Michael Batson

When the agent at Seven Diamonds travel booked my bus ticket I distinctly heard the English word “foreigner” mentioned. I paid 1000 kyat more than at my hotel for the ticket to Bagan but the hotel charged 2000 kyat to take you to the bus station whereas Seven Diamonds’ fee included the pick-up. The agent told me the bus took five hours, though this turned out to be incorrect. No one in Myanmar seemed to know how long it took to get anywhere by bus, and if you had a guide book, they were wrong also sometimes by as much as 100 percent.

During the tourist high season a speed boat runs from Mandalay to the ancient centre of Bagan, Myanmar’s version of Angkor. The journey takes a few hours and costs US$40. At low season however, there is the local boat. It takes 17 hours, costs US$10 and leaves at 5am. You spend all day sitting on the wooden floor. The boat pulls in at various stops along the river and halts for up to an hour before continuing on. It can be a long and very uncomfortable day. Then there is the bus, one at 8am with air-con and one at 8.30 without. The former costs 12,000 kyat, depending on where you buy your ticket.

The bus was the local, a battered old Japanese doubtless destined for the wreckers in the land of Nippon, but granted a reprieve and shipped to needy Myanmar instead. There was minimal legroom especially for lanky Europeans so with some seat rearranging, the crew of three placed four of us tourists in the back row. One other guy got two seats to himself.

I was seated next to an Argentine domiciled in Barcelona, a Dutchman and a young American on his first trip outside the States. Josh was from Minnesota and had been travelling for over three months starting in Turkey and the Middle East before heading to Southeast Asia. He was softly spoken and I was interested to hear his thoughts never having been away from home before and especially travelling in the Middle East. He said he hadn’t had too many problems, and expressed measured thoughts on the places he’d been.

Once the driver and his two assistants wrestled the dining room table on board we were off, and on time at 8am. There was the usual music blasting out from the television above the driver who wrestled with the right-hand drive on crowded roads through Mandalay’s suburbs dodging all manner of transport.

Behind the driver’s seat was a poster advertising the Barclay’s English Premier League sporting the champions, Manchester United, Myanmar’s favourite team.

The quality of the road deteriorated shortly after we took the turn-off for the airport and never improved all the way to Bagan. The road is narrow, one lane wide, so whenever a vehicle approached, one or the other had to slow almost to a stop and drive off into the roadside to avoid a head-on collision.

Ox-driven carts are a common sight on roads and are wider than a bus, so the vehicle of the 20th century reduced speed to match that of a vehicle of medieval times.

The road was riddled with pot holes where the seal existed at all. Half the journey was on dirt and rutted by daily use to the extent where the bus vibrated with such violence I doubted my computer would survive.

The countryside was extremely dry, as this is Myanmar’s dry zone. Despite this being the wet season which produced violent thunderstorms in Yangon, the Mandalay province seemed entirely without rain. Just as well as bridges were largely absent and every waterway bar one was forded. At one point we approached one river, the only one I saw with any water, only to discover the choice for crossing was a rickety wooden bridge incapable of supporting little more than foot traffic, or driving through the water. Without hesitating the driver was straight into the water.

Some waterways were hundreds of metres wide but bone dry. I had visions of flash floods sweeping vehicles and their occupants to their deaths.

Sometimes we’d stop in the middle of nowhere to let someone off or allow a passenger on board. At a roadside café I bought a can of Coke. My “change” was folded neatly and sealed inside a small plastic bag. The note was so worn and so dirty I could not identify the denomination. I was so amazed at being given this money that I kept it for a souvenir but later had to surrender it to an irate taxi driver at Yangon Airport to cover the taxi entrance fee, it being the last kyats I possessed.

Later there were candlestick cacti lining the roadside. Rather fitting as the television sounds had gone from pop music to Burmese country and western complete with steel guitars.

Josh had been in Syria when the revolts broke out and as the situation deteriorated and the US Embassy advised all its citizens to get out he jumped in a shared taxi to Jordan. He didn’t realise that the route taken was through Daraa where the troubles first began, and the Syrian army was beginning its bloody crackdown.

The road was a dual carriageway but as they closed in on Daraa the traffic in the other lane stopped. Then there was thick black smoke from tyres set alight. Tanks then appeared coming straight towards them. One of the other passengers was a Syrian journalist who spoke some English. “What do we do?” asked Josh.

“Well,” said the journalist, “if the army starts shooting we should get out of the car and run really fast into the desert.” Hardly a comforting prospect the young American decided.

He asked if I ever wanted to visit the US and I said yes but didn’t have the heart to tell him I had no desire to be biometrically scanned for the privilege. His views of Cuba were interesting. He wanted to go there and North Korea also, seemingly as he was fascinated by the prospect of visiting communist countries. I got the impression there was some hungover Free World indoctrination circulating. I told him I’d heard the Cuban ambassador give a talk on US-Cuba relations and he had described the status quo as being like a ex-married couple; Cuba had wanted the divorce but that the US has wanted to stay married and like the bitter ex-partner was still sulking about it. He found that quite amusing as his version of events was still grounded from during the days of the Missile Crisis.

As we entered Bagan one of the Dutchmen called out “In the house”. I didn’t know what he was talking about until it was explained that because visitors to Myanmar were unclear about whether it was alright to discuss the famous lady openly, this group had decided whenever evidence of her was seen “in the house” was the euphemism for the lady who had been under house arrest for so long.

The evidence was a sign on a house for the National Union for Democracy, her party. In Yangon I had faced a similar dilemma. Not knowing whether her name be mentioned or not I referred to Aung Sun Suu Kyi in a taxi as “the famous lady” to a Burmese who then started openly talking about her in front of the driver, albeit in English. My friend, U Tin Tut, told me he had met the famous lady, which I’d believe. Walking around the streets of Yangon with him he seemed to know a great many people, so why not?

A western-educated daughter of the elite, the famous lady’s is very much the product of the accident of birth, she being the daughter of Burma’s independence hero, Aung Sung. It is the great tragedy of Burma that when she was two years old, her father was assassinated along with half-a-dozen others of the new cabinet on the eve of Burma’s independence. Already famous in life he was “made” in death, as he didn’t live to experience disappointment or rejection, or indeed failure of a newly independent Burma racked by ethnic divisions, army mutiny and communist insurrection.

Aung Sung had an ambiguous political creed, which could be best described as a kind of populist democrat. A “non-doctrinaire socialist”, who believed in “one man one vote”, but only so long as it delivered a government in the peoples’ interest. Unfortunately for Burma, this proviso left room for political intervention by strongmen, something later much exploited by military dictators.

The British loathed him, especially Churchill who thought him a “Quisling” and a “Fascist” for his time with the Japanese, but then his father, Randolph, was largely responsible for the eventual conquest of Burma in 1885-86, so such comments smack more of personal spite.

Burma’s nationalists had been in partnership with Burmese Communist Party but the latter split in ideological and personal factions before independence, with neither the Vietnamese nor Chinese model triumphing. The British were keen to keep Burma within the Commonwealth and out of Soviet clutches. If Burma had become a communist state as later happened with Vietnam, the Cold War in Asia may have taken a very different turn.

But that was more recent history, Bagan is ancient history. When I finally arrived there, the famous lady was there also. I’ve had longer bus journeys, over rougher roads in worse vehicles also undertaken when ill, but the road from Mandalay to Bagan, when all the factors came into play, was a trip I was really glad when it was over.