The Peace Correspondent (26 page)

At Pagan's small airport, we pay the compulsory US$10 for entrance to the monuments for two days, declining the extra fee for additional days. No one checks while we are there, so we don't pay anything when we decide to stay longer.

The ancient site, once known as “The city of four million pagodas,” is actually a village of 5,000 pagodas, gathered around 2,230 monuments. Numbers aside, that is enough for the most insatiable sightseer.

On our way to the modest Thante Hotel in Old Pagan, one of the few still there, we pass some truly magnificent ruins, in many shapes and degrees of disrepair. But they are not even important ruins worthy of guidebook mention. Out hotel is a collection of wooden bungalows scattered around parklike grounds alongside the Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady) River. Around us, they are building new bungalows, out of brick and terra-cotta tiles in what appears to be a kind of neo-Bagan Ruins style of architecture.

Flicking away a scorpion, or some other kind of deadly insect, from our bathroom with a towel, I inspect our room. It is plain and basic, but the setting superb, with a porch overlooking the river and hills on the other side, one topped by a monastery.

We can explore this superb 42-square-kilometer collection of ruins by car, horse cart or bicycle. Over three days, we try all three. It is impossible to see every ruin, so we abandon any plans and visit sites by whim, like attending a great sightseeing buffet, sampling a Mon-style temple here, a tiny stupa there. Vegetation, weather and vandalism have reduced many of the structures to mounds of rubble, but numerous intact temples tower over the dusty, scrub-covered plains like cathedrals in the wild.

There are some “musts,” however: Bupaya Pagoda, the oldest in Pagan, for its riverside setting; Nathlaungkyaung, the only Hindu temple; Thatbyinnyu, the tallest in Pagan, a squarish structure with a dome in the middle; and Ananda temple, one
of the largest and best preserved, with its elegant stupa and long shaded arcade of shops selling lacquer ware and gilded objects.

While strolling the arcade there one day, I hear the tinkling sound of a temple bell which attracts me to one shop. There, a cheerful lady, her face plastered with white powder, is selling the bells, as well as flowers, the wonderful scent of jasmine mixing with that of incense and burning candle wax from the temple.

At another stall, where I buy a copy of George Orwell's classic Burmese Days, the young salesman asks me for Canadian maple leaf pins. Apparently, such national symbol pins are popular here, the girls wearing them as earrings. He wants them for his sister, and I am able to give him a matched pair.

These sites are so spread out, that touring Pagan is a peaceful affair away from a few of the most popular pagodas. Often, the only sounds are temple bells, birdcalls and the clinking coming from the bamboo scaffolding as workers rebuild a crumbling temple.

Back at the hotel that evening, we sit on the porch watching the sun set, listening to the chugging of diesel engines coming from boats on the river packed high with bananas, and shouts from children playing in the river. Along the muddy shore, they run this way and that, changing directions like a flock of brown birds.

At dawn, we hire bikes from the Co-operative Hotel for 150 kyat (just over $1) a day. These aren't the stylish, sturdy knobby-tired mountain bikes preferred by hardcore modern cyclists, but girls' bikes, with basket carriers in front. They are adequate for this flat, paved terrain, however. Starting at about 7:30 am, we peddle down the dusty, betel-nut splattered road and onto the highway, heading south to New Bagan, a village created several years ago when the government forcibly moved the residents from the original Pagan.

Even on the main road, traffic is limited to a few buses, some horse carts piled high with rural folk, open-backed vans packed with passengers, and longyi-clad opportunists with Mickey
Mouse T-shirts scooting by on motorbikes shouting out “Good morning, my friend,” “Hello,” “Bye-bye,” and “Buy rubies?” A woman follows us on a bike, wants to change money, and offers “flim” for my camera.

A well-preserved temple off the road to the left attracts our attention, so we bike over. It is Nagayon, now locked, but the drinks vendor smoking an acrid-smelling brown cheroot, like French Gitanes, sends for the key keeper to open it. We take off our shoes and scramble barefooted over the scorching ground to the cool inner temple. Dark corridors lead to a chamber with small terra-cotta Buddhas in the alcoves, staring out of the gloom. We have this magnificent historic relic all to ourselves.

Are there are snakes here? I ask a woman vendor outside the temple, making a waving motion with my hand. She understands immediately, and laughs. Not in the temple, her son says, because it is cool. They like to be in between rocks in the hot sun. That is good news.

Later on our random sightseeing, disaster strikes. Midday, miles from our hotel, at the main New Bagan intersection, one of the bikes gets a flat. It is the hottest part of the day, the temperature pushing three figures Fahrenheit, and there is not a garage in sight. What now?

The enormity of the situation has hardly set in when Mr. Ko Nine Win from the Khan Wa Restaurant comes out, his cheery smile displaying betel-nut-stained teeth. Sending his son to the village to get the flat fixed, he sits us in rattan planters' chairs on his restaurant's breezy porch and serves beer and excellent French fries with a sweet-and-zingy sauce. Twenty minutes later, his son is back with the bike. Drinks, food and bicycle repairs come to 210 kyat (less than $2). And he probably doesn't even know it is Visit Myanmar Year.

Down the dusty road, a sign catches our eye: “The only first class restaurant in Bagan serving traditional Myanmar cuisine. For reservations, telephone 01 60228.” True to its word, the Riverview, though modest, proves to be the town's top restaurant, for
setting as well as food. Sitting under a neem tree, which drops its minuscule blossoms on the table and on our hair, we study the extensive menu. The kitchen offers soups, quail's egg or duck's web salad, Myanmar-style chicken, pork or prawn curries or diced chicken with chili (large crispy dry-roasted chilies as red as the Burmese rubies). So we feast on chicken with cashew nuts, minced and fried pork, a whole river fish, noodles and rice. A good lunch for two, with Chinese beer, the cheapest kind in Burma and a tasty brew, comes to less than 1,500 kyat (about $13).

As we are leaving, I hear the Englishman at the next table comment, “I still have half my quacks left.” He is not, apparently, talking about ducks on his plate, but the kyats.

Another day, we hire a car to go north, to Nyaung Oo, an interesting, but messy village with betel nut shops and women collecting water at the village well. At the market, hopeful hawkers peddle attractive marionettes, betel nut cutters, rubies, slippers, longyis (sarongs) and monk's bags (called Shan bags here) beloved by latter-day hippies, and necessary for locals because longyis don't have pockets. Like so much of Burma, the simple village seems to be lost in the 1960s.

Nearby, the glittering Shwezigon Temple is a dazzling, living place of worship compared to the somber stone temples of Old Pagan. In this age-old scene, mischievous young monks and worshipping grannies stroll the open, paved grounds under sun umbrellas, while gaunt temple dogs doze in the shade, not the midday sun.

Later, back in Old Pagan, men with horse and carts hustle their services around the main hotels, offering private tours for $10 a day. That evening, we take a sunset tour with EyEy and his horse, Madonna, a name favored for Pagan horses, for some reason. As we trot off, EyEy tells me his name was Koko, but there were too many of them around, so he changed it.

The little horse takes us on a circuit of some of the nearer temples and pagodas, those most popular with mini-bus tourists on a tight schedule. When we linger inside the small Ananda
Okkyaung temple, trying to escape a voluble French group, we get locked inside the dark, dank sanctuary. It is like being in jail until our shouts bring the key keeper, who tries to solicit a tip for letting us out. Later, we hesitate before entering the long, low Shinbinthalyaung temple, but there are no potential jailers here. Inside, the reclining Buddha, thought to date back to the 11th century, lies like a giant taking a perpetual nap.

At dusk, Koko and Madonna deposit us at the great, squarish, Shwesandaw, the current temple of choice for sunset viewing. Koko and Madonna got $10 -- a good day's income in that impoverished country - and they head off happily down the road, the sun flashing off the carriage's brass fixtures.

It was money they would never have earned if we had succumbed to the call to boycott travel to Burma. Some Western liberals urge tourists not to travel to Burma, and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner, opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, has called for a boycott of Visit Myanmar Year 1996. (Curiously, the spirited lady's weekly appearance to speak to her followers outside her house has become one of Rangoon's tourist attractions.)

These Westerners will let ordinary Burmese suffer for the Westerner's ideals, arguing that all funds from tourists go to the government. Nonsense. The sweet little girls selling lacquer ware in the temples, the taxi drivers, the charming, cheroot-puffing elderly ladies hawking delicious, ice cold Mandalay lager, all profited from my visit to Burma, as they will from others who sensibly ignore the boycott.

With that thought, I head up Shwesandaw's steep, narrow stairs leading like stone ladders up the five receding terraces on four sides. At the temple-top vantage point, dozens of visitors from around the world, all ignoring the boycott call, gather for the nightly show. The dying sun turns the dry land all around us the reddish hue of monk's robes, illuminating a fantastic panorama of temples stretching to the hazy horizon. As the great red ball drops down behind the hills across the powerful Irrawaddy River, an ox cart passes below, only the squeaking of the axles
breaking the silence.

The complimentary solar show concluded, baggy European tourists scramble down the high steps sideways, like great pink crabs, and clamber onto mini-vans or bicycles. And we climb into the pony cart for the ride home, as a majestic silver disc floats in the sky behind the ancient pagodas, the moon over Myanmar.

IN the crowded Sunday Market in Ranau, Borneo, the hot, damp air smells of fresh and dried fish, pungent local spices and grilling chicken wings. Ethnic Kadazan women chewing huge wads of tobacco gather round aggressive city hawkers peddling cheap manufactured goods spread out on blankets before them. Placid, passive country folk in towel turbans or cone straw hats squat under umbrellas before pyramids of produce from jungle gardens.

Ranau's golden-onion mosque glows in the haze. An itinerant sorcerer displays sections of tiger's penis (for virility) and charms offering protection from forest animals. The thumpthumpthump of Kadazan tapes overpowers the rock music, hoarse-voiced hawkers, and a blind beggar squatting in the dust playing Three Blind Mice over and over on a harmonica.

Over this hectic Asian scene, poking through the grey morning mists, broods sacred Mount Kinabalu, Southeast Asia's highest peak (4,101 meters) that I will try to climb tomorrow. Kinabalu will prove to be more than a walk in the rainforest.