Monthly Archives: February 2015

Warmly Welcome on the Chindwin River, Myanmar (Burma)

#5 of series of posts from Burma that started here. Check the list of Recent Posts in the right margin.–>

Every stop on the Chindwin had its own unique charm — especially the aptly-named village of Warmly Welcome.

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This guy lived in that haystack.  We ran across him (and his haystack) just outside a village called Warmly Welcome.  He smiled for a picture, pointed us toward town, and sent us on our way.

 

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Many villages we visited promptly brought out (or took us to) their oldest resident. In Warmly Welcome, that was this lady. She was sweeter than this image might lead you to assume.

Late one afternoon, we saw a path leading through a gap in the rocky cliffs lining the eastern bank of the Chindwin. White paint on the rocks spelled out the Burmese words for “Warmly Welcome” in three-foot-high letters. We couldn’t pass up an invitation like that.  After anchoring the boat and climbing through the gap, we soon saw farmland and a small village in the valley a mile or so beyond. A short hike through the rice fields (dry this time of year) got us to the edge of town. It turned out that Warmly Welcome wasn’t (just) a greeting; that was the actual name of the town. By the time we got there, half the town (“25 houses,” we were told) had come out to see the foreigners. They told us we were the only outsiders who had ever visited,** and the only non-Burmese people they’d ever seen in person.

 

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The path over the cliff to the village of Warmly Welcome. That’s Toey, one of our “boat boys,” leading the way.

 

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A young-ish monk at the village of Warmly Welcome. He was bashful at first, but actually spoke some English. We were at least 30 minutes from the river, so we had to hurry to get back over the cliff to the river before dark.

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By the time we made it through the valley to the edge of town, a big group had formed to check out the foreigners.

We really were warmly welcomed in Warmly Welcome. And they surely seemed happy in their little valley enclave. They invited us to stay for dinner, but we had wandered a long way from our boat and the sun had already set, so we had to get moving. Truth is, we were warmly welcomed in (almost***) every village we stumbled into, even though we were total strangers who showed up on their shores literally at random.   Warmly Welcome was my favorite stop, but it’s just one of 20 or so villages we visited. Lots more to come from the Chindwin.

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Footnotes?!?:

* An “aptonym” (or “aptronym”) is a proper name that is also a real English word that is (maybe amusingly) especially appropriate — especially “apt”.  Think of  lightning-fast runner Usain Bolt, the virtuous Dudley Do-Right, or Thomas Crapper (inventor of the toilet).  I’m adding the hospitable village of Warmly Welcome to that list.

** The British controlled the region for 124 years, and the Japanese took control for a few years during World War II.  So I’d guess that surely they’d seen outsiders at some point in the last century or so.  And they’ve seen DVDs and other media, so they knew what we looked like.

*** Why do I say “almost”?  One stop was an attempt to see an elephant camp.  We’d heard that they used elephants to carry heavy loads (from mining or timber, I think).  When we stopped and asked where to find them, we got the run-around — and we surely never got to see any elephants.  The local authority watched us closely to ensure that we’d all got back on the boat and headed on down the river.  It’s unclear what was going on there.  My guess was that they feared we were PETA-type animal rights activists there to protest or do something to protect the elephants.  Just a guess.  But even those guys were polite — they were just entirely unhelpful.

Scenes from the Chindwin River, Burma (Myanmar)

#4 of series of posts from Burma that started here

The core and focus of my trip to Burma was a 400-mile trip down the remote Chindwin River. Most of it was very isolated, with tiny villages peaking through the trees on the river banks.  Two or three times a day, we would choose a spot, tie up the boat, and head ashore.  We spent lots of time on land, but here are scenes from (and of) the river itself.

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That’s our boat on the left, anchored in the middle of the Chindwin. It was the dry season, so the river was shallow and full of sandbars.

 

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No, this was not the boat I was on! But this is what a lot of the boats we met on the river looked like. This was sunrise on the Chindwin.

 

Our boat was an old rice barge — probably 70 ft long by 15 feet wide — temporarily re-outfitted for us as it chugged up-river for a week or so (from Mandalay) to pick us up.  Onboard:  8 Americans; 7 Burmese (guide, boatmen, cooks). 11 days. 2 toilets. 0 hot showers. Lots of chairs on top; 8 bunks below (each about 3 inches shorter than I am tall, but the crew slept on the floor so I’m not complaining!). We got stuck (briefly) on sandbars 3 times.  2 cans of Diet Coke (total, for 11 days!).  Plenty of rice; plenty of Burmese “curries;” plenty bottled water.  Plenty to see.  I took 13,000 pictures.

These are shots of our boat — the Zinyaw (“Seagull”).  The last image is of my bunk; the open side was usually covered by that green tarp:

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The area is remote and undeveloped.  There are no dams on the river, and we traveled almost 400 miles before we finally saw one bridge.  We started our boat trip in Homalin (the town you see in a few pictures where there are dozens of boats).  We went upriver for a couple of days, then came back past Homalin and all the way down to Monywa.  Only two flights a week go into Homalin.  Other than our group, there was just one other pair of “white” people arriving in Homalin that day.

 

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As scenic and serene as it was, the river itself wasn’t really what we were there to see.  The river is lined with people who were, without exception, welcoming and gracious to us, even though we were literally wandering around making randomly chosen stops.  We were treated as honored guests, invited into homes, schools, businesses and monasteries to see how these unspoiled folks live, learn, work, and worship.  Neither my pictures nor my words can really communicate that experience — but I’ll try.  Lots more to come from the Chindwin.

 

 

Naga New Year on the Chindwin River, Burma

This is where my Burma experience really started to get interesting. The core of the trip was 11 days spent on the remote Chindwin River, traveling village-to-village on a temporarily converted rice barge. This is NOT a tourist destination (and it surely wasn’t a cruise ship we were on).  Several of the villages had never had foreign visitors – many of the people had never seen a white person. Lots of interesting experiences.

First stop: The Naga tribe’s mid-January New Year’s celebration.

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Ladies of the New Somra village on the Chindwin River gather to rehearse their dance for the next day’s New Year’s ceremony

 

January 15 is New Year’s Day for the Naga Tribe. So in far-northwest Myanmar (and adjacent parts of eastern India) mid-January was the time to see a traditional celebration ringing in the Naga New Year. We got to the Naga village of New Somra a day early, so we met a few people in advance and saw them rehearsing their songs and dance. They’d never had any outsiders at their ceremonies, so when we came back the next day, we were the guests of honor!

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In the village during the day, we were ushered to the ceremonial grounds and offered food. Even though we revealed that we had literally just finished eating on the boat, they nonetheless started putting food on the table in front of us. In one of the more awkward moments of the trip, they told us it was an important tradition that they feed us each a chunk of pork – by hand, directly into our mouths. We suggested small pieces, but somehow that was lost in the translation. I’m pretty sure the skin was still on my piece, but I got it down and kept it down.

The nighttime ceremony consisted mostly of a series of group dances, each with singing and chanting by the dancers. First the women; then a co-ed group of teenagers; then the men. There was something of a fashion show, too, with the younger adults showing off traditional tribal attire. I’ve got fewer pictures of the men because we were promptly pulled into the circle to do the “dance” ourselves. What I remember being chanted most sounded like “Hopie Bee – Lay Haw Lay” over and over. They were speaking Naga (not Burmese) so even our Burmese translator didn’t know what we were all singing and dancing to. The locals seemed to think it was hilarious to see us out there.

The event reminded me of a Cherokee “stomp dance” I went to in Oklahoma a long time ago.  I guess that makes perfect sense: these are traditional, ancient, tribal ceremonies, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they primarily consist of folks in a circle around a fire.

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The “Man Dance”, just a minute or so before I had to put the camera down and join the circle.

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The Naga language has no alphabet. They’ve apparently borrowed one from the Brits (who controlled Burma for 120 years), so when they write “Naga” (in fire!), they’re writing it in English letters.

They were as welcoming as one could ever imagine, but I still worried that we spoiling their traditional (even sacred?) event — often standing right in the middle of the circle with cameras clicking. I was relieved when some of village elders came to our boat the next morning to emphasize how honored they were to have outside people care enough to come so far to see them and how much they enjoyed sharing and showing off their traditions.

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Unlike most of Burma, the Nagas aren’t Buddhists.  During the British colonial period in Burma and India, American Baptist missionaries converted Nagas to Christianity.  The loudspeaker you can see on that “totem”-looking pole says N.S.B.C. – New Somra Baptist Church.  Curiously, the church building we went to had paintings of Jesus and photos of the (Muslim) Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

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We had asked if someone would sell us any of those red-and-black blankets/skirts/scarves everyone wore — that’s the traditional weaving pattern of the Nagas.  Because they’ve never really had “tourists” or visitors like us, they weren’t really set up for that, but a couple of ladies gathered up a handful and brought them out to our boat.  They were offering them way too cheap to start with, and then they unfolded one that they said was very old — a much finer weave and prettier pattern than the ‘modern’ ones they’d weaved themselves.  It was 100 years old.  And because it was so “old,” they said it was about half price!   They had no concept that a rare, irreplaceable antique might be especially valuable.  I felt a little guilty, but just paid them what they were asking and gladly brought it home.  They were thrilled with the cash, of course.  Now I just have to figure out what to do with it.

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The ladies’ dance. This is what they were practicing for in the picture at the top.

 

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What you see in these images are traditional rituals and costumes — not what the Naga folks in New Somra wear or do day to day.  As you can see, they had some electric lights (powered by generator) and a loudspeaker — technology at a level you might have seen in the U.S. nearly 100 years ago.  Some aspects of their life looked like they would have looked 500 years ago, and a handful of things were relatively modern.

As later posts will show, we covered about 500 miles of the Chindwin river.  Ringing in the Naga New Year in New Somra was just the first stop.  More fascinations to come from remote northwestern Burma.

Inle Lake, Burma: Life on the Water

Inle Lake was another interesting stop in my tour of Burma — but the core and highlights of the trip were still to come.

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One of Inle Lake’s foot-paddling fishermen, out on the lake before a foggy sunrise.

 

There’s a famous Monty Python comedy skit that takes the “we-walked-to-school-uphill-in-snow” joke to its ultimate absurd level. Four Englishmen are talking about their childhood homes: One claimed to have lived in a shoebox in the middle of a road.  Another calls a tiny house “Luxury!” and claims that his own family had lived “in a lake” (and then it gets even sillier).  I thought about that lake-dwelling Englishman when I got to Inle Lake in central Burma.

Kaylar village at Inle Lake isn’t just lakeside.  And unlike Venice these aren’t just canals. The houses and shops (and, e.g., the post office) are built on stilts in the lake. People fish and farm, but even the farming (mostly tomatoes and flowers*) is hydroponic — on floating mats tied down in long rows right in the middle of the lake.  What looks like grass on the shore in these pictures are mostly plants floating in about six feet of water.

 

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These ladies were harvesting flowers that had grown in those floating garden rows you can see in the background. They’re out in the middle of the lake.

 

The fishermen at Inle Lake are famous for their unusual foot-paddling technique. They balance on one foot on the far end of their flat canoe-like boats and wrap their other leg around a long wooden oar. Fishing with their traditional cone-shaped net-traps required them to see and capture their prey in the clear shallow water, so the foot-paddling kept hands free to deal with nets and fish, and allowed much better vision down into the water.   Now small gas motors get them out to their fishing grounds, and nylon nets have made those cone-nets mostly obsolete, but foot-paddling is still the norm while actually out there fishing. The one-footed balancing is impressively graceful; it’s an especially fascinating sight in the quiet, still mornings as the sun rises over the lake.

 

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This guy was after some sort of shrimp or crawdad. Notice that he has traps instead of nets.  In the distance are some of the hydroponic farm plots in the middle of the shallow lake.

There’s an impressive weaving “factory” in Kaylar.  Everything is done by hand on old wooden looms and other primitive equipment.  They put those patterns in their fabrics by dying “stripes” into the threads before weaving.  The place does a unique process to make lotus flower stems into thread (which the then weave into cloth).  You watch every step of that being done by the few dozen ladies buzzing around the place.

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A few of these images are from Indein, an hour or so upriver from the lake.  The Buddhist temple complex there (Shwe Indein) has hundreds of mid-sized “stupas” around 20-30 feet tall, mostly around 1,000 years old.  The place is being completely refurbished.  All those elegantly-crumbling relics are being encased in concrete and plaster and painted gold.  We Westerners have an impulse to preserve the historical archaeological site as-is, but the Burmese Buddhists believe that their religious sites shouldn’t be left in ruins.  (We saw this in several places all over the country).  They’re about half-done at Shwe Indein.

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A young monk at a Shwe Yan Pyay monastery, a few miles north of the lake on the way  to the airport in Heho.   A few blocks from the airport was a restaurant, of sorts, which served only soup and beer, and had guys there who would give you a massage while you ate (and drank). I just had the soup.

 

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We saw a handful of these ladies — from the Padaung tribe — near Inle Lake. I was uncomfortable photographing them, but our guides insisted that they were flattered by the attention and were proud to model their “jewelry.”

 

*In such modestly-developed areas, flowers seemed like a non-essential luxury, so I wondered who would be buying very many of them. During the trip, though, I saw flowers very often, usually as a sort of offering or tribute to Buddha or to one of the various spirits (“nats”) that seem to be a big part of their culture.

Bagan, Burma: Temples, Monks, Balloons & Fractals

On my first morning in Bagan, I watched the sun rise from one of those balloons; the next day I watched the balloons go by from the top of one of those big temples.

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One of the dozens of hot air balloons that fly every morning over Bagan, viewed from atop the 950-year-old Shwesandaw Pagoda.

 

The Burmese City of Bagan was the capital of the Kingdom of Pagan* in the 9th to 13th Centuries.   The people of Pagan built several thousand Buddhist temples and monuments (“stupas”), some smallish and some reaching nearly 20 stories tall. The Mongols (a “horde” of them, no doubt) overran Pagan in the late 1200s. Happily, though, they left the Buddhist monuments largely intact, so thousands of them survive even today.

 

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Many Bagan monuments are solid “stupas,” but many are hollow temples like this one, usually with Buddha statues inside. There are thousands of them; I’m not sure this smallish one even has a name.

 

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Some of the young monks you see in Buddhist cultures are orphans, who live and go to school at places like the Shwe Gu orphanage and monastery in Bagan.

 

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A “fractal” is something with repeating patterns at different scales, so that if you “zoom in” on it, it still tends to look the same. Picture a stock market chart: A typical ten-year chart often looks about like a typical one week chart or a typical one-hour chart. The fractal-like shape of an ocean coastline can look much the same whether you trace the outline of a 100-yard stretch, a 10-mile stretch, or a 1,000-mile stretch. The temples at Bagan made me think of fractals. If you take a broad view, you see huge temples dotting the landscape. But zoom in and you’ll see a similar patterns of smaller temples filling in the gaps.  Similarly, the enormous scale of these monuments is all the more impressive when you see the tiny, intricate detail painted on the interior walls of many of the temples.

 

* As best I can tell, the Asian kingdom of “Pagan” has nothing to do with the “pagan” gods or practices of, e.g., the ancient Romans.