January/February, 2001

All around. Rangoon is a modern city with lots of old decaying colonial buildings, moss covered walls and loads of street markets and stalls selling everything from greasy noodles, chinese halal, muslim food to burmese army fatigues. Well organized like a grid with sidewalks (mostly compared to the usual 3rd world cities). but as soon as you get out, it's farmland all over. We spent our first night hanging with the guys we met on the plane comming over from Calcutta. We went out to this place called the "ABC Lounge" which was basically a 'beer and peanut' pickup place that had a band playing covers like "Hotel California and "Leaving on a Jet Plane" with a non-stop revolving door of girls singing amid a couple of large screen TVs playing WWII & wrestling footage!

They are so hungry for US money - i mean really desperate that most things are quoted in dollars and the exchange rates are so screwed up. at arrival we had to exchange $200 each! required! (we had to sign a form at visa application time) or you can present a "gift" of about $5-10 to bribe the woman into less for couples. but we had very little cash since all the thefts so we opted to save it. then they give us FEC currency (foreign exchange currency) which looks like monopoly money!. these then have to be exchanged into local kyat on the black market, which is the only way and very acceptable way to get Kyat. since maybe a few months ago, FEC's are worth 25% less! than cash. so immediately we loose 25% of what we exchanged and can't get around it at all. but you learn to live with it - no choice. and it does go fast. there is no AMEX or any bank that will release dollars cash. that is worth more than gold to them. so we ended up spending it all - hotels and govt tourist sites are expensive in comparision to food and local stuff.

After Rangoon we took a overnight bus up to Inle Lake in the Shan State, NE of Rangoon. this was a very beautiful part of the country. we took a boat trip out on the lake to visit various markets, these local markets are very colorful and mostly woman compared to the indian and middle east male merchant world. but these woman are tough cookies - dark sun drenched skin smoking these great looking green raw cigars, called cheroots. everybody smokes them! later visited buddist temples made out of wood on stilts in the lake. In one of these they have cats jumping through hoops for the tourists, actually kinda funny to see as the head monk sits back laughing and smoking his "cheroot".

We decided to go on a couple day trek to see some of the hill tribes living in the area around Kalaw. This turned out to be a great experience as we met up with a very good guide who brought us out to some very remote Shan, Wa, and Red-O villages that were very friendly and great places to stop for tea and a chat (courteasy of our burmese phrasebook, which wasn't much help when speaking with the hilltribes). we watched the sunrise from the village comming over the smokey distance through the pagodas, and ate 'family' style around the fire at night some of the best food we had in the whole country.

There were very few cars in the country but lots of old 1940's trucks, (except Rangoon for the newly "rich" middle class]. There isn't the sense of poverty as much as india or nepal. I guess the 30 years of 'socialism' has fed the people enough. though, I met a student on the local train up to Hsipaw, who come up to us and "talked" about their dislike of the military dictatorship govt and restrictions on freedom and the closing of the Ragoon university. It was painful to listen to him as I knew there was very little I could do personally for his sitution, but I tried to explain to him that the 'outside' world was aware of this. there are propaganda billboards all around describing the "People's Desire", stuff like "resist all foriegn elements who seek to destroy the state",etc... very "Orwellian" but the country is not at all closed off as LP makes it sound. We tried to not give the government any more money than they wanted and passed on the Mandalay Palace, as we were told it was built with 'slave' labor and was supposedly haunted because of this!

Unfortunatly, most of the food was a big disappointment!! very chinese influenced and did not agree with my digestive system. we started to drastically budget when we arrived cause we thought we were screwed with not having US cash, so we ate noodles on the street and got a day sick from it - but it was kinda tasty. then jon got better, but it lingered in me. few days later, got sicker, and then better, then sicker. In Bagan I had trouble keeping food down either end for a day and took some of our hardcore medicine for this thing (first one didn't fix it, then tried the other one) and got rid of it quickly. My innerards have gone through the ringer past month, crazy this all happened cause never got sick in india or nepal! there is something they use as seasoning (fishpaste, and MSG!!!) that I think was turning my gut into an unhappy thing. they use alot of oil in their cooking and hard to find true veggie food. so we just relaxed and rode bikes around a day or 2 extra in Bagan, the mellow ancient buddhist temple town, that was once the capital of one of the early Burmese empires. The temples were fantastic! especially at sunset when you could just sit there and watch the timelessness of the place slip into the backdrop of the Irrawaddy river.