where I was ushered to a heavy desk with flags on it. Here I awaited the director who arrived wiping his mouth and burping, to administer to this stupid gora who knew no better than to call at lunchtime. I took, and later ignored, his kind advice on bus timings to Guwahati.


***


The night watchman at my hotel was a squat and muscly ex-military Sikh in a camouflage vest and army boots, with a horrible fungal infection in his fingernails. But he was a nice guy and when I woke him at 5am to open the hotel gate he saluted me as I walked away to the bus station. Public buses in India are categorised as executive, super-deluxe and merely deluxe, tumbling down the scale as they dilapidate. Mine was acceptable and I enjoyed the morning ride through neat farmland.

I sat for a while at Guwahati terminal watching the barefoot beggar children devour the remainder of Gautam's pastries like hyenas on a wildlife TV programme. It wasn't long before I was approached by a local university professor who offered me a lift to the railway station and a lecture on Hindu mythology.

It's not a religion, he said; it's a culture. A true faith is defined by four things - a founder, a unifying deity, a set of holy texts, and a prescribed following. With its crores of gods and its ritual elasticity, Hinduism has none of these. In return for the ride my benefactor insisted that I promise to look up a global Hindu organisation, whose name I wrote down somewhere and promptly lost.

I was several hours early for my train to Calcutta so I wanted to put my bag in the left luggage office in the railway station. Some people said it was upstairs but it wasn't. Some people said it was past the ticket office but it wasn't. In growing frustration I went out on the platform and found it myself. The bureaucracy was so stereotypical I had to laugh. Even though three burly staff were on duty, I was not permitted to check in the bag without my own chain and lock. Naturally there was a lock-and-chain-wallah squatting nearby who happily upsold me to a 'most safe' set for Rs150.

Then back for the paperwork. Name, address, phone number. Multiple signatures. One copy for this box, one for that file, and one for me. Finally, in a rather glaring lapse of security given the application process, I was required to carry my own bag into the storage room, unsupervised, and lock it to the shelf. I could have ransacked a dozen bags. The price for 24 hours or part thereof "By Order of the Asst. Distt. Suptt. Incharge" painted to the wall was Rs10 or twenty cents.

I wandered about for a while, drinking scalding tea in the shade outside the station while being stared at, and eating a delicious masala dosa on the platform. A naked child touched my elbow. He wanted money and when I shook my head he rolled his eyes and clicked his tongue in exasperation at my ignorance. Then he grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me to a food stall where he pointed at the samosas. I thought this was fair enough - at least he wasn't pointing at a tube of glue - so I bought him a few, and was touched when I saw him share them with the other hungry kids.

***

What to say about a 26-hour train ride in India? Actually I already have very little recollection of this journey. But I do remember its endlessness. I must have spoken to someone.


***


Calcutta


Arriving at Calcutta's famous Howrah Station, long bereft of its colonial glory and far less impressive than Victoria Terminus in Bombay, the usual layer of sleeping humans carpeted the main hall. Covered head to toe in blankets and completely still they could have been fatalities laid out after one of India's daily stampedes.

Outside I pushed my way through the throng of voracious hairy taxi drivers and queued instead for a prepaid cab. While waiting I was approached by a ragged young man with a 19th-century coolie's haircut. I almost waved him away as a beggar before I realised he was also a foreigner, from Japan. And so I shared my cab downtown with him and his crazy girlfriend who emitted peals of manic laughter at every word I uttered. They had already been travelling for a year, and they looked it.



Having been at Calcutta at the start of their journey they recommended the Paragon Hotel, and I should have known better given the cut of the pair of them. But it was cheap - Rs300 - and following my logic at Kaziranga and Tezpur, I decided to give it a shot. I suspected I had made a mistake when I read the Lonely Planet's description 'coffin-box rooms... as spirit-crushing as you would expect.'

In naive expectation I inspected a few different rooms but even the best reminded me of a cell in one of the psychiatric hospitals in eastern Europe you used to see on TV after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The ruthless white glare from two buzzing and flickering striplights revealed every hideous detail. Great skeins of yellowing plaster peeled from the ceiling like scabs on a septic wound, and the crumbling walls were covered in thick layers of nightmarish lime-green paint streaked with hideous brown bulges of creeping damp.

Previous inmates' presence was inescapably evoked by scrawls of illiterate graffiti, clusters of toenail clippings and dried gobs of personal emissions splattered on the wall. The rock-hard beds were carelessly strewn with torn yellow sheets flecked with tiny bloodstains; the pillows were like sandbags. A shard of pus-speckled mirror hung from a rusty nail and a sticky dresser with squeaking drawers squatted grimly in the corner awaiting anyone masochistic enough to even consider unpacking their bag for a long-term stay.

The adjoining bathroom exuded a fragrance beyond my descriptive ability. Above a window sill thick with bird droppings, the sickly breeze flapped offensively through a greasy rag crudely sellotaped over the broken glass. Lengths of rusted piping protruded at grotesque angles from the walls as if embedded in acts of torture. Petrified slivers of soap and wads of tissue paper brittle with unspeakable material lay welded to a grimy ledge.

In place of a handbasin there was a slimy bucket of stagnant water supporting an oily scum studded with loathsome items. A perished rubber pipe, grafted to a tap at knee height and suspended above by a coat hanger jammed into the ceiling plaster, reluctantly spat an irregular shower of brackish water that smelled of blood. Lurking malevolently nearby was the noxious toilet whose flimsy seat had long ago detached from the bowl and now sat balanced delicately in place, lying in wait for the touch of unsuspecting buttocks.

In this filthy chamber I spent three sweaty nights which would have been largely sleepless but for the necessary medication of highly alcoholic Indian beer and veterinary-strength codeine pills. To be fair there were no bugs, but this was because even the roaches know that concrete structures absorb the unbelievable heat of the day and then radiate it after sunset. Mad dogs and Englishmen also stay inside on midsummer nights; everyone else sleeps in the open air.


***


Like in Kaziranga, after a 26-hour train ride I was dying for a beer. But like in Kaziranga, no alcohol was being served; this time because of a national holiday. So, quaking with rage, I barged across town to a five-star hotel whose bar, I figured, would probably be open. Sure enough, I spent the evening sitting on a leather armchair in air-conditioned splendour sucking up free wifi and knocking back bottles of Kingfisher that each cost as much as my hotel room.

I liked Calcutta except for the weather... I have never experienced anything like it. Perhaps the written numbers might better convey the reality. During the day the humidity peaked at ninety-five per cent and the temperature reached forty-four degrees. Even at 3am it was eighty-five per cent and thirty-two degrees. And all I had to do was tourist stuff; there were people outside doing roadworks. I felt like Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai... "Officers will not do manual labour!"

It was literally like a sauna and I was sweating like a racehorse at Aintree. I drank six litres of water a day which my body poured right back out; I never knew I had so many sweat glands on my scalp and upper lip. My hair was plastered to my head and my eyes stung. My fingers and toes crinkled like figs and eczema bloomed on my hands. Gravity seemed to strengthen and muscles weakened. My flipflops squelched along the footpath. Climbing stairs felt like an attempt on Everest.

As a result I spent a lot of time sprawled in my underwear beneath the lazy ceiling fan in my stifling room, fantasising about cool breezes I have known. I don't feel guilty at all about this. When I did venture out it was only to loll slowly between chilled refuges, pausing every ninety seconds to wipe my stinging eyes. At the Victoria Monument I contemplated the awful paintings for several hours because the benches were fan-cooled. For the same reason I attended an entire Christian church service for the first time in twenty years - even though it was conducted entirely in Bengali.

In the evenings I sat on the Maidan eating delicious chaat, watching the cricket and the kite-fliers until sundown. The grand colonial buildings along Esplanade seemed derelict but for the satellite dishes and laundry strung on the crumbling balconies. Children played in the rubbish-strewn garden of what had once been a graceful mansion; now families squatted ten to a room.



After a particularly hot day I intended to have a drink at a modest hotel near my own deathbox, and I was intrigued to find both a Hummer and an Audi R8 in the car-park outside. Less than ten feet away, whole families lived on the pavement in desperate squalor. I questioned the doorman. These vehicles belonged to the owner of the hotel - a very good man, he said. I asked, but surely this little hotel doesn't bring in enough money for him to buy cars like that? I mean, it's only Rs1500 a night! Yes, the doorman said, clamming up. Very good man. He was clearly some kind of serious gangster. So I went elsewhere for my beverage.

Leaving for the airport at 4am I found a ragged and emaciated junkie asleep in my taxi. "Look here, you!" I said, rapping on the window with my cane, "Clear off!" He awoke and glared at me with unseeing eyes, poured water over his head, urinated at the side of the road and then started the engine. The back seat was damp with his sweat. As we roared through the awakening city at a million miles an hour his eyes were closing and he seemed so out of it that I worried we would crash. I fed him cigarettes to keep him awake until we got to the airport.




***


Park Street cemetery in Calcutta is filled with the mausoleums of exotically-named British Empire-builders from the early colonial period. Among many others, Cornwallis Wilmot, Sackville Taylor and Streynsham Master all came out to dispense justice from horseback in their shirtsleeves and to make their fortunes, but ended up on Park Street before they were thirty. Their memorials, erected by 'brother officers' in 'sincere esteem' of their 'particular qualities', made fascinating reading. In the crushing heat I remember idly considering, with absurd envy, that it was probably quite cool in the stone crypts.



Amid the overgrowth I found the splendid monument to Charles 'Hindoo' Stuart, the main subject of William Dalrymple's excellent White Mughals. As the British Resident in early 19th-century Hyderabad, Stuart went native, as they used to say: he kept a harem in purdah and smoked a hookah and wore local dress and rode about in a palanquin. Most contemporaries thought him quite mad, but he clearly knew what he was about because he lived to the age of seventy - over twice the average age of the other tenants on Park Street.

The afternoon turned to evening among the tombstones. I was approached by a man so old that he could have just emerged from the ground. He wore a battered uniform and a superb moustache, and clutched a broom in his trembling hand. He opened his toothless mouth. "Good afternoon," he said in perfect received-pronunciation BBC English, "I ought to tell you that closing time is at five o'clock sharp; that is to say, in twenty minutes' time."

Amused, I asked if a bell might ring to alert visitors. "Bells? Oh no, there are no bells here," he replied, puzzled, "but were you to exit at the main gate by four-fifty, I would be most grateful. I should say, I always ask the guests to make their way out a little early, in order to shut punctually." He referred to 'guests' as if he was running a hotel. "You see," he went on, "it takes me ten minutes to dress." Dress for what? I didn't dare ask.

Now delighted, I presented myself at the gate at precisely 4:50pm in the hope that he might appear in white tie and a dinner jacket. Alas, it was just a check shirt and pressed slacks, but very elegant. "Thank you so much," he said, holding my hand, "Most considerate... as you're here, perhaps you would care to make an entry in the guest-book? It would really be most kind. This way, please."

He bustled me into a little room and sheafed the book open, licking his thumb every few pages. Shooting me a sidelong glance, he mentioned that "Many foreign guests also choose to offer a small donation - I feel it's really most kind of them." Very glad to contribute, I replied, grinning, and his wet thumb quickly folded my hundred rupees into his shirt pocket. "Most pleasant to meet you. Do have a lovely evening."

PHOTOS are HERE


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Thursday, May 26, 2011

BHUTAN


For many hundreds of years Bhutan seems to have been part of a greater Himalayan region encompassing today's Nepal and the northeastern Indian states of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. Feudal kings exercised elastic spheres of influence in the valleys, skirmishing with each other and with periodic invasions from Tibet. Buddhism was introduced to the Bhutanese area in the 9th century by an Indian apostle known as Guru Rinpoche, or 'Precious Master'.

In the 1640s the last of the Tibetan threats induced the birth of modern Bhutan as a hero named Zhabdrung emerged to rally the people to construct at strategic points a dozen enormous forts, or dzongs. The invasion was routed and after a few hundred years of largely clerical rule from the dzongs the adored monarchy emerged after some internal strife in the early 20th century.

So revered are Guru Rinpoche and the Zhabdrung that their images feature alongside that of the Buddha in every public temple and private shrine. Mahayana Buddhism is widely observed in the wider area (despite Chinese oppression in Tibet) but Bhutan is the world's only officially Mahayana state; folks further south are Theravada. Happily for the reader the distinction between the schools is eclipsed by my umbra of ignorance.



***

Bhutan's borders were closed for many years. Foreigners weren't admitted at all until 1974, and the airport was only completed ten years later. The absolute monarchy ceded power in 2006, on the accession of the current 31-year-old king, the fifth in the Wangchuck dynasty (and quite the heart-throb in Thailand). Since then the pace of change has been rapidly picking up. New roads and new towns are springing up in the west, new land borders are opening in the south, and there are plans to build two new airports in the east. Bhutan recently played host to both an Indo-Pak summit and an ASEAN congress, which saw foreign visits peak from 25,000 to 40,000 in 2010.

Despite all this development, the country is still extremely isolated. There's only one real road, switching eastwards from Paro through many valleys and ending abruptly in the wild central region. Tropical jungle steams in the lowlands of the Brahmaputra valley, tigers roam in the unexplored highlands, and the vista stretches up to the mountains where the highest peaks - each the supposed home of a demon tamed by the Buddha - all remain unclimbed by order of successive kings.

The small population of only 700,000 (in an area of 30,000 square kilometres) is, according to recent studies, the happiest in the world. By royal decree, Gross National Happiness is enshrined in the constitution as the most important measure by which governance is judged. I'd like to see the wording of the appropriate section of the Bhutanese census form, and send it to Enda Kenny for cabinet review.

Although they seemed pretty content, and extremely polite, I didn't actually ask any of the people how happy they were. As a convinced phrenologist I thought it better to use my calipers. After much head-measuring I found that the Bhutanese are an attractive and stoic people, below average height, with homogeneous Mongoloid features. Perhaps this also makes them happy. Further research is needed.



***

The dramatic landing at Paro on Druk - or Dragon - Airlines* was an exhilarating introduction to a landscape well suited as a backdrop for any fantasy epic. Above the clouds Himalayan peaks gleamed in the sunshine; below them the mountains suddenly walled on both sides. The plane followed the winding Paro valley making several heart-stopping low-altitude banks, the last only a few seconds before landing.

Stepping onto the tarmac the air was crisp and clean and dry and wonderfully cool after the crotch-rotting sweatfest of Bangkok and Burma. In fact it felt bloody cold, so after struggling with my backpack in the tiny terminal bathroom I put on trousers, socks and shoes for the first time in three months.

Passing through customs I was reminded that Bhutan is the only country in which tobacco is illegal - the laws were passed soon after the third king died of cancer in the 80s. The single cigarette in the pack in my pocket was detected and I was diverted to a booth to pay import duty. After some form-filling and multiple signatures I paid 40 Bhutanese ngultrum in tax - about a dollar, or twice the amount that the whole box had cost me in Yangon.

Onwards to immigration where I presented my credentials. Uninvited visitors must arrange a visa in advance and prepay the daily government fee of US$200 through an approved local travel agent. It's also currently required to fly either in or out of Bhutan on the expensive national airline. So the costs rack up pretty quick before you even set foot in the country.

To be fair the daily charge is all-inclusive and once admitted you only pay for souvenirs and booze. The hotels were pretty nice, the food was good and plentiful, and you also get a guide, a driver and a comfortable vehicle. The tour company prepared the itinerary based on my specified preferences and to a certain extent it's flexible on a daily basis. But for an traveller accustomed to making his own decisions and choosing his own route this prescriptive shepherding quickly becomes a bit of a drag.


* Drake is an old English word for Dragon. I wonder if this is a coincidence.

***

I was met outside the airport by my guide, Rinchen, a serious 28-year-old from the capital Thimphu. Like all working citizens and schoolchildren he was wearing the national dress, the kirin, which is like a black or brown dressing gown with long white cuffs, hitched up and belted at knee height, leaving a large pouch at the stomach used as a kind of manbag. This is worn with knee-high socks and smart leather shoes. Women wear a longer gown called a goh under a short jacket.

Rinchen gave me a formal welcome and a white scarf, before introducing me to my driver Kile and immediately whisking me away to begin the itinerary in our brand-new Toyota 4x4. Our first stop was at a clothing store where I bought a sweatshirt. Twenty minutes later I was watching Rinchen prostrate himself before the altar in the temple of Paro dzong. This scene would be repeated five more times in five more dzongs, after which he would stand up, clear his throat and deliver a largely identical lecture on Bhutanese culture and religion.

He had acceptable English which he seemed to have learned from teenagers in Dublin 4. That is to say, each of his sentences contained the word 'like' at least twice. I would ask - who is this statue? "Out here, like, we have a statue of Guru Rinpoche, like. And like the thing about Guru Rinpoche is that he manifests in eight ways, like. And like he came here from India, like, and brought with him the Buddhist religion"

Rinchen tried his hardest to make me feel at ease, although my comfort levels were not increased by his rapid disclosure that a) his sister recently died of stomach cancer; b) he himself experienced stomach pains; c) his wife was heavily pregnant and d) his infant daughter was in the hospital with a skin infection. He also mentioned that toast made him nauseous, which really made me feel sorry for him.

He in turn pitied me for going to India, which he hated; he couldn't understand why I would want to visit even once, let alone four times. Very big, very dirty, very many people, dangerous people, don't trust any of them, and you get "shooting diarrhoea." But he had only been to India for a weekend trip to Guwahati to pick up some tourists. But why do you like India, like? he persisted. I didn't really have an answer that he would understand. He was too conservative and too insular in his views. But this didn't stop him from changing into leather trousers and gelling his hair in the evening.

With me he was also a little overly formal which made things awkward. I guess it's just luck which guide you get. I met some who were thundering fun compared to poor Rinchen. In an attempt to liven things up on our long drives he often began telling jokes that were so execrable that I was obliged to put on headphones and look out the window ("what's brown and sticky?") I felt like an exchange student being shown around by a painfully polite host family who secretly couldn't wait for me to leave.



***

So I embarked on a journey that saw me in the capital Thimphu for two nights, Phobjika valley for a night, Gangtey valley for a night, and then Paro valley for two nights - about half-way into the centre of the country, and back out again. There's no real point in me going through these destinations day-by-day, as they were all rather similar. But it's a beautiful and serene country, there's no doubt about that.

As we moved eastward and gained altitude the landscapes became more breathtaking. The valleys began to narrow and the hills receded into the hazy blue distance one behind the other like shades on a Dulux palette. At every turn I my eyes caught the sun glinting off the stepped paddy fields carved into the contours of the slopes far below; from the peaks high above, far beyond the reach of piped water or electricity, monasteries peered down, admonishing me for my self-indulgence.

Along the road streams gushed from the forest and were channelled into small whitewashed shrines where their gurgling flow turned prayer wheels day and night. Passersby stopped and drank the ice-cold water and, more prosaically, used it to wash their cars. Nearby hollows in the overhanging rock were carpeted with tiny clay stupas deposited by generations of the faithful.

The flora and fauna changed visibly as the altitude increased. The trees turned evergreen, became sparser, and were suddenly swathed in long sheets of ghostly lichen. Yaks appeared and snorted angrily about. Eagles whirled and soared beside the road and dived out of sight. Above 3000 metres the forest opened onto wide fens of bogland thick with dwarf bamboo, reminding me strongly of the Wicklow 'mountains'.



We would drive for a few hours along these winding roads and then stop for tea and biscuits, or lunch, or for the night, in one of the approved tourist stops - all dim and silent and filled with heavy wooden furniture. In the centre of the room a wood-fired furnace was always blazing, often surrounded by skinny cats twisting in the warmth.

The food was average. Mostly toned-down Indian ishtyle, with some concessions to western tastes such as fried potatoes, boiled vegetables and porridge; it was all rather bland except for the shockingly hot national dish of green chillies in melted paneer. The meat was not great quality - although the Bhutanese eat a lot of it, they're too pious to do the dirty work, so they import Indian butchers.

My favourite food was something that seemed to be a fern, suspiciously delicious, and also served in cheese. "Yes! Fern!" roared the beaming chef. What kind of fern? "Er... forest fern!" Like the local mushrooms they're collected from the wild and are therefore wholly organic. I also enjoyed the fruit, particularly the apples. The apple juice in Bhutan is dynamite.



***

A diversion on dzongs and temples.



A dzong is a massive fort with sloping whitewashed stone walls and carved and painted wooden battlements enclosing a large keep of six or eight stories. Inside the main entrance there's a courtyard lined with administrative offices, and past the keep there's another courtyard surrounded by religious offices and temples - which are surprisingly small for the size of the dzong.



I visited six dzongs in six dzays. Some of them were bigger than others. Some were on hilltops; others at the confluence of rivers. One of them was ruined, and four of them had been ruthlessly restored so much as to seem newly constructed. Only one - Wangdu Phodrang dzong - was unrestored, and therefore was by far the most atmospheric and memorable. The whitewash was crumbling, the courtyard flagstones were broken, the keep was latticed with cracks from many earthquakes, and the wooden steps were worn shiny from hundreds of years of softly padding monks.



On entering a Bhutanese temple the first thing that hit me was always the size; the actual sanctum is always very small and dark in comparison with the size of the enclosing structure, especially if it's in a dzong. The next most striking feature is the smell, thick with years of incense and old wood, with a rancid hint from the numerous butter lamps (burning imported Indian ghee). Then there's the urgent tone of bells struck by giant spinning prayer wheels by the entrance, and the low murmur of mantras emanating from the elderly attendees as they rock back and forth.

The main focus in every temple is a massive golden statue of a serene double-chinned seated Buddha, ming-like Guru Rinpoche or grey-bearded Zhabdrung. Sometimes one figure takes precedence; sometimes all three are equally sized. Sometimes they are accompanied by past and future Buddhas, sometimes by the consorts of the guru, himself represented in up to eight manifestations. Hundreds of smaller statues are often encased in glass cabinets or in wall niches.

The altars are cluttered with religious paraphernalia: sacred statues; golden bells; silver cups; wooden boxes; even a few human skulls, halved, painted and used as vessels for holy water, although this practice is now officially illegal. All surfaces are scattered with offerings of money - retained by the lamas - and fruits, vegetables, biscuits and soft drinks - distributed to the faithful at regular intervals.

Every inch of the interior is richly decorated. The impact is sometimes overwhelming. Pillars and ceiling beams intricately carved and gilded in dizzying patterns. Walls vividly painted with scenes of mountain idylls and grotesque manifestations of gods and demons - often sporting giant phalluses. Some frescoes are still surprisingly bright having been covered for hundreds of years. Others are bright because they were painted last year. In fact several of the most splendid temples I visited - including the famous Tiger's Nest - have been completely rebuilt very recently which, like the widespread heavy renovation, deadens the impact considerably.

***

During my trip I mostly just took it easy and surrendered to the itinerary. But a few incidents bear reporting.

In Phobjika valley I walked through quaint fields to a temple of fertility in which all the monks except the lama were children. This was an interesting experience. The kids - and they were really little kids - sat swathed in their robes, learning and chanting and dozing in a room adjacent to the temple. They seemed nonplussed by my fumbling lumbering presence as I tried and failed to take a decent photo without a flash.

While Rinchen was again prostrating himself inside the temple, the lama surprised me by reaching behind the altar and producing an enormous black phallus ringed with silver. He waved it around for a few moments with great solemnity while making low incantations. Then he beckoned and anointed me with this beast, only laying it aside to splash my face with holy water from a silver coffeepot. And so I was blessed with a dildo in a temple devoted to a divine madman catering for childless women. I don't know whether this is ironic or not but it was hard not to laugh.

***

In Gangeng I insisted on doing some trekking. However, Rinchen's idea of a trek was an hour and a half's walk downhill - through admittedly lovely forest - to a wildlife sanctuary from which all the wildlife had flown away to Tibet several weeks previously, leaving one solitary sick and dying black-necked crane behind. Rinchen pointed excitedly, There! There! I could see nothing, and I wasn't particularly interested in black-necked cranes anyway. But he insisted that we go to the visitors' centre and look at the poor lonely bird through a telescope. It looked like it wanted to die.

***

In Paro I ran out of cigarettes and consequently became light-headed and delirious. Cursed fags! If only they weren't so delicious. I had read in the Bhutan Times that an elderly monk had recently been sentenced to three years' imprisonment for smuggling into the country twenty packets of chewing tobacco, and the readers' letters were full of outrage at the severity of the sentence.

I singled out a shop attended by a middle-aged matronly woman - often an easy touch, I've found - and I sidled up to try my luck. First I softened her up by buying a bunch of stuff I didn't really need, and then I gave her my lost-schoolboy look and cocked my head discreetly at her sign "Sale of tobacco products strictly prohibited." Bingo! She mimed that the price was a hundred ngultrum - 500% profit! Stakes were high in this game. We made the exchange in a wonderful back-handed identical-suitcase manoeuvre, and I walked away whistling, no longer a lost schoolboy but a naughty one.

***

I can barely remember the beautiful scenery on the 45-minute climb to the famous Tiger's Nest monastery in Paro Valley. This is because I was absolutely pouring with sweat and my heart was hammering so hard I felt that my neck might burst. At several points I was convinced I would perish on the hillside. I It would be nice to blame the altitude for this but I'm sure my absolute lack of fitness and chronic smoking habit were the real causes. Certainly, Rinchen stepped lightly up the trail, hands clasped behind his back, with never a bead of sweat on his furrowed brow.



The monastery itself was founded on a spot to which the Guru Rinpoche is supposed to have ridden a flying tiger in order to meditate for three months. Despite this preposterous claptrap, it's still an awesome sight, clinging to the sheer mountainside 3900m above sea level alongside a waterfall strung with prayer flags. Inside the gate I surrendered all my gadgets to the curious guards - no photos allowed, unfortunately. But that day I was the first tourist to make the ascent and therefore had the place to myself.

On descending we passed groups of flagging pensioners and pods of plump Indian families. How much further? they panted breathlessly. Oh, at least another hour! I took pleasure in replying. At one point I heard tinny music and I wondered who would spoil the occasion by listening to their phone as Asian kids tend to do at all times. Then I realised it was my own iPod in my pocket. Therefore I was probably the first person to broadcast Aretha Franklin in the Paro Valley.

***

All buildings in Bhutan are required by law to be similarly constructed. None can be more than five stories above ground, and all must have long overhanging eaves and triptych windows. Even the airport looks like a series of extravagant Swiss chalets, and the king's palace is a modest affair whose roof slats are held in place by rocks. Livestock populate the ground floor of a traditional home, providing a certain amount of warmth for the humans on the first floor, below an open attic stuffed with junk, as are all attics throughout the world.



***

One rather interesting aspect of Bhutanese culture is their, ahem, worship of the phallus. Like the ubiquitous Hindu shivalingam, the Buddhist stupa is phallic in its derivation (or so I'm told). But these Bhutanese images are less representative symbols than actual graphic pictures of giant penises, entwined with billowing flags, featuring a big pair of hairy testicles and a jet of semen. Sometimes they're also grasped by an opportunistic hand. And they're everywhere - most often painted in symmetrical pairs alongside the doorways of family homes.


***

You encounter a different class of backpacker in Bhutan. I met only one other single male traveller around my own age. He held a PhD in theoretical physics from Cambridge, where he lectured, and had published both a novel and a book of poetry, but was was quitting penurious academia to become an exchange trader in the City. These salient achievements made me feel rather like a stupid oafish boy. But at least I succeeded in being younger than he. Together we did our best to bring down the average age of the tourist in Bhutan from the late 50s.

****

Many Indians take as part of their conventional wisdom the view that India's traditional moral values are better than those of the west. Many Bhutanese naturally assume that their values are superior to those of the Indians - and the Chinese, and the West also for that matter. In fact I would venture to say that the Bhutanese have a superiority complex. Those who know me well could reasonably suggest that I might feel quite at home in such a place. But this was not the case.

The government says the high-cost tourist policy is in place to discourage the influence of what have been called "the less attractive aspects of global culture... the break-up of families, disrespect of elders, excessive consumerism, abandonment of religious values and worship of money."** This conservative and devout country doesn't want to become just another stop on the Asian banana-pancake backpacker circuit, awash with hedonistic dope-smoking westerners infecting the Bhutanese youth with liberal secular individualism.

But this influence is creeping through the valleys whether the king wills it or not. I was told that the Bhutanese youth take their cultural cues from Korea, and there were certainly plenty of spiky haircuts and crazy cutesy accessories on display. There are fast internet cafes everywhere, and we all know what happens then. Yes: Bhutanese kids come home from school, ditch their skirts for jeans (more's the pity) and spend the evenings playing Counterstrike. Traditional values, superior or otherwise, have taken a headshot and won't respawn.

** Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India

PHOTOS are HERE

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Sunday, April 17, 2011

MYANMAR

"Improper practice of democracy often leads to anarchic phenomena.

The improper practice of democracy often leads to anarchic phenomena. Thus, democracy requires stability and peace in the country, knowledgeable and mature citizens and a reasonable degree of wealth and prosperity on the part of the nation and the people. So, the Armed Forces has laid down the 12 objectives and the government, the people and the Armed Forces are building sound foundations in unity, while the Seven-step Roadmap has been laid down and the transition to a new order and a new system is being undertaken."


- Senior General Than Shwe, Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council, Commander-in-Chief of Defence Services (from speech delivered at the parade of 65th Anniversary Armed Forces Day)

The New Light of Myanmar (estd 1914); 7th Waning of Tabaung 1372 ME (Saturday 26 March 2011). Front-page banner quote.

***

The 12 Objectives (also from The New Light of Myanmar)

Four political objectives:

- Stability of the State, community peace and tranquility, prevalence of law and order
- National reconsolidation
- Emergence of a new enduring State Constitution
- Building a new modern developed nation in accord with the new State Constitution

Four economic objectives:

- Development of agriculture as the base and all-round development of other sectors of the economy as well
- Proper evolution of the market-oriented economic system
- Development of the economy inviting participation in terms of technical know-how and investments from sources inside the country and abroad
- The initiative to shape the national economy must be kept in the hands of the State and the national peoples

Four social objectives:

- Uplift of the morale and morality of the entire nation
- Uplift of national prestige and integrity and preservation and safeguarding of cultural heritage and national character
- Uplift of dynamism of patriotic spirit
- Uplift of health, fitness and education standards of the entire nation

People's Desire

- We favour peace and stability
- We favour development
- We oppose unrest and violence
- Wipe out those inciting unrest and violence (!)

Other notes:

- Anarchy begets anarchy, not democracy
- Riots beget riots, not democracy

- VOA (Voice of America), BBC sowing hatred among the people
- Do not allow ourselves to be swayed by killer broadcasts designed to cause troubles

***

History lesson

The population of Myanmar comprises several ethnic groups, the largest of which are the the eastern Shan, the southern Mon and the central majority Bamar, after whom the country has been named, rising to prominence in the 11th century and building thousands of Buddhist temples during their 200-year reign. Weakened by a failure to centralise and consolidate power and by constant expensive wars with their old enemy, the Siamese, the power of the Bamar kings was finally shattered when Kublai Khan invaded. There followed smaller Mon and Shan kingdoms, until the Bamar Empire emerged again in the 16th century and triumphantly sacked the Siam capital at Ayuthaya. Again, though, the royal succession faltered through internecine strife and over-ambitious expansionism, and the country became a part of British India in 1885 after the third Anglo-Burmese War.

The rise of nationalism following WWI didn't skip Burma, and the 20s saw several large-scale protests against colonial rule. Often led by monks (who were often handed lengthy prison sentences), these prompted some concessions from the British, but it was the 26-year-old Aung San's establishment in 1941 of the Burmese National Army - and its subsequent growth and resistance to the Japanese occupation - which gave him the leverage to negotiate successfully for full independence from 1947. This achievement resulted in lasting national adoration, but later that year he was assassinated by political rivals, leaving behind his two-year-old daughter Aung San Suu Kyi - and a country which promptly collapsed into anarchy.

The main power struggle was between the secessionist communists, supported by China, and the US-funded Kuomintang allied with other anti-communist and ethnic militias, who were all forced to retreat after Mao Tse-Tung's victory. After almost surrendering, the Burmese government managed to regain control in the 1950s and expelled all foreign 'aid', but constant political squabbling led first to the voluntary handover of power in 1958 and then its forced assumption in 1962 by the armed forces, or Tatmadaw. This move was welcomed by a population grown tired of lawlessness and the Tatmadaw initially made good progress, but its announcement that the country would "march towards Socialism the Burmese way" was rapidly followed by widespread nationalisation, massive inflation and demonetisation, riots and massacres, and the expulsion of Indian and Chinese minorities.

Marching in this particular direction continued until the massive student-led protests in 1988 when thousands were massacred. The resulting Western sanctions resulted in a closer relationship between Myanmar and its neighbours, particularly China, but also India and Thailand. Nonetheless, the obvious impending collapse of Communism prompted the junta to about face and abandon socialism for the free market in most industries. After this popular change, and huge investment in public infrastructure, the generals felt they had won public support and so finally allowed elections in which they lost heavily to Aung San Suu Kyi's opposition. The response was to block the parliament from taking office, and then arresting, imprisoning or exiling its leaders. Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest again and remained there, with only brief periods of freedom attended by bloodshed, until January of this year.

***

Than Shwe, the junta's current leading general, is a flabby old chap whose meagre chest is adorned with more medals than it can reasonably bear. He looks out from the front page of the New Light of Myanmar newspaper in three-quarter profile, gazing implacably along the Seven-step Roadmap towards a new order and a new system, and impetuously ignoring the population whose welfare he is supposed to be advancing. His quote above is, of course, profoundly derogatory to the Myanmar people and dismissive of their many qualities, and is merely the latest of many hundreds of vapid statements issued over the years in an entirely transparent attempt to legitimise the regime's retention of power while it and its cronies amass enormous personal wealth.

This they do through two main channels: the exploitation of the country's huge commodity reserves - mainly oil, teak and precious stones - through 'shared partnerships' and 'joint enterprises'; and the exploitation of its people - not by extermination like the Khmer Rouge, but by economic warfare. The largely uneducated Tatmadaw is annihilating the civilian middle classes by steadily increasing taxes, fees and licence charges on desirable goods, services and trades - making them affordable to a dwindling minority which, by obtaining them, become more subject to state control. Thus, to obtain General Than's "reasonable degree of wealth and prosperity," people are forced to stick their heads up, be noticed, and thereby get relieved of more wealth.

For example: I am told - and my experience would seem to confirm - that less than 2% of the population own a car, with prices for even fifteen-year old Japanese imports running at over $10,000. And despite having the largest oil reserves in south-east Asia, a litre of petrol now costs roughly $1.20 - equivalent in value to the highest-denomination bank note - having increased exponentially in 2007 (sparking further monk-led protests). Well before dawn, queues of hundreds of vehicles queue form at the few stations where fuel is available. Unlike in other Asian countries the rural population do not flock to the cities because employment is unavailable and costs are high, so the country remains largely agrarian and the majority subsist on $3 a day. At the other end of the scale, the wedding of Than Shwe's daughter in 2006 was estimated to cost the country $50 million - about a dollar per citizen.

In recent years the State Peace and Development Council, as the generals call themselves, has been following its usual strategy of appeasement by the extension of minor liberties while accelerating its own enrichment programme. After cyclone Nargis killed 140,000 people in 2008, the junta refused external aid from most countries but embraced that from Beijing, soon realising that permitting cheap imports would allow the imposition of additional taxes on the elite who distribute them and also on the masses who consume them. The price of an imported Chinese scooter has since fallen by 100% to $400 and sim cards - initially over $600 - have plummeted to about $25. Clothing and white goods are also becoming cheaper, I am told. But prices are rising for subsequent necessities such as detergent and the sporadic petrol and electricity supplies. A similar process took place in Vietnam during the last decade. If people toil for years and finally attain relatively cheap commodities, they feel a sense of achievement and progress but are in reality even worse off compared with the privileged class who, during those same years, have progressed far further, cruising in Range Rovers to gaudy whitewashed mansions in the leafy suburbs. It's easy to say that this is just capitalism at work, but in contrast to equally corrupt yet free-market democratic India, there is no middle ground, and the gap between rich and poor is widening.

***

My actual trip

Descending into Yangon along the Ayeyarwady delta, the hazy landscape slowly resolved into a pancake-flat view of brown snaking rivers flanked by bright green paddy fields glinting in the sun. Small towns dotted the landscape, each of them surrounding a pagoda shining in white or gold. I was stamped and admitted to the country with the minimum of hassle. No questions from immigration, and a dismissive wave from customs. My bag could have been filled with revolutionary, pornographic and narcotic paraphernalia. Stepping out of the terminal into intense heat and humidity, I began perspiring violently. As no public transport goes to the airport, I boarded an ancient private bus for the bumpy 45-minute trip through the city to my guesthouse. Looking out the window I was immediately reminded of India. The streets, edged with sand and thronged with roaring trucks and parping motorbikes, are lined with rows of crumbling multi-storey poured-concrete blocks filled with tiny enterprises below tiny apartments whose balconies are strung with drying laundry.

Bamboo stalls line the pathways: street food, clothing stands, tea shops where men sit reading newspapers cross-legged on tiny plastic chairs. Women in cane hats squat behind huge piles of vegetables or fish swarming with flies. Seven-year-old monks and seventy-year-old nuns pass by, flicking their purple and pink robes over their shoulders, clutching an alms bowl to collect food, or an umbrella to shade their shaven heads. And everywhere the jungle seems to be trying to retake the urban landscape. Plants of all kinds spring from the many cracks in paving and masonry. Giant palm trees recede into the distance. The damp aroma from all this vegetation, mixed with that from diesel and kerosene fumes, frying food, human waste, disinfectant, incense, and minty paan spat onto the ground in great bloodstains, all combine to enrich every experience with a feeling of fecundity, of the constant cycle of growth and decay. Things here are no longer built to last but seem rather to be built for a very temporary utility.

On my first excursion from my hotel I hadn't gone twenty minutes down the road when I was met on the street by a young monk who asked me most courteously if I wouldn't mind attending his English class. So he guided me up the shabby staircase of one of the crumbling buildings to the fourth floor and into a room in which the paint peeled off the walls in a pattern reminiscent of a horrible skin disease. I was introduced to the teacher - a hilarious jovial skinny long-haired bejewelled hippy named Uma, who waved his arms a lot and spoke a wonderful English learned almost exclusively from a book of proverbs translated into Bamar. "There's one born every minute!" he would say when his students made a mistake, and "pearls before swine," after I said something that they didn't understand.

I sat in the centre and they plied me with questions. "Allow me to ask you something, and please be quite frank." Did I have my own language? How large is my country? When did it achieve independence? How many times have I been to London? My father's and mother's professions? What do I think of the Myanmar people? What do I do for recreation? What religion do I follow? How many countries have I visited? Is it true that there are very many prostitutes in Thailand? They were all in their early twenties, full of smiles and laughs and curiosity. None of them had ever left the country. They were mostly boys, ad about half were monks, but there were a few girls who had I offered might well have married me on the spot.

One of these was much celebrated because she had just got a permit, produced and passed around with pride, to work as a nurse in Singapore earning $450 a month - three to four times the GNP per capita. There were some guys of Chinese descent and one of Indian extraction who offered me a cheroot. Soon I was sitting back at my ease smoking freely and regaling the class with stories of my life, my travels and my weighty thoughts. The teacher took some photos which I was later enraged to discover were ruined by his disabling the auto-focus. Hunger eventually forced me back out onto the street after two hours. I walked on to the Sule Paya, the temple in the heart of the city around which the British numbered grid street system is laid. So after an interesting biryani at the lively night market I wandered back to my hotel on the corner of 56th and Panzungaung, getting lost several times in the darkness and finally being set to rights by a stern policeman.

Drinking beers at the hostel I met one of those fascinating people you only meet when travelling. Bammer, or Bamboo, is a sixty-something Californian who left the States to dodge the draft back in 1963 and hasn't been back in 47 years. Here's a guy who's been everywhere, and done everything, long before there were guide books and banana pancakes and ubiquitous internet. He'd followed the entire hippy trail through Afghanistan and the Karakoram highway before it became fashionable; he'd killed a man in the Amazon who was going to rape his wife. He was entirely believable. But the most important thing about him was that he sounded like the Dude, and looked like the Stranger. And if you don't know what I mean, then watch The Big Lebowski. He sat there at 11pm behind his shades and his bushy grey moustache, laughing freely and tossing his long hair, totally at ease and at peace. I overheard him saying to a French girl: "Yeah, I dig France, man. Beaches are nice. I remember I got a call from my brother, you know? And I was like, What?! Mom's sold the beach house?! - Now I can never go back, man!" I wanted to tell him to keep his gold-brickin' ass out of my beach community, but I didn't know if anyone there would get the reference.

***

I slept late on my second day in Yangon to escape the roaring heat. Eventually resolved to walk the entire 10km to the jewel of the nation, the Shwedagon Paya - a 1500-year-old temple complex surrounding an enormous stupa embossed with sixteen tons of gold and surmounted by a sixteen-carat diamond. Walking towards the city centre I passed by the Muslim quarter where rotund orange-bearded men and skinny unsmiling boys emerged from a mosque onto the street. Here the stalls sold heavy fried Indian foods and sweets. The Muslims seemed to be mechanics and metalworkers, and I passed several roadside smiths with ship anchors parked incongruously outside next to huge piled lengths of chain.

Wandering freely, I got lost several times amid the identical buildings and the absence of street signs outside of downtown. Heading onwards I soon realised that Shwedagon Paya Road was eerily empty of pedestrian traffic because it was four miles long and largely devoid of shade. The heat at 2pm was outrageously violent, yet on I sweated, grateful for the bag of iced watermelon I had bought. On and on, past the endless People's Park - which is closed to the public - I began to flag a little, never having perspired more outside of a sauna. Once the Paya's gleaming zedi, or central stupa, loomed in the distance, I got a second wind. After three hours walking I finally arrived, shrugged off the taxi drivers, the food stall owners and the pierced kids, checked my shoes to a flirtatious young woman, and entered.

I was suddenly alone on a long flight of wide marble steps, blessedly shaded by a high canopy supported by richly carved pillars. Bells rang in the distance and the air was scented with incense. Ascending slowly towards the glint of gold I began to feel a sense of timeless majesty. But suddenly I became aware of a stronger sense and the spell was broken by a visit to a toilet frequented by far more vicious mosquitoes than pious Buddhists. Soon I got back into the groove and reached the top of the staircase where I was relieved of my $5 entry fee, most of which goes to the generals. Duly stamped and stickered I entered the courtyard where the flagstones hot to the touch for my delicate feet.

Walking around the giant golden stupa in the requisite clockwise direction, lots of Burmese tourists were chattering. Monks, monks everywhere, tiny ones running and ancient ones hobbling. Hello! said the little kids. I sprawled in a shady spot and watched the Paya change from shining yellow to burnt orange to blood red as the sun set, which was pretty unforgettable. But the timelessness of the scene was kind of spoiled when the power was turned on and multicoloured LED halos began to twinkle behind the head of every visible Buddha statue; despite trying hard to maintain my sense of awe, I was reminded of a Japanese pachinko hall. I would very much like to have visited the Paya before the advent of electricity.

I needed to pay for my hot-air balloon flight in Bagan, my next destination, so the following day I took a cab out their office in the city's fanciest hotel where rooms started at US$400. The lobby was full of elderly continental European and north-east Asian coach-group tourists and in the conference hall preparations were being made for a fashion show. Having achieved my task I went across the street to Inwa Lake, its shores lined with the mansions of the rich. Among these was Aung San Suu Kyi's house, which stood out against the rest by virtue of its colonial architecture and its security cordon. Walking towards it I was surprised to find no barricades, but then remembered that Suu Kyi was released from house arrest earlier this year. So I went up to her gateway and peered in. Didn't look like anyone was home. I sat around for a while hoping to be invited in, and the passersby smiled. But there was nothing doing so I wandered off down the shady winding streets of the exclusive suburbs. Occasionally as the road climbed I caught a glimpse of the spires of the Shwedagon Paya, so I was never in danger of getting lost. After several miles I came upon a wonderfully peaceful nunnery layered along a hillside where lilies floated in reflecting pools and graceful fruit trees swayed in the warm breeze. I sat on a stone and drank in the scene. Groups of young nuns in their pink robes glanced back at me and dissolved in giggles, clutching at each others' arms.

Back in the city I bought some papaya and strolled along ducking in and out of shops and laneways, feeling pretty pleased with myself. I had some tea with another local English teacher who was pleased to inform me that "the Lady is free!" He wrote out my name in Bamar script and arranged to meet me later dinner and beers in Chinatown. Sitting for a while on a tiny pink stool drinking sweet instant coffee from a roadside stall, I noticed a young fireman at the next table and complimented him on his bright yellow boots. Made in China, he said, and came to sit with me. He was killing time before his shift, which began in three hours. I wondered why he would sit around in the sun for so long in full uniform, but it soon became clear that it was out of pride. He had a prestigious and stable job in a city where most of the other guys his age pulled rickshaws, sold paan, or squatted around on the street all day. His father and brother were both firemen and his mother owned the stall at which we sat; she smiled a matronly smile at me. Apparently there are three or four big fires every week in Yangon, and after six months he would be transferred to a rural station. Soon he disappeared and I went off to Chinatown where I couldn't find the teacher. Opposite a brightly lit temple strung with paper lanterns I sat at a stall and ate a huge steaming bowl of delicious Shan noodle soup, watching the street life go past.

***

Unique in South-east Asia, people in Myanmar still wear their traditional dress. The longyi, pronounced lonnjee, is a wide cylinder of cloth wrapped around the lower body and gathered at the front, where the knot is folded into the waistline. Although full-length it can be hitched to various heights as required by tucking the surplus material into the folds at the back. I did not try one, but other travelers I met swore by its utility and practicality - if they were able to keep it from falling down. In addition to wearing the longyi, the women here, and some of the younger boys, cake their faces to various depths with thannakha, a yellow paste of the powdered wood of a sandalwood-like tree; supposedly, it acts as both a sunblock and a moisturiser.

I had heard Myanmar described as "the best of India meets the best of Thailand" and to an extent that's true. The street scenes are very similar to India - lots of street life taking place around stalls and bamboo huts arranged outside hideous peeling poured-concrete buildings. The concrete paving slabs are so shattered and uneven that they threaten at every second step to tip you into a stinking drain. In fact public infrastructure in general is deplorable, except surrounding wealthy enclaves. The roads are pitted and crumbling, while those highways in a decent condition are empty. Street lighting is urban areas is largely jacked from the nearest main circuit by the local shop-owners. Power cuts are frequent, caused by mild breezes or the most minor electrical storm. Trains can run up to 12 hours late and are also affected by mild weather.

The smell is also reminiscent of India - aromas of all sorts of foods from the street stalls, and the kerosene fumes of their stoves, and the diesel fumes from the traffic, and wafts of incense, and minty paan juice spat out in great bloody gouts, and disinfectant, and human waste. But I was surprised to find that the food in Myanmar was not to my liking. Perhaps I had bad luck, but every local Bamar dish I sampled was horribly sour - sour pickled cabbage; sour pickled mushrooms; sour tomato curry; sour fish soup. The Shan - or Thai/Chinese food, on the other hand, is absolutely delicious.

Advertising is uniquely revealing about any place, and here again Myanmar is like India. The ads are split in their target demographic. One half of the market is urged with strong-man imagery to buy the best cement, steel rods, sprockets, ball bearings, three-stroke engines, generators and lighting fixtures, while the other half is tempted by huge sun-faded billboards depicting plump women adorned with vulgar jewellery being fawned over by paunchy gents in open-necked shirts sporting bouffant hairdos. Some ads transcend boundaries. Wholesome families, including the mother-in-law, watch TV while drinking instant Rich and Creamy instant tea or coffee sachets; popular boy bands are seen langorously drinking Royal and Grand whisky, and smoking Red Ruby and Blue Diamond cigarettes. Western caffeine, nicotine and alcohol products are produced here in 'joint partnerships' and marketed under various brands by evil corporations such as Nestle, Tiger and Rothmans.

***

Next day took a taxi to Yangon station which is like a little town where all the streets are identical and all the traffic is buses; a low circle in the Inferno, populated entirely by tough kids with multiple piercings who hustle travelers into the nearest place serving alcohol. I had booked a night bus to Bagan and was curious to see if the contraption in which I eventually travelled would bear any resemblance to the gleaming luxury vehicle depicted on my ticket. My heart sank when we arrived at the oldest most banjaxed bus I've ever seen. No windows and fixed hard seats. But then, gloria, we were gestured to the adjacent bus which, although it didn't have four-poster beds and full-body massages, did at least have cushioning. However the seats were designed for persons not exceeding five feet in height and soon I found that reclining mine to an obtuse angle resulted in a rapid loss of circulation to my feet. Further, the slightest bodily movement resulted in my shins coming into abrupt contact with one of the various steel bars welded invisibly below, which I can only assume were installed by design out of sheer malice. In addition, the window pane beside my head was loose and rattled violently. Finally, the misanthropic driver blared truly diabolical music and interminable movies long, long into the night. The road was too bumpy to read and the cryogenic air conditioning precluded sleep, so I passed the time by twitching with rage. Originally seated beside an ample woman who burned with shame at rubbing up against a single foreign male, I got some relief when she exchanged seats with a wide-eyed eight-year-old who I could push around with impunity, but who got his revenge by sleeping soundly through the whole trip. But at least I had a little more space to twitch.

The journey was broken only at a gaudy truck-stop that rose out of the darkness like Las Vegas, offering wholesome food and opportunities for prayer rather than gambling and whoring. Mercifully we arrived at our destination of Nyaung U several hours earlier than advertised and took a horse and cart through the dark sandy streets to our guest house where we slept the sleep of the righteous. Awakening early afternoon we took a stroll in the smothering heat. I was in search of the Ayeyarwady, or Irrawaddy - one of the great rivers of Asia, and one I'd always wanted to see. We reached its banks after a pleasant but sweaty walk through the village of Wykti-In, or Giant Pig, named after a malevolent local beast slain by an heroic king; history doesn't recall if he enjoyed the rashers.

Like many places in Myanmar Bagan used to be the national capital. Now it's not even a city, but a plain of 20 square kilometres below a lazy bend of the Ayeyarwady about 300km north of Yangon. During its heyday in the 13th century its monarchs and richer citizens built over 4000 private temples and stupas in a bid to outdo each other and their predecessors; 2500 remain after an earthquake in 1975. For the uninitiated, the correct archaeological term for this number of temples is a 'shitload'. They are reminiscent of the temples at Angkor in Cambodia, except these are of brick instead of stone, and less magnificent in scale and decoration, but no less impressive for all that. Most of them are relatively small - simple stupas and larger shrines - but the true payas are enormous and beautifully symmetrical structures, rising hundreds of feet in tapered tiers to elegant pinched domes surrounded by smaller pinnacles in multiples of four, each temple enclosing a vaulted gallery housing single or quadruple altars beneath a towering Buddha statue. There are about a dozen of these larger temples scattered throughout the plain and their panorama is truly stunning, especially at sunset or sunrise.

Later we took another horse-and-cart ride to some minor temples but it was soon cut short by a minor storm that appeared out of nowhere from the north side of the river, gritting my eyes and throat and sending the locals running to secure their stalls and boats. We did visit one paya whose gatekeeper was a jovial plump red-toothed young man with two pet squirrels in his shirt pocket. He told us that Myanmar's most famous band, Iron Cross, were playing a gig in Nyaung U on April 1 - sadly too long a time to stick around in Bagan. Subsequently I saw many young guys with Iron Cross T-shirts in Mandalay and Yangon. In fact, aside from saccharine girl-pop, a majority of Myanmar's domestic music (judging from the band names alone; unfortunately I did not actually hear any of it) seems to be hard metal, complete with fascist icons. Guys ride their motorbikes in German WWII infantry helmets, or wear T-shirts emblazoned with the eagle or swastika. Hitler adopted a mirror image of the Buddhist swastika for his own ends; and although the Jews were driven out of Myanmar during the 1960s along with other minorities, I don't believe the people embrace the significance of this fascist imagery, unless perhaps in unlikely tacit support for their own government.

The next day I and my companion Charlotte rented bicycles and set off on a grand tour of Bagan, a 15km loop along the river and back to Nyaung U. It was really pleasant to bike around the temples in the coolness of the morning, but we soon grew weary of the gatekeepers touting their 'sand-paintings' and other wares. Stopped for lunch in New Bagan, whose residents were 'encouraged' to leave Old Bagan in 1990, ostensibly to facilitate archaeology but really to make room for expensive hotels. Some kids immediately appeared and shepherded us to the most expensive restaurant in town. They were surprised when we eschewed it in favour of a small place serving local dishes which we pointed out with their help, accompanied by lots of smiles and laughs. As we ate the horrible food the kids loitered outside until we beckoned to them to sit with us. They lashed into our dessert sweets after refusing politely just once. The little girls put thannaka on Charlotte's face and Charlotte put red lipstick on the little girls. So cute! she said; adorable! I thought they looked like underage hookers.

We wanted to see the river again so we set off, one girl on the back of Charlotte's bike and the boy on the back of mine, roaring orders to everyone. At the riverside temple we sat in the shade and Charlotte - or Chocolate as she was now called - was swarmed by even more little girls. Admittedly she was rather fascinating, wearing a backless diaphanous top and tiny denim cutoffs; not the most appropriate attire for visiting Buddhist temples. They cooed and touched her long blonde hair and sang songs for her. Disgusted by such effeminacy the little boy stood on the parapet with his back to us shouting like a general at his friends below, periodically turning and urging us to leave.

Down at the riverside we shocked everyone with our intention of going for a swim. Charlotte changed into her skimpy bathing suit in a nearby shack, and down onto the bank we went. The kids wanted us to get into a dark and stinking pool but we walked on to the main stream. The girls had disappeared, and we had by now attracted a dozen additional boys who glared open-mouthed at Charlotte. Dangerous! said some. Not dangerous! said others. There were plenty of local people in the river both up and downstream, so after some hesitation I stripped down to my underwear and we waded in. The water was warm and slimy and filled with pieces of fish and vegetation. I floated there for a few minutes looking at the temple. Then I remembered that the Burmese python can swim very well and has been known to grow to eight metres in length, so I got out to dry in the hot sun. Charlotte caused howls of derision by borrowing one of the boys' longyis to get changed under. Most of them turned away, sneaking glances which reduced them to tears of laughter. But one cheeky guy stood contraposto with his hands on his hips, a big white grin on his face, raising his eyebrow at me and cocking his head towards Charlotte. I laughed and let him believe that it was so.

My sunrise balloon ride the following day was cancelled due to rain. This was a bit of a disappointment but on the other hand it meant that I had an additional $300 to spend. In the morning I walked with Charlotte to the jetty where she was to take her boat upriver to the village of Pokoko, and leaving her there I went off on my rented lady-bike in the searing heat with my water and my hat and my sunscreen, to see the sunset. I cycled off-road along sandy pathways to the most remote and easternmost of the grand temples, the Pathada Paya, where I was irritated to be forbidden from climbing to the very top. The sign above the locked stairway said that this was to 'preserve the sacrosanct heritage' or some such, but I knew the real reason: Myanmar's richest civilian, Tay Za, had exercised his power to close off the upper tiers of all the largest temples to tourist access so as to leave his own incredibly ugly (and illegal) modern viewing tower - with its $10 entrance fee - as the highest local vantage point.

Still I was enveloped by a wonderful solitude when I scrambled as high as possible up the Pathada Paya. All I could hear were the putting of faraway tractors and the calls of the shepherds driving their herds below. There I sat for several memorable hours contemplating the stunning panorama of temple spires receding into silhouette above the glinting Ayeyarwady. But as the sun began to set it all fell apart. I ran out of water and became parched. I was bitten by bird-sized flying insects. Then eight large tourist buses arrived amid clouds of dust and I was presently joined in my wonderful solitude by hundreds of Burmese with their radios and mobiles and incessant chatter. Then the clouds rolled in and the sunset was destroyed. I descended the candlelit stairway to discover that the back tyre of my bike was flat. It was 10km to my guesthouse, and getting dark fast. It was barely tolerable to cycle through the sand, but when I hit the tarmac road (with another 6km to go) I was forced to walk. This wasn't as bad as I had expected. The temples were lit, and the road was empty, and again I had a great feeling of isolation, except for the giant bats. But inevitably I soon met an entrepreneurial local guy with a headlamp and a puncture repair kit, who for 50 cents fixed my flat and sent me on my way without ever having said a word.

***

Using some of the money from my cancelled balloon odyssey I booked a flight to Mandalay and early the next day I took a horse and cart to the airport, which is how I shall travel to all airports in future if possible. There were only five passengers on the turboprop aircraft and we flew at only 9000 feet which made for a bumpy ride. Mandalay International Airport, serving only two international routes, is a wonderful white elephant located in total wilderness an incredible 30km from the city. Despite being built only fifteen years ago (at huge public expense) its lonely grey halls are already deteriorating; the whole place was cloaked in brown dust and ants swarmed through cracks in the windows. The information screens were blank and the ambitious eight baggage carousels sat motionless. Large fish circled slowly in the flooded underground car-park ramp.

I shared a taxi into the city and found my guesthouse on the corner of 25th and 83rd. Despite public opinion to the contrary, Mandalay is a young city, only founded in 1857 when the Burmese capital shifted yet again. Kipling's famous poem has a lot to do with this misconception. Kipling himself never actually visited the place. But I was there. Whenever I arrive in a new city I always like to wander aimlessly and maplessly, taking turns that seen auspicious, and I usually end up in interesting places. On my walk in Mandalay I was duly rewarded by several bustling markets, a tea shop staffed entirely by ten-year-olds, and an internet cafe in which the previous occupant of my seat had left the porn video playing minimised. After several hours of this wandering I inevitably arrived at the moat of the erstwhile royal palace, two kilometres square and fifty metres wide, enclosing a high red wall with uniquely Burmese watchtowers. I was reminded of Hue in Vietnam; Mandalay Palace was also destroyed by war, and rebuilt by forced labour not too long ago. So I didn't visit, instead walking around the moat and then taking a trishaw to the famous Mandalay Hill.

A digression on trishaws. Every Asian country has its variation of the three-wheeled bicycle taxi. In India the wallah is in front and the seat is mounted behind, with no back support. In Vietnam the passenger reclines languidly in front. In Myanmar the seats are back-to-back in a little sidecar. Trishaw drivers pay up to 30% of their take for the privilege of loitering near tourist guesthouses - depending on how big the fish is. These fellows were usually fat and sleek and cunning and falsely friendly. So I ignored them and selected my drivers from the street, who were invariably honest and kind, and not as desperately poor, ancient and skeletal as their Indian counterparts. But they are no doubt still poor: they can go for days without a fare - just sitting around waiting. Several of them told me that the government is trying to stamp out trishaws altogether; they are already banned from congregating near railway stations, markets and tourist sites - in fact practically every place where a person might actually want to hire one. The reasons for this are unclear, but if trishaws were to disappear the city would be poorer for it.

So I negotiated a price with my driver for the wait and the ride back. He kept my shoes and I started to climb barefoot. It seems that every hill in Myanmar is surmounted by a paya and reached by innumerable steps punctuated by other payas increasing in magnificence with altitude. This was no different. I was soon befriended by a cute young monk who was also climbing. He had excellent English and I found out several interesting things. For instance: every male in Myanmar must spend some time as a monk at two stages in his life - between the ages of five and fifteen, and again after the age of twenty, for a period of not less than three months on each occasion. Interesting that the troublesome and rebellious late teenage years are excluded.

So we walked and chatted. The temple on top of the hill is encrusted with mirrors and arches inscribed in the beautiful Bamar script with the names of donors. Of course there is a gleaming gold stupa, or zedi, in the centre. As we circumnambulated the boy pointed out various things; the river, his monastery, the Shan mountains, the local prison (backing directly onto the local university). He then showed me his English textbook, which was full of the same archaic phrases as the one owned by the teacher I met in Yangon. After sunset and the obligatory photographs, it was time to descend. On the way I was looking for the memorial to the British regiment that captured the hill from the Japanese in WWII, but I failed to locate it. Instead I found lots of sprawling cats. The trishaw and my shoes were waiting.

That evening I joined some new friends for dinner. Like elsewhere in Asia, much food is eaten on the street, and there's usually a great spread of Indian, Thai and Chinese choices. We dined at a Mandalay institution - the Chapati Stand. Rows of foot-high plastic furniture spread along the pavement, centering on several massive pots of meat and veg curry heated over drums of kerosene. It's sweaty, smoky, loud, uncomfortable, and so delicious that I overate and I got the chapati sweats that night.

Next day I hired a motorbike (and a driver) to take me around a couple of the sights outside the city. First was Sagaing, a lovely riverside town of low hills covered with monasteries and nunneries all linked by pleasant shaded walkways. This apparently is the place where Burmese monks go when they feel the need to relax and get away from their hectic pill-popping 24-hour party lifestyle. It is, in fact, wonderfully peaceful, and could have stayed all day, but instead just strolled around for a few hours, popping in and out of temples and being hassled for 'donations' by watery-eyed old monks. I spent a while surreptitiously watching two young monks who had climbed a tree and were shaking the blossoms from the branches. These are later dried and (I'm presuming) made into incense.

My driver gave me strict instructions to descend the same way I had gone; I ignored him completely, and when he found me a few hours later, pottering around a local market, he was irritated that I had upset his schedule. So he punished me by going straight to a craft shop where I was determined to buy nothing yet ended up spending $20 on carved wooden stuff that I can't even import to Australia. After that, off we went for lunch in a roadside dhaba. In the shade several fat men in vests snored and rolled around on charpoys with their chubby arms outflung.

On our way to Amarapura, which also used to be the nation's capital, traffic was stopped by police as a group of young monastic initiates passed by on their way to their new home. I was lucky to see this event which apparently only takes place in the area every few months: a long procession of about a hundred little boys on horseback and a hundred little girls in bullock carts. All the children wear jewellery and crowns and makeup and fine colourful robes and are shaded by elaborate parasols. All the animals are richly tasselled and liveried. At either end of the queue a large band of brass and drums, prodigiously amplified, is hauled on a flat-bed truck and in the centre the local lamas ride under saffron canopies. The children were on their way to meet their relatives for a communal feast, the day after which they hand back the jewellery and wash off the makeup, queue to have their heads shaved, and are finally given their robes and take their vows. It's a very expensive but most auspicious occasion for the families. So meritorious is it to sponsor a novice that childless people often pay for the children of friends.

As it began to rain heavily and I became a little worried for my safety given at the driver's breakneck speed; I was glad when we stopped for coffee to wait it out. He told me about Thingyan, Myanmar's equivalent of the Thai Songkran or water festival. This celebrates a deity who is not in fact immortal but who merely has a very long life; this festival is when he leaves the celestial realm and lives in the human world for a while. The driver's pronunciation of 'celestial' sounded so much like 'salacious' that for some time I had quite the wrong idea about the whole thing.

At Amarapura the main attraction is the world's longest teak bridge, U Bein's bridge, linking the old city on the one side of the Ayeyarwady with the monasteries on the other side. Over 1200m long, it's supported on tree trunks sunk in the sand, although some parts are concrete. It's a bit of a tourist trap but the view of the sun setting behind the bridge, as it's crossed by hundreds of monks, cyclists, and local women balancing loads on their heads, is pretty magical. Here I also missed a great photo opportunity. A coachload of stern tall unsmiling army men were walking across the bridge, determined not to show any outward signs of emotion. But as I passed a group of them standing around in the centre, for some unexplicable reason one of them was holding to his lips a child's tiny orange plastic trumpet, with a gold horn. He hadn't noticed me, and when I was struck by the absurdity of the scene and laughed out loud he was embarrassed and teased by his friends at having let down his guard and displayed a sign of weakness - and to a foreigner!

The last paya I visited in Myanmar was the youngest of all I'd seen, and also the biggest. Mingun Paya is an hour's trip upriver from Mandalay. It featured in a photograph by the guy who also took the famous picture of the Afghan girl with the green eyes. Begun in the mid-19th century, construction of Mingun was halted when the king died; in those few years an enormous square base was built, a hundred feet high, with a grand portal in each wall. Soon afterwards the whole thing was split by an earthquake unfortunately resulting in the central chamber being sealed off but also producing the cracked facade featured in this photo, and also in several of my own. Back in the city I met my favourite trishaw driver who took me to the post office and other fascinating locations, telling me all about his life: being imprisoned for intervening in a fight; how a month in jail changed his life; how he doesn't chase money any more; how he studies English every day; how his friend escaped to California by virtue of his connections with an NGO staffer and his English language skills; how he's worried that the government is reading his emails (he is a Gmail user). On this last point at least I was able to reassure him that if anyone's Gmail is being hacked then it's not that of a trishaw driver.

Arriving back at the airport the next morning, dozens of porters squatting at the departures mall leaped to their feet and swarmed around my taxi. I sat in the shabby Kipling Cafe eating Maggi noodles and massacring mosquitoes. There were very few passengers and therefore no queues, but my passport was scrutinised thoroughly before I was admitted to the check-in desk. Here my lone presence caused an argument among the staff who then apologetically informed me that my flight was delayed by three hours. Back in the Kipling the obviously gay waiter was being mercilessly taunted by a group of oafish airline employees. Soon I was fetched back to the gate by the check-in staff who had found me a different flight. I gave the waiter a large tip and my best smile, told him he was very handsome, threw a withering look at the slack-jawed persecutors, and flew away to Yangon.


***

I left Myanmar at 6pm the next day and after spending seven hours in a Bangkok airport hotel I arrived at Paro in Bhutan, via Dhaka, at noon. This represents four countries in sixteen hours, which I believe is a personal best; although I suppose Bangladesh doesn't count because I couldn't get off the plane.
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