Friday, July 31, 2015

an adventure in myanmar




Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar
May 20th, 2015

I want to tell you about a journey that only took a little over twelve hours but felt like an eternity. Jump on board. Here we go!

The 24 hours before our harrowing transportation adventure started were spent in equal parts sleeping on the dirtiest and softest mattresses of the trip, mending some pretty bad stomach woes, and wandering a sadly bland little town. The journey started when we first stepped out of the hotel room at checkout time, which miraculously coincided with the end a of 24 hour bout of debilitating stomach woes. We still had six hours to kill before the departure of our “VIP” night bus across a mountain range to Mandalay, where we would catch a bus to a little mountain town in the north. It came as no surprise that the lovely weather that we successfully slept through in a dismal hotel room disappeared the moment we stepped outside and became street wandering itinerants again.

Of course that is what would happen. The first order of business was to find a pharmacy where we might be able to score some electrolytes to bring us back to life and calm our stomachs. To my amazement the pharmacist actually reacted when I said electrolytes and went into a corner in search of an old cardboard box of goodies. He delved inside and took out some packets of rehydrating salts. I was delusionally fully expecting some fruity flavored yummyness in bright pink appealing packet… but in proper Myanmar style instead we had the pleasure of chugging some disgusting salt packet water, which to its credit, did seem to do some good. We spent the next hours wandering aimlessly stopping for little bites we weren’t ready to digest and just passing the hours waiting for the bus to leave. You can tell that a town is nothing special when one looks forward to a night bus. Dark clouds rolled in overhead. Rain started falling steadily harder from the moment we stepped out of the hotel room until we had to run to the bus station with our backpacks to avoid getting drenched and having to endure the next twelve hours of busing soaking wet on an air-conditioned bus.

We made it to the bus, found our seats right in front, and started to get cozy for the ride. Life seemed far better now that we were headed onto another adventure in another city. It really only took a few minutes of driving on the tiny shambling road in this massive bus for it to dawn on both of us that even paying premium for the nicest bus around we were still about to cross a mountain range at night in the rain, the same mountain range that had been scary during the day in a mini-van. As the bus started to ascend the first mountain, the cliffs off the side of the road became steeper and higher moment by moment to the point where not only would there be no chance of survival, there would hardly be any chance of finding the bus in the woods below if we were to tumble off the road. If we went off the road there would be no way to know where anyone should even start looking for us, that is if they even had the motivation to do so. So far our experience in Myanmar had not convinced us that there would be any particularly organized effort to find a missing bus. In a country where a human life seems almost dispensable there is certainly not much thought or time put into looking after those in harm’s way. The only thing on my mind for the next while was how the hell could this night bus have been the best option in our minds to get back to the big city? The ride continued and became more and more harrowing and terrifyingly dangerous. At this point I was absolutely disappointed in myself for falling back on the idea of the western “guarantee” of safety and not even stopping to weigh my options before setting off on an inherently perilous ride. The road was wet, the curves sharp, the hills steep, and the cherry on top was the suspiciously loud and funky suspension creak coming from the left front wheel. I couldn’t get over the fact that we had spent a day wandering aimlessly in a shitty little transfer town when we could have found a shared taxi to drive this road in perfect conditions. I was a wreck. The road seemed impossibly small for our impossibly big bus. The hairpin turns were so sharp that the bus had to turn 180° at each one. The trees were growing so close the road that when the bus would turn on a dime to make the curve, the small section of trees illuminated by the faint headlights would pass across the front window of the bus just like a child’s view out the back window of a zooming car. They went whooshing by horizontally and truly made me wonder if we were already in the midst of falling off a cliff, or if that was what was going to happen in the next moment. As a normally positive person I had a hard time seeing how we were going to get out of this one unscathed. It truly felt like the bus was spinning in place as it turned and each time it felt like it lasted an eternity, taking up the whole road and just asking for a disaster to come zooming from the other direction. To make matters worse my travel buddy in Myanmar, an old friend from Montreal whom I had serendipitously bumped into while drinking a coffee in Vietnam a few weeks earlier, had a particularly bad relationship with night buses. Just a few months prior she had been in a frightful bus accident in Laos. She had come out of the wreck with a broken rib and a scarred psyche when it came to the idea of night buses. Though fairly severely injured, she escaped the disaster far better than the majority of the passengers and spent weeks dealing with the repercussions of the crash in a series of awful hospitals.

As a means of distracting ourselves and calming our nerves we tried to watch a documentary I had loaded onto my phone but quickly became dismayed to realize that the documentary consisted mostly of facts about the dangers of travel around Myanmar. When the narrator began speaking about the weekly death tolls on a shuttle bus route we had taken the week before we quickly switched our focus back to clenching our seats and peering between the gap in front of us to get a sliver of a view out the window.

The bus briefly stopped in a village and I tried to turn my mind back on to consider the looming consequences of jumping ship and sleeping in this village for the night. The catch was that in Myanmar travelers are only allowed to sleep in certain hotels that have the proper permit from the harsh military government and it was fairly certain that this village would have had no such thing. Was it worth it to get off this death machine of a bus to find ourselves in a village strictly forbidden to accommodate us for the night? Thats a tough call in the pouring rain. The bus doors closed and made my decision for me. Eventually I decided to give in to the peril and put my life in the hands of the driver and let my eyes close. I woke up every few minutes assuming the bus was already careening off the edge of a cliff and would open my eyes to realize how delightful it was to still be alive.

Next thing I know I’m awoken by bright lights and people yelling. In my head this is it. We’ve crashed and this is the gory aftermath. To my amazement, I was wrong, we weren’t dead yet! It turns out we had been told the bus would take far longer than it did and we were already at the bus station. Its 3:30 AM and we groggily realize that we could still have time to make it to the 4AM train that we had been sure we would miss because of the ridiculous hour of departure. I took a deep breath and pushed my way through the crowd of taxi drivers waiting in the rain the middle of the night. I yelled to them to back off and we went with our time tested strategy of finding one of the drivers who wasn’t pushy and yelling. We haggled prices a bit and finally went zooming off in a clunky little taxi to the train station. The driver went zooming through the city in the pouring rain, seemingly still annoyed that we had haggled the price down, though probably simply annoyed to be driving a taxi in the middle of the night. All of the sudden he makes a massive U turn and right at the end of it my friend screams. Before she can even get the scream half way out of her mouth theres a big thud and then taxi suddenly screeches to a stop. We’ve obviously crashed into something but I can’t see anything around through the windows. My friend screams that there's a baby and I take a deep breath to prepare myself for the chaos and get out of the car, fully aware that if there is something gory outside there will probably be no one else willing to help. I jump out and am so thankful to see that it’s simply a scooter wheel that is stuck under the taxi tire. We had crashed into the front wheel of a scooter that a family was walking across the street. The mother was holding a baby and the father walking the now somewhat squashed scooter. The two men start having it out with uninterpretable harsh words and pulling on the scooter while the woman takes the child to the sidewalk. I stood next to the car and vividly remember taking in the moment. The rain beating down on the empty dark intersection, everyone still alive, and these two men having it out over a bent wheel couldn’t have mattered less to me. My moment of pondering was interrupted when I realized that we were actually already at the train station. The accident had happened right as he was pulling up and our train was leaving in a matter of minutes. I fished out the right amount of tattered kyat bills from my pocket and handed it off to the hot headed driver with a shaky hand. I got my friend out of the car, we apologized to the mother with a brief game of charades on the sidewalk, and headed inside.

The next ten minutes consisted of running around this train station following the vague directions yelled to us in scrambled English by the groups of plain clothed men standing around. We never did figure out if these guys actually worked there or not. The entire station was sprawled with families sleeping on the floor. Some slept in the midst of their laid-out vegetables for sale, some on mats, and others simply sprawled mat-less and blanket-less in the muggy heat on the grimy floors. Finally we had our tickets, completed registering our passports with the strict military government, and found our way to the 1st class cabin. First class is a total misnomer in this situation, don’t be fooled by our western vision of first class into thinking that this was anything more than an opportunity to have a cushion on the seat. I’m not complaining, that cushion made one hell of a difference compared to not having it at all. My friend's first language is French which made us often speak French together, this is only relevant because in French there is a word that describes how we were feeling that I can’t pinpoint in English. The word is dépaysant, meaning disoriented and overwhelmed due to being deeply immersed in a culture so different to home. I have never felt more this way than I did after all the previous chaos and then not even having the time to process the fact that I was stepping over hundreds of people to make my way to the train. Not only had I never seen such an impoverished crowd sleeping somewhere but the simple fact that in the muggy heat and rush we were in turned them into an obstacle made me feel especially confused. One wants to take more time when you see something like this, to try to wrap your head around something of an understanding of the situation...but reality strikes and you really don’t want to miss the only train of the day to our destination.

The archaic hundred year old train lurched and slowly started rolling and we were off to the next adventure, thankful to have safely made it through the mayhem to our “cozy” seats. I was too wired to sleep and left my friend asleep with a military cop sprawled in the row next to her and a monk crosslegged over the seats facing ours. I poked my head out the window and watched the world go by as we rumbled through the 4AM rain. The train headed straight through dormant neighborhoods just starting to rise. Streets were flooded by the rain and lights were few and dim. Many of the houses we were passing, built of a basic structure and a series of tarps for walls were seemingly flooded also. I can’t even imagine the struggle of trying to sleep in a place with toxic sewage-laden water rising into the dwelling. I felt quite fortunate to be where I was, looking in from the outside, yet similarly troubled that there wasn’t more I could do for such people. Halfway through town the train stopped at a station with zero electricity and again, many people sleeping on the floor. We waited for the train to continue and suddenly heard the wildly loud shrieks of animals on the slaughter block. I stepped out onto the platform and saw a group of a dozen or so men surrounding a herd of at least a hundred goats to force them onto the train. The animals seemed to fully comprehend the lethal nature of this train as they anxiously squealed and tried their best to bolt in any direction. The men screamed and waved their flashlights in the animals eyes as they got some to walk up a board onto the car while others they literally picked up and tossed into the train. Eventually when nearly all the animals were aboard a few of the men tossed the stragglers over their shoulder and off the train goes, the men walking down the track in the other direction, animals in tow. I had SO many unanswered questions. Did each man take an animal as payment? Oh the things you have to accept you’ll never have a real answer to when you travel in such a place!

As we rose into the mountains the sun slowly started to rise over the horizon. An incredible thing about traveling in a country as undeveloped as Myanmar is the reality that rules have not yet been set. There is no one to tell you not to open the door of the train and spend hours leaning out taking in scenery. You can probably extrapolate that that’s exactly what I did. After hours of rising up into the mountains the train slowly came to a stop...and then to our moderate terror started rolling backwards. I saw a man in the trees holding some archaic train levers and the more I looked the more wires and controls I saw running alongside the tracks. We rolled backwards faster and faster and then passed right past the route we had come up and went onto another track. We figured out through a bit of charades with a cop and a bit of tired thinking that the mountain was so steep that this train would continue changing directions for the next hour to make it up a series of seven switchbacks up the mountain. What an incredible feat for such an old train. And as if that weren’t remarkable enough, at each switchback there was a man who lived in a little hut to control the tracks and ensure our switchbackability. What a life to live! Living in a shack on the side of a mountain to pull a lever once a day. We got used to the switch backs and enjoyed the next seven back and forths to make it up the hill. When we were finally over the mountain the train picked up speed and began bouncing what felt like a few inches off the tracks. We had read about the dangers and frequent derailings of this line and those little moments of train wheelies didn’t instill much confidence. I eventually went back to looking out the door as the train passed over wild ravines and waterfalls, with me dangling out the door. We stopped at a few more stations along the way, buying mangoes through the train window and watching the wonders of this world pass by.

There’s never a good moment to let your guard down in such a country and truly never a dull moment. We were only a few hours past the twelve hour mark of getting on the dreaded bus the night before and it felt like we had lived through so much. It’s hard to believe the experiences that can occur in such a brief period of time. By the time we arrived at our stop on the train, the sun was out and we went on to haggle prices for a tuk tuk and then haggle again for a hotel. The time I spend there was definitely not easy, but the experience was undoubtedly rewarding.

Yangon Train Station 4:00AM




Selling mangoes to the train passengers




Lush valleys




Can you decipher the squiggles? Me niether.












He wasn't too thrilled about this shot.

1 comment:

  1. Quite a travel tale. I found this paragraph "The word is dépaysant, meaning disoriented and overwhelmed due to being deeply immersed in a culture so different to home. I have never felt more this way than I did after all the previous chaos and then not even having the time to process the fact that I was stepping over hundreds of people to make my way to the train. Not only had I never seen such an impoverished crowd sleeping somewhere but the simple fact that in the muggy heat and rush we were in turned them into an obstacle made me feel especially confused. One wants to take more time when you see something like this, to try to wrap your head around something of an understanding of the situation...but reality strikes and you really don’t want to miss the only train of the day to our destination." to be key to the greater depth of feeling and writing you are no doubt in charge of. Take good care in your circus of tours!

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