When I visited Myanmar (a country some of you may prefer to call “Burma”) in December 2010, it was with an almost completely blind eye to its pariah military dictatorship. I wanted to hear the proverbial “other side of the story” — the one the U.S. State Department couldn’t tell, even if it wanted to.
What I discovered on the ground in Myanmar was jarring and unsettling, but not the reasons you think it might have been. While I don’t doubt for a second that there is a layer of truth to the decades of reports on the brutality of the country’s ruling junta, the more immediately disconcerting characteristic of daily life in Myanmar is that no one seems bothered by any of it.
In fact, the majority of local Burmese I encountered seem incredibly content with their lives. Like animals born into a zoo, they know no reality outside the proverbial cage that separates them from visiting tourists, who find themselves placed unwittingly into the role of voyeur.
My Air Asia flight from Bangkok arrived to the Burmese capital of Yangon just before sunset, so by the time my taxi cab traveled the eight miles from the airport to the city center — this journey took the better part of an hour, thanks in equal part the age of the vehicle and the condition of the roads — it was pitch dark. I was eager to begin exploring the mysterious country my own had all but forbade me from visiting, so I took to the streets with my camera. Initially, I was frightened: I didn’t even have to venture off Bogyoke Aung San, the city’s main commercial and transportation artery, to find myself literally surrounded by people I assumed to be beggars. In hindsight what is perhaps more terrifying is that no one I encountered begged for money or seemed bothered by the fact that I actually had it. This young woman was adamant that I photograph her young daughter. On the way back to my hotel I considered getting an instant print of the picture from my memory card but as I looked behind me into the crowd, I realized my chances of ever finding her again were almost nonexistent.
As a former British colony, it isn’t surprising that local Burmese take tea in the morning and several times throughout the day. What was surprising, however, was the manner in which they were made to take it. Although certain establishments I visited in Yangon did have proper tables and chairs, the vast majority of corner cafés were equipped with nothing more than plastic children’s furniture. These grown men didn’t seem to take any exception with congregating at a bubble gum-pink table that rose barely two feet off the ground.
My first stop the next morning was the Yangon Railway Station, where my travel companion and I would price tickets to Mandalay, the largest city in the northern part of the country. According to the attendant, the journey time was longer and the ticket price higher than a bus both of us had heard about prior to arriving, so we opted not to purchase tickets. At some point, I must’ve set my camera’s lens cap down because by the time we were about 20 minutes down the road leading away from the station, it was nowhere to be found. When we re-entered the station almost an hour later, I was shocked to find the lens cap sitting exactly where I left it, in spite of the fact that no less than 100 people were either entering or exiting the railway station or waiting in line for tickets.
If you visit Yangon, the most conspicuous and famous attraction — and one visible from all over town — is the massive Shwedagon Pagoda. The pagoda’s original incarnation allegedly dates back to about 500 years before the birth of the Christ, when two Burmese merchants visiting India happened to run into the man historically known as Siddartha just as he was achieving Buddhahood. Legend and conjecture aside, Myanmar is an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, with red- and orange-robed monks on literally every street at every time of the day. I can’t help but think that the Burmese peoples’ devotion to their religion gets in the way of their questioning contradictions in their society. The splendor that exists within this grand, solid-gold pagoda stands in stark contrast to most of the rest of the city and country that rise around it — but local visitors emanate solemnity and adoration, rather than bitterness or wanting.
After about 13 hours in an extremely uncomfortable and cramped bus I found myself in Mandalay, the northern Burmese city that couldn’t be further from the Las Vegas resort that jacked its name. Although Yangon isn’t cosmopolitan by any means, I found Mandalay to be decidedly more small town in its look and feel, with public buses passing by slowly enough for people traveling on them to interact with friends and passers-by walking on the street below them. Although Mandalay is even less organized than Yangon, its road system even more in need of repair and its vehicles even older, the residents I observed seemed disarmingly happy, maybe even moreso than people I met in the capital. This presents an interesting ethical dilemma: If a disadvantaged person is happy in spite of his disadvantage (and, likely, because he doesn’t realized he’s disadvantaged), is the better course of action to allow him to remain ignorant and happy, or inform him of how he’s being wronged and risk inducing stress and heartache?
Myanmar doesn’t seem overtly sexist and nothing I’ve read about the country suggests that it is. This being said, religious conventions always seem to get away with being more archaic than contemporary social ones, so I didn’t find it surprisingly that women were made to pray in a separated area further back from the Mahamuni Paya Buddha image near Mandalay. While their husbands, sons and fathers — and, by way of my anatomy, me — knelt within inches of the Buddha and pressed gold leaves onto it, their wives, mothers and daughters willfully (but perhaps not woefully) made their own blessings from a distance. This was another scenario which made me question the extent to which devout adherence to the traditions of Buddhism underlies Burmese peoples’ willingness to accept whatever hand life deals them, even if it comes in the form of an oppressive government that limits personal freedom and economic development.
Inwa is the name of one of the tiny villages that sits a few miles south and on the other side of the Mandalay river from the city proper. While attempting to find my way to the proverbial “Leaning Tower of Inwa,” I came across a monk named Henry, an older man with a disarming gaze, an almost perfect grasp of English and a child-like inquisitiveness. He was reading the June 1969 edition of “Spectrum,” an American magazine I assume is now out-of-print. Without any hint of sarcasm, he held the article he was reading — “The Japanese Economic Miracle” — up to my face and asked me if Japan had become one of the world’s largest economies yet. Obviously, Henry was aware the piece of “news” he was reading was 41 years old. But it raises the question: When the only information you have access to is either out-of-date or plain wrong, how are you supposed to extrapolate an accurate impression of anything else?
For better or worse, the answer to this question seems to be of little concern to everyday Burmese people. Among the most interesting sights to be seen from the centuries-old Amarapura Bridge, which creaks and shakes as if it’s going to collapse even when you tip-toe across it, are local men who fish with half their bodies submerged. I wasn’t able to get a straight answer as to why they use this technique — I assume it’s because fish tend to congregate in an area of the marsh far from any of its shores — but all the fishermen I saw finish their days’ work seemed to walk away with more than enough to feed their families. In this way, at least, the Burmese know exactly what’s up.
Robert Schrader is a travel writer and photographer who’s been roaming the world independently since 2005, writing for publications such as “CNNGo” and “Shanghaiist” along the way. His blog, Leave Your Daily Hell, provides a mix of travel advice, destination guides and personal essays covering the more esoteric aspects of life as a traveler.
