What will become of Myanmar? Will the Union disintegrate? Will sovereignty perpetuate?
I look forward to using this trip as a basis of comparison when I return to explore, say, the Golden Rock, or Myitkyina and the upper Irrawaddy. My guess is that things there won’t get worse. Barring another Cyclone Nargis, I have confidence that the 21st century, along with the Lady and her ilk, will eventually loosen the stranglehold that the generals have on their “subjects” (can’t really call them constituents). It also wouldn’t surprise me if the West’s economic sanctions were removed in the near future. I can’t claim enough understanding of their consequences to know whether or not lifting of sanctions would improve the lot of the average citizen, but I doubt it would hurt.
Democracy has little chance of taking root any time soon. (Keep in mind that the government lists as one of the people’s desires the “Crush[ing of] all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy.”) Perhaps the majority would be best satisfied, and maybe even best served, if the country moved toward some version of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”: a repressive regime that allows for a wider and wider piece of the pie to end up somewhere besides its own pockets. Such a future would match my own sense of the people’s desire.
In the end Myanmar wasn’t as weird as I expected. Sure, the men wear garments that to outsiders look like long skirts. And yes, you have to feel despair over the wackiness of its dictators. Yet I also sensed in Myanmar a normalcy that might be a reason for optimism about the future (if it doesn’t become an excuse for inertia).
At the risk of sounding like a Chicago Cub fan, it’s just hard for me to believe that a place with this much going for it—assets, history, celebrity—won’t rise again. Any country can have a bad century, right?
Five tips for making the most of a visit to Bagan:
* Vary your ride. On day one you’ll likely want an overview of the entire plain. Choose either horse cart or air-conditioned taxi, depending on the heat. (Come to think of it, you will be lucky to find an air-conditioned taxi here.) For your remaining days, your best mode will be bicycle—preferably equipped with fat, knobby tires for traction on the sandy roads. (Come to think of it, you will be lucky to find fat, knobby tires here.) Wheels of some kind will be better than trying to see Bagan on foot—distances are too long for comfortable walking, and you’re an easy target for postcard/painting sellers if you don’t have a getaway vehicle.
* Keep your distance. Going inside the temples needn’t always be your goal. Few of the interiors are as rewarding as the outsides.
* Take extra-long siestas. The ideal schedule has you up and out before sunrise. Delight in the dark silhouettes against the changing colors of the morning sky and the mists among the desert plants. If you’re a breakfast person, grab some food about the time when you no longer need your windbreaker. Between roughly 11 and 4 you’ll want to seek shade. Late afternoon / early evening is another magical time to be out on your bicycle taking in the floodlit spires of the most-favored chedis (though you’ll need a flashlight—darkness descends quickly!).
* Remember the river. A sunset cruise on the Irrawaddy finishes your day in Bagan just as nicely as a climb up an elevated perch. Pushing off around 4:30 gives you time to motor upriver from the jetty past Bupaya, briefly pull alongside the massive steamer Road to Mandalay, and then pass Shwezigon just as its shiny gold top appears to age slightly, changing from dazzling new to lustrous antique with the changing angle of the sun’s rays. Eventually the boatman will cut the engine and let the craft float back down. If you’re close to the right, temple-less bank, you’ll see farmers hand-watering the lettuces, onions, and tomatoes that will appear at the morning’s markets in Nyaung Oo. At this hour the star attraction is Tan Kyi Taung, the gold stupa-ed paya atop the ridge on the sunset side. All day long this temple’s many cousins across the river have held the spotlight. Now, as the sun descends behind it, Tan Kyi Taung appears to be the last man standing. (People from Myanmar who visit Bagan often do so partly to make merit at four sites in particular, representing the cardinal directions. This temple stands at the western extreme, and is generally saved for last during a morning-long dash to get to all four.)
* Lose your socks. Or else you’ll get awfully tired of putting them on and taking them off all day.
Can there be a grander way to begin a day than by balloon? Not by our reckoning. As we lifted above Shwezigon Pagoda, powered by hot air, watching the sun come up over the mountains in the distance, we thought perhaps we were getting a sneak peak at the view from heaven.
For most of the next hour we glided one or two hundred feet above the Bagan plain, high enough to reveal the majesty and scope of this fantastic ancient city, but not so high that we couldn’t make out any number of present-day goings-on: brick-making, crop-planting, water-carrying, breakfast-cooking.
We found the view to be only part of the wonder. The brain trust at Balloons Over Bagan has designed a pre- and post-flight ritual that stimulates all of the senses. We felt the sound and fury of the fans and gas jets as they inflated the 12-passenger vessels before takeoff. Champagne and croissants took the sting out of what our pilot described as a “controlled crash”—also known as a typical balloon landing.
To say that the company had thought of everything would be like saying that the ancient rulers of Bagan thought on a big scale—neither statement is really comprehensible until you’ve been here. Miss this ride at your own peril. You’ll never forgive yourself.
Reasonable people might recount our evening bicycle ride on the plain of Bagan using very different descriptors—thrilling, frightening, unusual, unwise, heart-warming, heart-pounding. All would probably agree that we earned our supper.
Along the way we passed through a technological existence far removed from our day-to-day. The road crew applied hot tar and gravel by hand. Goat herders whistled their charges along sandy paths. West Pya-Saw village was built of thatch and bamboo, lit by candle.
We reached our intended sunset viewing pagoda just in time to catch the afterglow. The Shan Mountains turned to silhouette, and distant temples began to light up in glorious and varied styles across the plain. Some of the largest brick-only structures had their outlines illuminated with fairy lights. Those with more gold in their spires were spotlighted as if they were parts of a film studio logo. The lovely Dhammayazaka, which seemed to glow from within like a giant tree ornament, guided us home.
We surely needed its landmark as we rode back through the nearly pitch-black and suddenly quiet village. Our progress was slowed by a flat tire and the dune-like conditions of the track. Only 45 minutes earlier, the same route was a busy swirl of livestock and cooking and evening gossip. The rhythms of that pre-modern place, like its close neighbor Pya-tha-da Pagoda, must be governed primarily by the sun.
After finally reaching the paved road we hugged its edge. Depending on your point of view, we were either invisible or invincible. We pulled off whenever we saw a car approach, at one point nearly colliding with a large gravel pile that the road crew had left near the shoulder. Note for next time: no leaving home without the headlamp.
I confess to arriving in Myanmar predisposed to look for its bizarre side. Everyone says it’s a weird country, which of course is music to the ears of most travelers. Why else do we go places, if not to see and do things that are out of the ordinary?
I told myself to rely on conversations rather than proclamations. The posted stuff does tend to be what you encounter first, though. Here and there were signs announcing:
Our Three Main National Causes
Non-disintegration of the Union
Non-disintegration of national solidarity
Perpetuation of sovereignty
The in-flight magazine published a few government-approved lists, with titles such as “People’s Desire.” Among these desires are “Oppos[ing] those relying on external elements, acting as stooges, holding negative views.” The list of “Four Economic Objectives” concludes that “The initiative to shape the national economy must be kept in the hands of the State and the national peoples.”
Naturally, neither those subjects, nor any of the “Four Social Objectives” (“Uplift of dynamism of patriotic spirit,” etc., etc.), ever came up in chatting with people. Rather than non-disintegration of the union, everyone we spoke to seemed interested in non-disintegration of, say, their phone service or their bank account. Nearly all of the folks we met were lovely, generous, realistic, and industrious, making lemonade from lemons.
More than once we were approached by people who claimed to be students or academics. Their desire for English conversation and connections to the outside world bordered on the desperate. One self-described science professor spotted us walking along a side street and pulled over her car (twice!) to (double) check that we really wanted to be on foot. Her offers to drive us where we were going felt awkward for all concerned—we knew we didn’t really have a destination, and she knew she didn’t really have much waiting for her at the office. Getting ahead through education seems futile in Myanmar, where the government apparently closes universities and colleges on a whim, sometimes for months at a time.
Maybe the slice of the population we met wasn’t representative. Maybe in Myanmar there’s no such thing. Much more than its neighboring countries, it seems to be a place full of many ethnicities and landscapes and agendas. I was surprised by the variety of faces we encountered. The number of people whose people seemed to come from India and China was higher than I’m used to seeing in Bangkok.
Another surprise was the perfection of Shwedagon Pagoda. I knew it was going to be gold-plated and glittering, but I didn’t expect to feel so many forces swirling around, from the spiritual to the artistic, the touristic to the pilgrimatic. All roads lead there. A place to become restored, in case one’s faith has waned. Maybe the most stunning site in Asia.
Yet the same spot delivers quirkiness. Encircling the head of every single Buddha image on the Shwedagon grounds is a disconcerting neon halo. These recently installed rainbows, swirling and pulsing and spinning in endless different patterns, turn the serene into the silly.
We divided our eight days equally between Yangon and Bagan, not counting a quick break from the boundless Bagan to see where the road south goes from there. Abandoning ourselves to serendipity nearly always worked out, even though we often had no idea what was going on or what was being explained to us.
There was the time we got a little lost during a long hot stroll and ended up in the back of a pickup truck surrounded by 30 or 40 school kids and their lunch tiffins. The boys climbed onto the roof, the girls squeezed in wherever they could. Only one flat tire later, we arrived safely at a road we recognized.
We wondered at one point about the history of a handsome wooden monastery, but signage and local knowledge was in short supply, so we simply soaked up its beauty and called it good. Another time, the roly-poly abbot of a temple school mystified us with palm readings and palm-leaf Pali texts, before providing us a sparkling blessing in response to our donation. Sometimes we felt, by the time we got back to our hotel, that we hadn’t really done much. Oddly, Myanmar rewards not doing much. You just walk around for a while, take in the abstruseness, and end up feeling satisfied.
In Ratchaburi Province, to the west and slightly south of Bangkok, lies a district whose green, rolling hills call to mind Vermont. We drove out to Suan Phung on a Sunday morning, mostly because one of our crowd had heard about a chi-chi resort that was offering two-for-one coupons, good any night but Friday or Saturday. We all had Monday off because our office was closed for one of those American holidays that nobody else in Thailand celebrates.
Now I say chi-chi. What I really mean is a place that looks as if it were designed by a recent architecture grad. A cross between funky dorm room and Anasazi kiva. The dozen or so whitewashed cottages have little stars and moons carved into the walls. From the rooftop patios, reached by outdoor staircases, the view features sheep in the foreground. A long twisty driveway leads to the open-air breakfast room.
Everything felt newly unwrapped, as if the place had been a present from well-off Bangkokian parents to a child wanting to put art-school theory into practice. We had passed dozens of weekend getaways and stylish coffee shops with a similar vibe and vintage as our car left the plain and climbed Suan Phung’s slopes that morning.
It occurred to me to wonder who had lived there before. Signs of farming-for-a-living were scarcer than most places I’ve been in Thailand. An orchid nursery owner told us he had been in business for more than ten years, supplying stems to wholesalers in the big city, but to me that didn’t count as traditional agriculture. Burma is only a few ridges away—was this smuggling territory? The well-maintained roads had clearly been built for something besides tourism. Maybe mining? Military? The district doesn’t seem to be on Lonely Planet’s radar. We didn’t see any other foreigners.
Nothing much was happening. The six of us, and the two dogs we brought along, made up more than half the guests. We watched the dogs chase the sheep. We picked up the sheep. We posed with the sheep. On Monday, we photographed a lamb born during the night. That afternoon we headed back the way we had come, pausing for coffees and pictures and scenery.
All of the towns in this part of Spain are postcard towns. Their white houses have thick walls, small windows, and red tile roofs. The houses cascade down the hills on which these towns are nearly always built, but the houses do not flow onto the plains. At the bottom of the hill, the town stops and the agriculture begins. The people seem to prefer living close to other people and far from the fields where they work, rather than the other way around.
Perhaps the reason they live this way has to do with safety in numbers. Historically, these towns had to be defended. Or maybe in this region, where the dominant agricultural products come from trees rather than barns, it makes no sense to plant buildings when you could plant olives or almonds or oranges or whathaveyou. It has been lovely this week to hike along the ridges, looking out across several valleys dotted with ancient stands of produce. The views are old views, probably not much different than they appeared three or four centuries ago.
We are here celebrating our birthdays, 18 of us who mostly were born in the same year and then graduated from college together. It’s true that gathering in Albuquerque would have been simpler for most of us than getting to Andalucia. In the American Southwest we might have found similar landscapes. If we were really lucky we could even have rented a farmhouse similar to the one we’re enjoying here, where we wake up late and buy wine and cheese at a nearby market and set no goals other than to take one siesta per day.
But there are no postcard towns near Albuquerque like Iznájar, the tranquil hilltop village that presides over a nearby reservoir in this part of southern Spain. We climb the narrow streets of Iznájar, passing exquisite doors, courtyards, and plazas decorated with colorful tiles and pots. At the top we find the Arab castle-turned-church that dominates this fine photo taken by John Beach and the neat watercolor by Jay Mead, both of our group. We can see for miles. Swallows circle. Below, a cemetery clings to the side of the hill, its inhabitants stacked atop one another in the style of post office boxes.
We feel unplugged. Our lives here require no broadband connection. For a few moments we can concentrate on the picturesque, the flavorful (who knew that anchovies could be made to taste delicious?), and best of all, each other. We luxuriate in strolling the squiggly alleyways that seem only to exist in Europe, reverting to a pre-email era when to stay in touch we wrote… postcards!
Our viewpoint affords us a point of view we rarely seek out anymore, that of ourselves as teenagers. Old pals who reunite often become again the age they were when they first met. Surveying the olive hills that stretch to the horizon, we know without a doubt that we will live forever, that our friendships will never fade, and that if we ever return to this hilltop, the view will be unchanged.
Here I am in the place once known as Thailand’s Alcatraz. Evidently the deal was that if you were a political prisoner back in the ’30s and ’40s, you got sent to paradise. The catch was that you had to find your own food.
This island near the Malaysian border was thought to be perfect for banishing the inconvenient. About one third of the convicts died, but those who survived sometimes ended up OK, spending their non-foraging time on projects of their own choosing, from experimenting with agriculture to writing dictionaries. One of the most well-known prisoners was fictional, a soldier who remained loyal to the king in a book that most Thai people know called Four Reigns. I read that story last year, which is why the island’s name jumped out at me when I saw that the Siam Society was organizing a trip there.
Koh Tarutao is now a national park made up of more than fifty islands spread over a wide area. Many of these are ringed by coral reefs that disintegrate and form fine-looking beaches with sand the consistency of Coffee-mate®.
We are here during the region’s nicest time of year, the non-monsoon. While we have to be careful to slop on the sunscreen, pleasant winds make temperatures ideal. We spend our days snorkeling (one source claims that the park contains a quarter of the world’s fish species) and eating and watching the sun set. Not a bad four-day exile.
When a new fad rolls into Thailand it moves pretty fast. Fashion, film, and food trends crest and crash quickly. Likewise travel destinations.
We knew Pai was hip and happenin’ before we flew up there. A semi-artsy movie showcased the high altitude town a few weeks ago. Another clue was waiting for us on the road from Chiang Mai. At a restaurant where many buses stop, the long list of fruit juices and sodas on the menu concluded with “Add vodka to any of the above, 20 baht extra.”
Nearly every building on the outskirts looked brand new. Yet infrastructure hasn’t kept up with demand. Our group expected to get around on rented motorbikes; the supply was completely exhausted when we arrived early Saturday afternoon. We booked two nights at a newish resort where the gimmick is in-room hot springs; unfortunately, most guests prefer filling their personal tubs at roughly the same time of day, which meant that everybody’s flow was so slow that the water was already cold by the time there was enough to soak in. The night market streets weren’t wide enough to hold all the tourists walking up and down them.
In no time we had investigated the two must-see attractions. “Coffee in Love” is an all-the-rage java shop that figured in the movie. The “sea of fog”—misty valleys visible from above at several viewpoints before the sun gets too high—sounded cool enough to get us out of bed early on Sunday. Just as we were beginning to feel the first pangs of been-there-done-that, somebody suggested we drive a couple hours beyond the t-shirt vendors to a royal development project known as Pang Oung.
The roads soon got pretty narrow. We came to a checkpoint where we were told that our van wouldn’t be able to handle the turns ahead. Conveniently, a queue of pickup trucks was ready for precisely that Plan B, and one of them took us the rest of the way. A few minutes later, we seemed to have left Thailand and arrived in Switzerland. A camera-friendly reservoir, rimmed with pines and other plants rarely seen at this latitude, waited at the end of the road. We strolled the path along the water’s edge, pausing for photo after photo.
Happily, we had Pang Oung nearly to ourselves. A few people had pitched tents among the pines, but they didn’t seem to be in them. Nor were they riding the bamboo rafts or watching the swans on the water. It seemed that the royal project, which promotes reforestation in an area once known for opium production, had prepared itself to become a fad, but the wave had yet to arrive. Perhaps it never will.
We returned to Pai after nightfall to sample a few more of the pie selections at Cake-GO-O, a bakery that is now in vogue. My travel mates were glad to be back in town, but I had left my heart in Pang Oung.
We ate a late lunch in Long Xuyên before touring a Cao Đài temple that Tiger knew something about (Tiger knew something about nearly everything). He summarized the beliefs and traditions of a sect that borrows bits and pieces of dogma from lots of religious and philosophical thinkers, including Confucius and Jesus and Victor Hugo. We walked into the place unannounced, but were warmly welcomed by a guy who appeared to be a Cao Đài elder.
Tiger (tigernguyen2407 at yahoo dot com) walked us through the architecture (heavy on both sculpture and neon) of the structure, as if he did it every day. Even the elder seemed impressed, deferring to Tiger’s explanations rather stepping in to correct him on the fine points of Cao Đài theology. No doubt it is a complicated subject even for experts.
We then continued driving in the direction of Cambodia until we were about midway through Châu Thành district. We turned left and switched back to bicycles on road number 941, a long, straight ribbon of two-lane highway with water on either side of us. Like lots of the roads in the Delta, this one went for miles without any way to turn off of it other than by boat. Once you’re moving in that direction, you’re likely to stay in that direction until you get where you’re going.
This setup is great for riding, especially if you don’t really know where you’re going, and especially late in the day, when the sun isn’t too high and the glare off the water on either side isn’t too bright. We cruised along, enjoying the light motorized traffic that characterized all of the country roads we traveled during this trip. There were lots of bridges to cross over as we passed perpendicular canals. The houses were close to the road, often on stilts above the water, and were full of waving kids. Behind them were endless flooded rice fields. It was hard to know where the paddy stopped and river began.
Eventually Road 941 becomes surrounded by land again on both sides as it enters Tri Tôn. The town is medium sized, a pleasant change from the straight line and the nonstop horizon. On the public propaganda loudspeakers announcements are made in both Vietnamese and Khmer.
The road forked and we curved to the left, eventually finding ourselves on Road 955B. Here the landscape consisted of mountains, broken forests, and, because it was the season when the rice had just been harvested, large congregations of ducks in knee-high pens. I gather that the ducks feast on the rice chaff and help fertilize the next crop in the process.
An hour or so earlier, with the five-o’clock sun sparkling off the Mekong-flooded fields, I had thought that the biking couldn’t get any more effortless nor the scenery any more agreeable. Now, taking in the smell of evening cooking fires and the sounds of neighbors shouting across pastures to one another, I wanted the road to go on forever.
The road ended, of course, and the sun set. We stopped briefly in the gloom to swing through a museum (Nhà mồ Ba Chúc) dedicated to atrocities carried out by Khmer Rouge in that part of the world during the late 1970s. Even that ghastly memory couldn’t spoil our delightful afternoon. Our van turned right onto Road 955A, another long straight ribbon surrounded by water that would have also made a great ride if it hadn’t been dark. On the left was the 100-kilometer-long Vĩnh Tế canal, paralleling the Cambodian border.
We drove on in to Châu Đốc, the first big town that the Mekong meets as it flows out of Cambodia and prepares to splinter before finally arriving at the sea.
My friends Vinnie and Tina and I weren’t afraid to visit Vietnam. Just the same, we were haunted by ghosts familiar to most Americans of our generation. As children during the '60s, we heard about Saigon as a scary place. We arrived for the first time at Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport and instantly had flashbacks to news footage narrated by Walter Cronkite. This airstrip is of course the same one where so many American soldiers formed their first impression of Southeast Asia forty years ago.
Our first impression was of motorbikes. The streets can’t hold them all. People drive them as if they were boats. They flow onto the sidewalks, in all directions—upstream, downstream, into the eddy—as if following the tide or the current rather than the painted lines on the streets. We saw no sign of anyone in uniform; there were only people who tried their best to make some order of the chaos by standing in a central place and making what looked like tai chi movements.
Prayer helps when crossing the road on foot. “Just be Moses,” advises one guidebook. You have to trust that the surges of helmeted riders will part and pour around you. I’m told that in Hanoi things are even more chaotic.
We exorcised our ghosts with a visit to the War Remnants Museum and some walks along the wide boulevards. The old notions didn’t take long to break down: watching people walk their dogs or play hacky sack in the park made the place feel anything but war-torn. Just the same, we didn’t stay in town long. The hum of Hồ Chí Minh City wasn’t what we had come for.
Soon we were in the countryside, bicycling along long straight riverside roads on which motorbikes were in the minority. In an hour I estimated we saw something like 500 bicycles, 200 motorbikes, a dozen trucks, and only three passenger cars. This was the Mekong Delta, where waterways are much more common than pavement.
Two of my stereotypes did hold up in this part of the country. First was the cone hat. It was nearly universal among people on the road. It wasn’t our bikes that made us stand out—it was our bike helmets! The other stereotype was the áo dài, or traditional women’s costume. They were everywhere, especially on teenage girls biking home from school.
Our guide, Tiger Nguyen, provided the bridge between the Vietnam of our imaginations and the genuine article of today. He was born after the war ended, but both his father and grandfather were veterans of the South Vietnamese army, and he wasn’t shy about echoing their anti-communist rhetoric. Tiger wasn’t shy about much: he loved to talk and had an amazingly wide English vocabulary.
Over the course of two days, from Saigon to Châu Đốc, Tiger shared his opinion on subjects ranging from government corruption to the superior play of the national soccer team. He also loved jokes of all kinds, and had great comic timing. We came away with many new impressions of modern Vietnam (Cần Thơ seemed to me more capitalist than Chicago), as well as countless glimpses of the timeless (at the Cái Răng floating market, the produce du jour is hung on flagpoles in the bow of the boats that sell it).
Lots of people back here in Bangkok knew I had gone to Tibet. They asked me if I had fun. I had to answer “yes and no.” The country is thoroughly fascinating. My aunt is a great traveling companion. The monasteries and mountaintops were inspiring. Yet our emotions flipped all the time between exhilaration and despair. The beauty! The Burma-like oppression! The devotion! The death! The dung!
Since coming home I’ve looked over websites like freetibet.org, tibet.com, and savetibet.org. The picture they paint of life in Tibet matches what we saw. The sites describe a booming Tibetan economy that doesn’t benefit Tibetans. We noticed that migrant Chinese workers are getting the best jobs, and presumably maintaining their advantage through their language and networking. The websites also confirm our sense that although Beijing is sponsoring development, it’s in buildings, power plants, and roads—advances that give the advantage to a police state. No similar gains are being made in education, healthcare, and other areas that build up a people.
I realize that we, and the websites, look at Tibet with a strong Western bias. Our viewpoints are probably as far from the middle way as the Chinese government’s are. Maybe the Dalai Lama would laugh if he saw our wish list for his country.
But I still hope that the millions of prayers flying out of prayer wheels and prayer flags around Tibet lead to dialogue and a political solution there—soon. My aunt’s frequent tears during our trip came in response to the rapid extinction of Tibet, and to the nearly endless series of protests and clampdowns that has caused so much suffering up on the plateau.
As tourists, we won’t ever experience or understand most of that suffering. But we did witness enough to doubt that the two groups now sharing those wide open spaces will live happily ever after. The Chinese government’s continual deployments of additional troops there, its appetite for resource extraction, and the ongoing restrictions on religion, travel, and speech, make me suspect that Tibetan culture will go the way of Native American culture in the U.S.
I hope I’m wrong about that. Not only does the world need more middle-way success stories, it needs models to address the rights of people everywhere whose principles and customs are distinctive. If we can’t figure out more ways to accommodate everyone’s views, then it’s going to be a pretty sad century.
Because she is so good at reaching out to people, my aunt knows a few Tibetans well enough to invite them to dinner. One group was so much fun, and their joy in being together so obvious, that we met up with them twice in the same week.
It was hard to say what was more entertaining: the four Tibetans joking in Tibetan about this and that, or us listening to them laugh and then explain the jokes in their excellent English. Not everything we talked about was light-hearted, but these women had a way of smiling through tough times that made us want to bottle up their high spirits and share them with the whole planet.
They were also proud of their educations and of their country, without ever sounding superior. Out of nowhere one of them said, referring to her computer, “Guess what’s on my screen saver?” Our first thought was a picture of the Dalai Lama. We didn’t say it out loud, partly because that guess was too obvious, and partly because we weren’t sure how to refer to him in a public restaurant. Do you say “His Holiness?” “HH?” “He who must not be named?” She helped us out with a hint: “it’s not what you’re thinking.”
“A picture of your family?”
“Nooo,” she smiled. “Too easy.”
“Your village?”
“Getting closer.”
“A yak?”
She clapped her hands with delight before answering her own question. “You almost got it,” she squealed. “It’s yak shit!”
Of course. What better than dung to symbolize her herder childhood and the struggles of life in Tibet? The women collapsed on each other with laughter.
The guest house at the end of the road was sounding awfully appealing. Though our several-hour drive had been wonderful, the weather was turning foul and some of us were feeling the thousand meters of altitude gain since Lhasa.
All day the sights and sounds felt like Tibet—or at least the Tibet that lives in our imaginations. Ganden Monastery, celebrating its 600th anniversary this year, bustled. Monks in every one of the dozens of rooms we passed through were sewing, carving, chanting, practicing the long horns. Villages along the way featured houses that all faced the same direction, backs to the wind. Tea shops sold yak butter tea by the grimy thermos-full. Nomads, wool spinners, herders, pipe smokers, apron wearers—everyone seemed to come straight out of a coffee table book.
Yet we were ready for a rest. It was becoming dark, cold, and wet. The allure of monasteries had faded at the last one, which is famous throughout the country for the practice of “sky burials.” In this tradition, corpses are left on long flat rocks for vultures to dispose of. As we drove up a narrow canyon toward the Tidrum Nunnery, everyone’s thoughts turned toward a good night’s sleep.
Prayer flags greeted us at the end of the road. These colorful cloths, which are thought to promote peace and compassion as their mantras are blown by the wind, stretched far up the canyon and out of sight. From below came the calming sound of a rapid river. “I’ll go check to see what kinds of rooms are left,” said our guide.
The travel agency hadn’t provided much detail about the accommodation. If it had, the description might have sounded like this: “a glimpse of the way most of the world spends the night.” In other words, the beds were basic and public. Though we were off the ground and covered by blankets, I knew that my traveling companions had been hoping for something a little bit less like camping. They definitely hadn’t counted on sharing their unheated lodging with countless Tibetan pilgrims.
The way to make the best of the situation was to remind myself that we’d spent the day enjoying the “real” Tibet, and that this guest house was an extension of that. Dressed in everything I had brought along, and carrying a toothbrush and towel, I headed down a set of slippery stone steps in search of the communal bathroom. What I found was a long open trench covered by a corrugated tin roof. As I brushed my teeth, grateful for the scent of the toothpaste, a pilgrim walked in wearing only a robe and rubber sandals. He nodded at me and straddled the trench. From his hindquarters soon came volcano noises.
I left him to his business. On the way out I noticed other men walking around in just robes and sandals. It seemed an unlikely coincidence that so many of the nunnery’s guests would be both male and out for an evening stroll in the midst of a drizzle. Following them led to my discovery of the antidote for what otherwise could have been a long night. Tidrum Nunnery was home to a hot spring.
And not just any hot spring. These pools were world class. Gently carbonated, just over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, open to the stars—they don’t get much better than that. Joining eight or ten naked, intoning pilgrims, my attitude about the guest house quickly shifted. What at first seemed like a hardship post was in fact heaven.
My springmates stopped chanting long enough to warn me away from the patch of nettles growing along one edge of the pool. One part of me knew I shouldn’t stay too long, but another part was loving it enough to consider settling in until I simply moved on to my next life and could let my body be taken down the road for a proper sky burial.
After about fifteen minutes I looked up at the lone decoration, a framed photograph of a monk. Someone tried explaining the significance of the picture. Or perhaps he was telling me that my formerly white skin was looking lobster-like. I chose to see the one-way conversation as a sign that it was time to go. My sleep wasn’t half bad.
At around 4am I was still blissed out enough not to mind when the pilgrims in the next room got up and loudly ate breakfast. At 5:30, when they came back from their first trip to the pools that day, I got up and took another turn myself. It’s hard to imagine a better way to start, or end, a day.
That guest house will stay in our memories a long time, though each of us will tell a very different story about it. Shortly after sunrise we left it behind. The wide valley of the Drigung Chu River led us back toward Lhasa. Our car slowed for goats in the road. We stopped to take pictures of the yak on the mountainsides, and of their dung, piled high on the village walls in the shape of large cookies, waiting to be burned for fuel.
Today my aunt and her friend went off on appointments they’d arranged long before, taking our guide along as a translator, and leaving me to fend for myself. A small hillside hermitage intrigued me. It sits high above a monastery we’d visited two days ago.
Going there alone wasn’t advisable. Our guide told me that as the holder of our travel permit he would definitely get in trouble if I were ever stopped and questioned while walking on my own in the mountains outside Lhasa. He suggested that a friend of his could stand in for him.
She was a great substitute. Even though her English wasn’t quite as good as his (or perhaps because it wasn’t?), she never complained about the hike. I thought she might roll her eyes a bit after we looked down from our first destination and spotted the switchbacking trail that somehow we had missed on the way up, forcing us to bushwhack. Instead, when I said, “Where to next?” she answered in classic Himalayan fashion, “It’s your wish.”
We followed the contour, admiring the views of the city, finally crossing over a ridge into a new valley. All told we stopped at three different secluded religious places of varying sizes. As was the case at every such community we visited throughout Tibet, the residents made sure we knew that the current census was way down from previous years. The typical refrain went something like, “We used to have 50 monks here, now only two.” Unspoken were the reasons for the drop: restrictions from Beijing that dictate the age ranges and teachings of monastics, and arrests that target monastics during political demonstrations. We never once saw a picture of the Dalai Lama, or heard his name spoken. What if Catholics couldn’t mention the pope?
This trip is my aunt’s seventh to Tibet. Her cultural literacy impressed me two years ago when we met up in Beijing. She had more Chinese language skills than I suspected, and she clearly knew her way around.
Slowly I’m coming to understand how she comes by that literacy. Her comfort zone is simply way bigger than average. She thinks nothing of striking up conversations with strangers, regardless of whether she has two words in common or 200,000. Sometimes she’ll pull up a chair at a neighboring table in a restaurant, either because those people are eating something that looks appealing, or because somebody there strikes her fancy: an old grandma, a cute baby, a wrinkled face sporting a stylish hat.
Or she’ll reach out to a person she senses is in need. Just today a pilgrim couple stopped outside our hotel’s front step. My aunt greeted them with the customary Tibetan blessing, “Tashi Delai,” which then somehow led to their request, via translation by the front desk staff, for medical help. The woman, probably in her mid-50s, complained of non-specific eye problems.
Talk about asking the right person! As it happened, we had eaten the night before with a person connected to a medical NGO in Lhasa. This friend of a friend soon had us pointed to a free eye clinic on the edge of town, where the woman got seen right away and came away with a year’s supply of eye drops and the comfort of knowing that she doesn’t need surgery. All it cost us was taxi fare and a couple hours of our free afternoon.
Most people wouldn’t have established the connection in the first place, let alone followed up on it. But with just a handful of Tibetan phrases, my aunt was able to pull off a random act of kindness that, if multiplied by just a small number of the travelers currently jetting around the world’s friction spots, could bring peace in those places many steps closer.
Yet my aunt also cried this evening. The loss of the Tibet she saw on her first visit, over twenty years ago, saddens her beyond words. Further, she continues to struggle with the tension between admiring her many Chinese friends and seeing how much discontent their government’s policies and investments have sown in Tibet.
Yesterday the Chinese government stopped issuing new permits to visit Tibet. We weren’t affected because we were already in. The ban will probably last about three weeks, because of fears that the 60th anniversary of the 1949 Communist victory might inspire protests in Lhasa. This kind of thing isn’t rare—foreign travel to the capital has been stopped three times over the last 18 months. I suspect tonight won’t be the last night my aunt cries here, however.
In the end Myanmar wasn’t as weird as I expected. Sure, the men wear garments that to outsiders look like long skirts. And yes, you have to feel despair over the wackiness of its dictators. Yet I also sensed in Myanmar a normalcy that might be a reason for optimism about the future (if it doesn’t become an excuse for inertia).
