Home At Last

I woke up at 4am this morning, an early start to my fourth day back in my favourite GMT -5.  I hate to blame my fatigue on some ailment as imaginary as "jet lag", but I seem to have a more difficult time than most adapting to the 12-hour change, and some of the last few days has been a bit of a daze.  Maybe it's an indication that I should never travel again.  Ha!  Good one!

The jet lag weariness is the final concrete remains of the trip, the only tangible proof that I was ever in Asia.  The millions of pictures and the collection of currencies and the random ticket stubs document a fanstastic larger-than-life year, but are stuck collecting dust somewhere in memory; a trip is something we can remember but can never get back.  Yet it's amazing how quickly I've switch back since stepping off the plane, how I've never forgetten how to live like a Canadian.  It's amazing to think, while enjoying holiday festivities with friends and families, while talking about the dismal ski season and new apartments and bus strikes and Jimmy Kimmel, that less than a week ago I was sleeping the deck of a river ferry somewhere around the Tropic of Cancer with everything I needed acting as my pillow.

The only hiccup in my reintegration has been related to clothing.  In the Seoul airport, I looked around at the waiting area filled with well-kept Koreans (they all look the same!) in tidy black pea coats and leather shoulder bags, playing on advanced new electronics.  In my shorts and Bikenstocks, green sweater of many years, and sporting a goofy Ronaldo bum bag, I was overcome with a sense of my own destitution.  This was only exacerbated while waiting at the Toronto City Airport terminal after arriving on Porter Airlines, where I bumbled my way to the ferry with a cart balanced with a huge dry bag and a dirty bike wrapped in plastic bags.  After a year of dressing like a slob and being hailed as a rock star, I worry that I won't be able to blend in back home.  I've been digging deep to recall how to coorindate shoes and socks and warm jacket and scarf and all the other little things.

For all the societal differences that confront the long-term Asian traveller returning home, it's surprising how similar our two worlds are.  While walking downtown the other day I had a flashback to Kathmandu, to the cramped shops and simple merchandise of Asan Thole.  Our shops are bigger and cleaner, but it's all the same game of buying.  It doesn't matter where you are in the world, people come together to shop and to eat: humanity is united in its search for community.

What's surprising is how travelling around the world to Asia has given me so much more context for a place like Toronto.  I called to make a dental appointment and got to talking about the receptionist about where she was from in India.  An Afghan baggage handler at the airport reflected on my time in Pakistan.  I hear Mandarin everywhere.  I see Hindu temples now in places I've walked by hundreds of times.  One upon a time, well-heeled British graduates went on the European Grand Tour, a loop through the many cultures of the continent that served the worldly education one couldn't get in school.  How much better prepared for the future would Canada be, if all its future leaders had completed a required-reading Grand Tour of Asia?

And what have I learned on my circle tour?  Lots.  Lots about money, success, family, and work.  Lots about what makes a place great.  Lots about values.  How lucky we are to live in Canada!  Not because we are rich.  Because all people are considered equal.  Because we have free schools and hospitals.  Because we pay people in the most menial jobs enough to lead a happy life.  Because we have the luxury of being able to retire. 

In the reflection of the trip I also see myself.  I see myself as the person I've always wanted to be, someone who reads, writes, learns languages, and finds himself having a great time in strange places.  I hate the "He's finding himself" explanation to my chasing of distant adventures, but on the other hand I do return home more aware of my place in the world.  I've always thought that a love of travel was something I would eventually have to fit into the confines of a successful life.  Now I'm leaning toward the idea that my future is the thing that has to fit around the pillar of travel.  One thing is certain: the more I travel, the larger the world becomes.

Thus I bid farewell to a grand year in Asia.  I will think of you every time I see the sun rise.  And everytime I eat rice.  And, come to think about it, every time I get food poisoning.  I wonder what I'm going to do now?

Sixteen Scenes From Burma

Burma is a destination that feels like it's been designed by executives at Nikon as a playground for their high-end cameras.  You've never seen a place with more budding amateur photographers, all taking pictures of scenes out of everyday life.  But then again, everyday life has never been more beautiful, and the mouths of Westerners water every time we see a golden pagoda, or a group of monks walks by, or a fisherman does something on the lake, or a kid smiles at the camera.  Indeed, we're all still searching for that Burmese Photo Holy Grail: the photo of the monks teaching a child in front of a pagoda during sunset with a fisherman silhouette in the background.  That would be something special.  In the meantime, here are twenty favourites of mine (with captions for once!).

Sandamuni Paya, a collection of hundreds of pagodas, each one filled with a stone page from some important Buddhist book.  Just sounds like an excuse to build more pagodas!

Amarapura Teak Bridge

The air was heavy with stone dust in this corner of Mandalay where all those Buddha carvings are painstakingly created. 

Hiked through a part of Shan State that must provide most of the world's red hot chili peppers.  This child is obviously a fan.

On the road to Inle Lake, Shan State.  Thankfully not as hilly as Nepal!

Tone Le, Inle Lake: this school, like the rest of the village, is on stilts and only accessible by boat.  All the kids waved to us as we went by.  Maybe someone had taken their boats and they were waving to try to get our help.

Inle Lake traditional foot rowing technique.  Not as easy as it looks!

There's a quiet moment every morning around sunup, where the monks walk (barefoot) through town collecting alms from the local shops.  That warm feeling in my heart quickly subsided when I got back on the bus and we continued on one of the worst bus rides of the trip.

Burmese food may not be the most delicious in Asia, but it certainly takes the award for Most Side Dishes.

After touring the temple region of Bagan, I never want to see a Buddha statue again.  This one is one of my favourites, likely inspired by Buddha's love of the movie Alien.

There are well over a thousand temples still standing in the Bagan region.  Here are two of them.

This is Kaka, or attentive little tour guide we picked up during our first day in Bagan.  He is 8 and spoke excellent English, knew all the major temples, and could operate all of our cameras.

Kachin State: teak wood likely bound for China or another of Myanmar's very powerful neighbours.  Also, hungry cow.

Cruising down the Ayerwaddy River: this guy stands at the front of the boat during shallow sections and touches that stick to the river bottom to give a depth range.  We only ran aground once during the 24-hour trip.

Disagree.  Burmese pop rock is alive and well

Shwedagon Pagoda, the mother of all pagodas in Burma.  The very top is studded with over 5000 diamonds, which at night have the nice effect of twinkling high above a country that is one of the poorest in SE Asia.

Speak Your Mind on Burma

Though it's not likely that the Burma secret police watch your web activities with any scrutiny, and though a rumour of screenshots taken of every computer every five minutes seems contrived, I thought it would be most prudent to save some thoughts until I was safely out of the country.  It is, after all, a country where people are jailed for decades simply for delivering democratic messages.  Perhaps their spies are everywhere.

So, Burma, nice place.  It's an empire, really: though most people couldn't place this country on a world map, it has a language completely different than the Thai, Hindi, and Chinese ones surrounding it, a script that looks like alien symbols, a population double that of Canada, and lots and lots of natural resources.  Hard to tell if it should be relegated to that list of "Countries That Would Have Been Better Off if the British Never Left", but ever since the military dictatorship jailed and dismantled the winning democratic party in the 1980s, the West has imposed economic sanctions.  This puts Myanmar in the proud company of Cuba, Iran, and North Korea.

It also presents some quirks that are unknown on the rest of the otherwise straightforward SE Asia traveller's circuit.  There are no ATMs in the country; travellers need to make sure they have enough brand-new, un-creased $100 Benjamin Franklins to last them the trip.  You exchange about half your money to the local kyat (obviously pronounced chat), since prices indescriminately alternate between dollars and kyat.  You check into a hotel and pay for the night in dollars, then walk over to their restaurant and buy your meal in kyat.  The government exchange rate for kyat is about 6 to the dollar.  On the black market the rate hovers around 800.  And it is the filthiest money I have ever handled.

With this in mind, I was expecting to get off the plane in a place that resembled Europe circa 1300.  Instead, I was welcomed onto paved streets with streetlights, sidewalks, office towers, and a faded air of English regalty.  Most Asian nations grumblingly do business with the oppresive regime, so there's no lack of electronics, vehicles, or crappy Chinese goods, even if there are no Mastercard and McDonalds.  This all sort of turned my world upside-down at first, since Myanmar is a country with economic sanctions that is visibly much more prosperous than Nepal, which receives aid, and tourists, from everywhere.  Furthermore, from my best understanding, China's violent suppression of protests, atrocious human rights violations, and unwavering single-party system seem of equal severity as that of Myanmar, but we've elected to punish this mysterious place with sanctions that don't work.  Well done.  And despite all that, the people love foreigners.

I flew up to the city of Myitkyina, in Kachin State in the north of the country, with the intention of taking a slow boat down the country's lifeblood, the Ayerwaddy River.  It didn't come as a surprise that a two-day section of the river was closed to all passenger transit due to fighting with the Kachin Independence Army.  It was safe enough to take a bouncing, British-era train halfway down the river to Katha, and continue the adventure from there.  Maybe it was for the best, for sleeping "Deck Class" entailed camping out on a cold metal floor in an open-air galley that looked like a refugee camp, and I'm not sure I could have taken another night of it.  It was a nice ride though, a great view of local river life.  And I'll have you know that the ferry only ran aground on a shallow sand bar once in the entire trip.

The Kachin are one of the seven big minority groups in Myanmar, and I was told they have the third largest rebel army against the government.  All the rebel groups hold the border regions.  

A bomb went off in Myitkyina a week before I arrived (impossible for me to have known about this while I was in the country since no one seems to know anything about anywhere else in Myanmar).  The rebels would appear to be a threat, until a Kachin guy explained that the site of the explosion was a very important Kachin park.  The city is 70% Kachin, most of whom are sympathetic to the rebel's cause.  So did they really set off the bomb?  A man I was talking to told me that he believed in the Union of Myanmar, and the rebels were fighting for more rights and autonomy.  In fact, most solutions to the country's problems seem to involve working with the government toward reform.  This was enlightening, as Canada still calls this country Burma as a big F-U to the current government.

Anyway, the exciting thing right now is that Myanmar is changing very rapidly.  A year ago no one spoke openly about the house-arrested democratically elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.  These days there are pictures of her for sale everywhere, and the newspapers have front-page coverage of her recent meeting with Hillary Clinton.  It seems very likely that the democratic party will be running in the upcoming mid-termesque elections.  Some say the sanctions may have only a few years left as the country moves toward reform.  I had tri-sha drivers nearly wipe out in excitement as they talked about their charismatic leader, known simply as "the lady", who is realistically the only figure who could unite all the rebel groups in peace.

It was all very interesting, and shattered my notions of what a "banned" country looks like.  Despite all this I still know very little about the place and will have to do much more reading and return one day.  No doubt it will have already changed quite a bit.  

Anyway, I think visitors are obligated to talk about what they saw, and that's my summary, as coherent as it can be in my current state waiting in the Bangkok Airport.  Today was a busy final day in Bangkok, hurridly hitting the city's best: a teeth cleaning, a cooking class, a swanky rooftop bar, and a go-go bar.  Even though I left Burma this morning, it feels like I've been gone for weeks.  Yet the longest day of my life is only beginning: this December 15th will last 36 hours.  My flight from Korea later today lands in New York City twenty minutes before it took off.  Somewhere in there will be a cross-Manhatten epic, lugging around 56 kg of luggage.  When it's all said and done I'll be sitting in Tim Hortons in downtown T.O., furiously trying to warm up hands that have forgotten reality.  Yet at the moment I am brimming with excitement at the in-flight entertainment ahead, and at the only appropriate ending for this post: see you soon.

Burmese Daze

Mengalaba and hello once again from sunny Mandalay. Yesterday, on a
slow ferry down the Ayerwaddy River (where I had spent the night
sleeping on the deck floor in the not-much-class "Deck Class"), the
first glimpse of Mandalay Hill from the river triggered a wave of
nostalgia. Although I still have five days out here in Asia, this
marks the end of strange new places and the beginning of retracing my
steps back to familiarity and eventually, back home.

The past two weeks in Myanmar have been, among other things, very
photogenic. Unfortunately, with my computer locked up in Bangkok (I
do miss it) I'm unable to easily share photos. You'll just have to
wait.

Despite swearing to myself that I would never trek again after Everest
(Base Camp), less than two weeks later I was lacing up the boots for a
short three day walk in Eastern Burma. If trekking in Nepal is the
prime rib of the hiking world, then trekking in Burma is...well,
something much cheaper than prime rib (God I miss steak). That wasn't
a bad thing, since there's a bit more "pressure" in the Everest region
with the altitude and tough days and costs. Here, the grades were
tame, the patchwork of crops on the hills colourful, villagers were
friendly, there was a good trekking crew, and we slept in quiet
village homestays. Did we sleep well? No, because homestay is
actually Burmese for "sleep on a wooden floor until the roosters
outside wake up at dawn".

The trek brought us to Inle Lake, a favourite traveller destination
and certainly worth the hype. Basically most of the villages are
built on stilts along the marshy borders of the lake, so instead of
roads of asphalt (or more appropriately, dirt) you have waterways as
the main method of transport. We boated past a school ending for the
day, a virtual flotilla of narrow canoes with kids in uniform paddling
home like it's the most ordinary thing in the world. It may not sound
exciting, but it was relaxing and really interesting. One day,during
an extremely pleasant boat ride back across the lake at sunset (our
driver pausing as we passed by fishing boats to get iconic fisherman
silhouette photos of course), I had a flashforward to the snowstorms
and darkness waiting for me in Canada. Can hardly wait to get home.

One horrifically uncomfortable bus ride later (thought I suspect I am
becoming a bit of "bus softie" after so many months cycling) we
arrived at a temple site called Bagan. I haven't even Bagan to
recount some of the great puns such a spot offered up. We biked out
to the first temple we saw, snapped some photos of the Buddha statues,
and I was about to chalk the whole thing up as over-rated until we
ascended a narrow, steep, unlit flight of stairs to the temple roof.
From there the scope of the site became clear, with the forest and
fields in all directions pierced by thousands of pointed temples of
all shapes and sizes, some as big as castles. It was a cool spot to
explore for a few days, but I did reach a point near the end where I
decided I never wanted to see a Buddha statue ever again. Seeing how
the trekking promise held up, it seems likely that there's still hope
to save my soul or whatever seeing Buddha statues does for you.

Not one to waste time with the end in sight, a
plane-train-bus-taxi-boat combo took me up to the north and through a
bit of a far-flung region. I think that one deserves some more
writeup, and certainly once I'm safely out of the country.

As always, the people on Myanmar are wicked and extremely friendly and
surely the highlight of the trip. One of my favourites was the old
guy who rented me a canoe to paddle around along the shores of Inle
Lake. I got back to town, and wasn't he waiting there with snacks and
tea. We talked about his family and work, and then on the walk back
we stopped for shots of rice whiskey. That's pretty par for the
course here, though not always the rice whiskey. Sort of related,
they do have local draught beer everywhere which is sort of out of
place but of course incredibly welcome.

Tonight, one last bus ride back to the principle city of Yangon for a
few days trying to procure a decent tailor-made shirt and a debate
whether to buy one of the male sarongs that are so popular here.
After that, there's 12 final hours in Bangkok that are getting busier
and busier. The next time you'll hear from me I should be somewhere
in the limbo of the five airports that will bring me back home. If
anyone needs any high-quality lacquerware or Buddhist oil paintings,
this is the time to let me know.