Shwedagon Paya

Here I find myself, frayed with 28 hours of sleepless travel, in Shwedagon Paya, the largest stupa in the world, built around hair relics of the Buddha, 2000 years ago, still constantly growing as vistors buy tiny packets of gold leaf for 1000 kyats (about $1) to be added to the 100s of statues, dozens of small pagodas, historical bells and an incredible array of ornate images.

There are shrines for each day of the week, people making offerings for the one of the day of their birth, lighting incense and candles for wisdom, pouring water over the icons for purity and the hope for lives that are cool and smooth. Friday is guinea pig. Monday, my day is tiger. This dragon is, if I remember correctly, Wednesday.

Wandering sleepless, almost soul-less, but feeling incredible peace and calm as some kind of white-tipped swallows dart around at sunset, people kneel to worship, monks poke at mobile phones, and children hit loud long gongs. Hungry and asleep on my feet but experiencing right here, right now, as perfect.

**

The hotel room is at the top of a Chinese restaurant, at the back end of the hall on crowded street in Chinatown, windowless and absolutely Spartan, though boasting hot water, a new laminate floor and a generous sized bed that takes up most of the room. I have many friends who would have refused to cross the threshold of even the restaurant (Beth!), let alone consented to stay in the room, and my heart did sink a little. But it’s clean enough, and the cigarette smoke smell barely discernible, and I’m in Burma, by myself.

I ate catfish curry and rice and soup and mango and pickled tea leaves for $2 in a crowded open restaurant on the side of the street near the pagoda. The woman who is my guide for the first two days took the leftover catfish home in a baggie for her son.

**

I have the sudden insight that Myanmar might be a bit like Cuba, the colonial glory of Yangon crumbling after decades of trade isolation, people edging into connection with the rest of the world. Laundry and furniture and the scarecrow fill the balconies of apartment buildings that look like their outside walls could shift downward a few feet at any moment, like hills stripped of trees in flood season.

“There are 70,000 new cars in Myanmar in the past couple of years,” says my guide. I notice recent model hondas and toyotas, part of the bizarre Myanmar traffic system of right hand drive cars that drive on the right side of the road. She sounds proud, then adds “the traffic jams are terrible now.”

My reading has suggested that this is a time of glasnost-like change here, but I am still surprised to see a banner from the National League for Democracy strung openly across one of the apartment balconies, portraits of Aung San Suu Kyi and her father Aung San flanking the ends.

**

I have rickety, frayed wifi in my tiny hotel room when my jet lag wakes me at midnight, so I write. Posting photos will be more of a challenge.

Feckless

On a whim, I let myself be whisked off the strangely delayed plane in Winnipeg, abandoning Danny for a $200 travel voucher and a later flight in business class. I realized as I headed down the ramp, Air Canada crew thanking me profusely, that maybe Danny and I had a few more things to say to each other, but the promise of travel credits felt like the seed for some future trip. I am so precipitous sometimes.

Later, in business class, eating because the food is on offer even though I’m not particularly hungry, I read Aung San Suu Kyi’s Letters from Burma. They’re rather sweet, quiet essays from a quiet and fierce soul. (Apparently, in Burma, they just call her “the Lady”). Her description of her life after release from house arrest strikes me.

People ask me in what way my life has changed since I was released from house arrest eight months ago. One of the most obvious changes is that I can no longer keep up the strict timetable that governed my days when I lived alone. Then, it was important to establish a routine and to follow it strictly to avoid feckless squandering of time.

She later describes the weekends on that timetable – meditation, the small pleasures of tidying a drawer, reading over her morning tea and the holiday-like feeling of Sunday mornings: Sunday was especially luxurious because I would boil myself an egg for breakfast.

I note my own skirmish with the omelette guy in the hotel of faded glory this morning, when he dumped shrimp and crab into my vegetable omelette, my sublime irritation.

I note that I’ve just eaten a meal I wasn’t even hungry for, complete with chocolate fudge cake.

I note it.

Found sunrise

Brazil, River of Stars, at the end of the Transpantaneira.

Love found images.

I leave Saturday

There’s a cyclone, but it looks like I won’t get blown away, though I imagine I will get WET.

cyclone_mahasen_976_160613.jpg

Apparently, it’s fizzling.  Good.

I am kind of indecisive about many things.  What exactly to bring.  (How wet?  How cold?  It was 37 yesterday in Yangon and 27 today, because of that cyclone.  Do I need a hoodie?  Or are the wraps I have okay?  Do  I have too many?  Why don’t I have the PERFECT one?).  How much money, when I can’t get any more, or use credit, and have been fully warned of how all the bills have to be PRISTINE $100 US bills, and what if money changers won’t take mine?  What if I make the mistake of drinking something on an overnight bus and I get robbed?  (Not that I’m planning to take any overnight busses).

I have too much and too little information, and I guess that’s the sign of a good adventure.  This straddle point is embodied in the fact that I still don’t know what to call the place I’m going to.  Here’s what I know about nomenclature:

The generals of the military regime (junta?) changed the name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989.  Some people refuse to use the term because they think it legitimizes the regime.  But it seems that the term Burma is kinda sorta the colonial name, though not really, and technically they are derived from the same word, though Myanmar is considered more “literary” or more “formal,” so maybe it’s highly politicized and maybe it isn’t, and it may be a bit like calling all of Canada “Upper Canada” or maybe like calling it Ontario, or maybe it’s more like using the terms United States or USA or America interchangeably, where some people have emotional or political weight behind one term or another, but they kind of all mean the same thing.  Except when they don’t.

So I’ll keep saying Myanmar/Burma, I think, until I get there and hear what people say. There, to me, a tourist, in a pretty authoritarian, but less so than before, environment.

I don’t know what to expect, really, and a big part of it is not knowing how much voice I can reasonably expect to have while I’m there.  I have been well warned (books, visitors, the media) that the internet is very controlled, and that I need to be careful about what I say or give to the people I come in contact with — I shouldn’t leave books, for example.  I’m not much at risk but I could, theoretically, get the people I talk to in trouble.  If I wanted to incite something.

I do know that when I was in Rwanda, someone posted a comment on one of my blog posts that could be perceived as mildly critical of the authorities, almost as soon as I posted it.  That felt pretty creepy, to me alone on that hard little bed in the very safe little hotel in the middle of Kigali.  I felt completely safe in Rwanda, but it was also a reminder about eyes I don’t expect, surveillance that is just not part of my own frame of reference.  I honestly don’t know what to expect in Burma — whether I’ll have any internet access, whether it will be controlled the way my friend Shelley describes from her time a few years ago (they logged her in and out and print outed her emails), or whether open means open in ways I might recognize.  It’s a question, and part of the adventure — and I do write to make meaning of what I’m experiencing.  So I’ll try to capture something, knowing whatever it is will sound naive, and that I will have to feel my way.  Pics, probably, only when I return.

Sunset, lights, Arizona desert

On this ice-pellety, snow-hellity Mother’s Day, I cleared off the hard drive on my travel computer in prep for my trip (I leave next Saturday!). Found this shot from my November trip to K’s place in Arizona. Blinking eyes and self-transporting.

Note to my 28 year old self

Dear self-of-20 years ago,

I went for a quick run at lunchtime today, struggling a little with some asthmatic tightness, heavy-footedness. Spending a moment feeling ugh, so out of shape, this is hard, how irritating to have spring allergies, exercise-induced asthma, chest heaviness.

And then I stopped myself, and realized for a moment that I was engaging in quite the little parade of self-criticism… and that in fact, I’m 48 years old, and here I was tripping along at a reasonable 5 minute/km pace, running at lunchtime. When many of my peers are kind of physically broken, disks and knees brittle and painful, chronic pain or other ways that their bodies don’t feel in their control. Could never dream of running.

I spent a moment, then, thanking you, my 28 year old self. For noticing the people I worked with, who were pretty big smokers and drinkers and non-exercisers, and who turned 40 when I worked with them and visibly aged about 10 years in less than a year. Thank you for deciding right then, not to be a 40 year old smoker, to lose the weight you had acquired in late-night agency life and eating crap at your desk. The life where you bought a new pack of smokes every morning with a coffee in the lobby of the office building. Thank you for resetting life choices, and turning 30 a non-smoker, and a nascent runner. Ran my first 10K about three months later.

Today, my body is aging, and I’m tired a lot. I drink way too much coffee, eat too many carbs and eat far too much sugar.

(Ha! I had no idea my health card was on the counter there. A little scrutineer perched on my shoulder).

But. I’m 48. People always tell me I look much younger than that. I’m reasonably bendy. I can lift heavy things. My blood pressure, cholesterol etc. are great. I’m carrying a few pounds more than I really want to, but I can run 10 km reasonably comfortably, and am aiming at the 15K at the Triadventure this summer with some ease. I can sweat and pedal with the best of them in spinning class, and ride my bike far with joy.

Thank you, 28 year old Catherine. Weren’t you smart.

48 year old Cate

Why Myanmar? (Burma?)

People keep asking me, “why myanmar?” And I really don’t have an answer. This is more of an impulsive/gut jaunt than any before, I think, notwithstanding the complexities of booking the trip, getting a visa, etc.

I leave 10 days from now, by myself. I have a plane ticket, and a visa, and a wad of US cash ($100 new bills only, pristine condition, post 2006, no serial numbers of CA or BA). An itinerary with nothing apparently confirmed in a way I would recognize it — a (recommended) local travel agent who suggested I send the payment for my hotels and internal flights to her brother at Ohio State, because transferring money is so complicated. Trust, and the willingness to perhaps be wrong, to have to find my way.

Why. I saw an image in a film of the fields of golden temples at Bagan, and it struck me. “I want to go to there!”, but I didn’t even know where “there” was.

I figured out where it was, and that it’s open to tourists more, right now, and that maybe that means it’s a small window of time, or it might mean that in 3 years it will be simpler and well-visited.

In that sense it’s the right time, but in seasons, it’s the wrong time — it’s the shoulder into the summer, and it’s rainy in the mountains (no birding), and some of the things I want to do, like a river trip between Bagan and Mandalay, aren’t happening. It looks like even the hot air balloons over Bagan at sunrise may not be happening. But it’s the right time for me to go on an adventure by myself, for purposeful, contemplative space, just me and my camera and my pen in a place as unfamiliar as possible.

I’ve always been intrigued by the region — the cluster of Tibet/Bhutan/Myanmar — where there is an incredible rich ripeness of stories and complex logic of history that is both so visible and so opaque to me. The land I could never understand from the inside, as I’ve come to learn from my time in Uganda, but that I might be able to taste, just a little, if I listen and look hard.

I’m trying to cram a bit before I go, tasting novels and surface history, but it’s such a skim of the top. I don’t even really understand the politics of the name change. I have the sense that for me, it might be like that planet they visited on Star Trek the Next Generation where the people spoke only in metaphor — where the enterprise members could understand the words but not the meaning of a statement like “darmok and jilad at tinagra.” Meaning “where two enemies achieved peace.” Wanting to immerse myself in those metaphors, try just a little bit to feel a place whose history and culture is so full, so long, so seasoned, future hopes so open. Feeling human scale of life in completely different space.