Central Yangon
I am about to leave Burma after an all-too-short visit of five days. This is a fascinating place, and it will take my a long time to process all that I have seen, sort through my photographs, and collect my thoughts sufficiently to write a thoughtful blog entry (Update: Now done, though I don’t know how thoughtful.)So, in the mean time, here are some random and undigested scribblings from my travel notes.
- Arriving in Yangon is like going back in time a few decades. Most of the cars on the road seem to date back to the 1970s, many of the buses look even older. Much of the taxi fleet in this city seems to consist of ancient Toyotas, very few of them with air conditioning.
- Mysteriously, although the traffic drives on the right hand side of the road in Myanmar, most vehicles are right-hand-drive. I have asked three taxi drivers about this. All gave the same answer, “Many tourists ask that.” Pressed, two of three told me that the government had decided in the 1960s to switch traffic to the right side of the road, but they could not explain why vehicles of later vintages were still right hand drive.
- Most buildings are a lot older than the cars on the road. There are lots of colonial era buildings around, the kind that have been demolished to make way for newer structures in cities like Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.
- On my first day, I wandered the streets of central Yangon, taking pictures. During my hours of wandering, I didn’t encounter any other westerners, nor did I see many people who looked as though they might be tourists. I certainly didn’t see anyone else with a camera (I suppose I should read too much into this. Most tourists I know don’t spend their time walking down narrow streets lined with stores selling school exercise books, vendors selling rubber stamps, and the makers of plastic signs.)
- Despite that I was clearly an oddity on the streets of Yangon, nobody appeared to pay much attention to me at all. I took photographs without any problems and, most surprisingly, hardly anyone tried to sell me anything. Quite a few people, however, did ask me whether I had any dollars to exchange. When I did need to exchange dollars, I was hustled down an alleyway and into a small shop, where my hurried transaction took place.
- On my second day in the city, I took a taxi to the Shwe Dagon Pagoda on a low hill in middle of the city. Of all of the temples and pagodas I have visited in Southeast Asia, this was the most impressive. It is dominated a large gold stupa, surrounded by huge courtyard containing numerous shrines and small buildings. Hardly anybody here appeared to be a tourist, and again, hardly a westerner in sight.
- A few hours after visiting Shwe Dagon, I was walking along a street in the city center, a few kilometers away, when a Buddhist monk carrying an umbrella, greeted me. “Weren’t you at the pagoda this morning?” he asked me. “I saw you there.” He asked me where I was from, and where I was headed. “May I walk with you?” he said, and we chatted all the way back to my hotel. As we parted company, he told me that I should come back to the pagoda in the evening. “That’s the best time to see it,” he said. The monk was one of the few people who chatted openly with me here.
- As I toured the city with a taxi driver today, I noticed at least four new high rise buildings in Yangon that were apparently unoccupied. I asked my driver, who told me that they were all empty because the owners did not have government permission to occupy them. Government permission, he suggested, was dependent on money changing hands. His driver’s license, he told me, had cost him $300.
- If corruption is indeed endemic here, as my guide intimated, I didn’t see the kind of evidence of its fruits as I have seen in Cambodia. There is lots of evidence of wealth in Phnom Penh, most notably in the extraordinary number of late-model Lexus SUVs driven by people (often government officials) whose salaries could not possibly cover the costs of such vehicles. I saw very few such displays of wealth in Yangon.
- My driver pointed out a part of the city where a large number of people appeared to be hanging around on the sidewalks. He told me that they were waiting to apply for passports. I lifted my camera to take a photograph. “No, no!” he said, “Too many information people around here.”
- Our first stop was a large park in the center of Yangon. In the middle of the park was a lake, and on the lake was what appeared to be an ornate floating restaurant. I photographed it from afar, and as we approached the entrance to the building, I prepared to take another picture. A woman who appeared to be the restaurant hostess waved her hand at me, “No pictures.” As we walked away, my guide explained the reason, “Lots of important people come here.”
- After visiting the park, my guide suggested we visit a temple an hour or so away, just outside Yangon. I agreed, and we headed off in the rickety taxi, the driver and me in front, and my guide in the back seat. (I shouldn’t call him my guide. He told me that if anyone asked, I was his friend, since he didn’t have a permit to be a guide.)
- As we headed out of town, the road got bumpier and bumpier. There didn’t
Taxis on the road to Kyauktan
appear to be too many provide cars on the road; most people appeared to be getting around in old, crowded buses and taxis consisting of pick-up truck with benches in the back. (The capacity of these taxis is not limited by the number of people who can sit on the benches. When the benches are full, passengers stand between them. When there is no more standing room, they hang out of the back.)
- The electricity supply in Yangon seems to be shaky, to put it mildly. During each of the four nights I have been here, the power has gone off at least ten times, usually for no more than a thirty seconds or so. Staff in my hotel carried on about their duties as though nothing had happened. It was with some trepidation that I took the elevator to my seventh floor room.
- Good news for the makers of carbon paper. You still have a market in Burma.
Donald N. Rallis
June 3, 2010
Yangon, Myanmar/Burma.
For more photographs of Yangon and its environs, please visit my Picasa web album.