Burma (new name Myanmar)

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Trip Start Aug 27, 2006 Previous
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  Yangoon, Myanmar
Saturday, October 14, 2006

October 6, 2006
We had our cultural preport tonight, we are expected to arrive in Burma (Myanmar) tomorrow evening but we are not allowed off the ship until the morning of the 8th. We found out this morning that it is actually illegal to enter Myanmar by road or by ship...hmmmmm....that posed a question for most of us! But we were also informed that on our immigration forms we were to mark "trainee" and not "visitor". We aren't really sure what we're in training for - but this entire ship is going for some sort of training! Pretty interesting stuff. Cultural preport was boring, but mandatory this time as the information presented has been rumored to be on our Global Studies exam tomorrow afternoon - which we thought was pretty lame that the information on a test was going to be from a presentation that was not mandatory for us to attend. We raised hell about that but it fell upon deaf ears. The instructors are starting to do that more and more - meetings after class hours that are not mandatory have become "mandatory" on the basis that the instructors are telling us the information in those meetings will be on our exams - but whatever, it's not like we have a lot else to do on board?!?!? Burma has stirred up many controversies on board as to why we're traveling there if the United States wants to impose restrictions on travel there. Burma is a military dictator ship and there are many stipulations that the United States has placed on Burma and its imports, so many of the students don't understand why we should support the economy by traveling there. I can't wait!!! It may soon become a place that we cannot travel to at all and I don't understand why students aren't taking the opportunity as a welcome one instead of something to complain about. It's amazing the things people find to bitch of - even after visiting the places we have. There is not really any appreciation in diversity going on - maybe as we get into Burma and India, as the first three ports haven't posed many ethical issues (with the exception of Cambodia for the students that traveled there). We have been seeing slides of Burma taken by the professors that have been there in the past and it looks like one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. It really seems to have an otherworldly characteristic, between the hundreds of stupas, pagodas, and temples that fill almost every frame, or the robe clad monks walking within the general public at temples....it goes on and on. It just looks like a really unique and interesting place that we should really take advantage of. I know we are the last voyage of Semester at Sea to travel to Myanmar, to me it's a thrill. Hopefully it is everything they have showed us!!!! Our logistics meeting is tomorrow night after we dock, I am not sure what the technicality is on us not being able to disembark the ship tomorrow night after we dock, but the rules are rules. 

October 7, 2006
I guess I started this blog a bit early, as we have only just now docked in Yangoon, well about 45 minutes outside of the town proper. Last night's cultural preport was boring, but it shed a lot of light on certain issues that I am sure not many people on board were aware of, so in terms of effectiveness I guess it was fine. This morning the waters surrounding our ship turned from the deepest of turquoise to the ugliest brown that I'd ever really seen. It wasn't dark brown like chocolate milk but it was brown, we all decided that it was like not really choclately chocolate milk. That's the best we could do, but it was odd as it stretched on and on, it wasn't just in spots. The entire ocean had seemed to change colors, the sky became foggy and we couldn't see anything for the longest time this afternoon. As we began to make our way into the Bay of Bengal the water stayed brown but the fog lifted and revealed to us the greenest landscape, far more vibrant than that of Vietnam just a few days ago. Here was no smog in the air and the little boats had all come out to greet us waving their paddles and arms, it was fun to come up the river to such an excited crowd. The fields of green went on forever and we decided, a bunch of us standing on the bow, that Crayola should called one of their most beautiful greens "Burma Fields" because they were absolutely magnificent. The floating thatch houses that dotted the river and its banks just added character to the already intriguing mix. In the midst of all the beautiful landscape were literally hundreds of stupas rising out of the ground, gold ones, brick ones, clay ones, everywhere you looked a large spire would rise into the air among the rest along the horizon. It truly was as they said last night - otherworldly. I haven't seen thus far a landscape more beautiful and mysterious than this; I can't wait to be on the ground in the middle of it all. Miss Amy told me that if she has me pegged that this will defiantly be my favorite port - but she said we'll have to wait and see. Our Diplomatic briefing was one of the best we've had so far. Really down to earth guys that knew we really didn't want to sit there for an hour listening to them tell us everything that we've already been told all week, they did a great job of keeping our attention which was refreshing. Our logistics meetings was the same as well, there were a few things that are much different in this port than any other. Like the fact that we are completely dependant on the tides - at low tide the ship has 27 centimeters of clearance so it is crucial that we depart at the right time - so they stressed on ship time. We learned that in Vietnam, there had been a group of Europeans that had posed as Semester at Sea Students and tried to board the vessel on two different occasions during our four day stay in Ho Chi Minh City. So our security from her eon out got beefed up which is understandable. Dr. Bob got issued dock time because he and his wife's flight got cancelled - we sailed out of Vietnam without them. We joked tonight that his dock time extends through Turkey and it was one of the funniest moments at logistical preport that we're have. Other than that things went pretty much as they have for the last 42 days. We did realize that this was our 42nd day on board the MV Explorer and conversations arose that when we talk about heading for "home" we have unconsciously stopped referring to out places of residence in the states and that this big blue, white and orange vessel has become the place our hearts stay. We don't say we're on our way back to the ship - it has become common place to say "I'm going home". We don't have to early a morning tomorrow. I am on my way up to Inle Lake which is supposed to be beautiful.

October 8, 2006
It was an early morning when we met in the union - our group of fifty got split into two groups of twenty five which made everything a little more efficient and much easier to deal with at 4:30am. There was much anticipation in the union this morning because we have been sitting here at the dock for twelve hours or so and haven't been able to rush off and explore. It will be our first taste of this magical place and we wanted to get going. Our forty five minute drive was to be an adventure in and of itself, the poverty was already overwhelming for some, there were comments on the way to the airport in the early morning life of "How could someone live like this?" I asked myself "Who are you t judge?" So we arrived at Yangoon International Airport - THAT was an experience. Very very little security, as in they didn't check any of our bags, put them through an xray machine, nor did they check us. We walked from one small, hot cramped room to another small room and sat with each other. Along with the fifty of us there were about fifty or so Burmese people waiting for another flight and we assumed that these people were more well off than most others. When a prop plane rolled up the runway and stopped in front of our little room the rumble of nervous voices started, and it seemed that the general consensus was that the plane must be the "other" flight, defiantly not ours. Wrong. All of a sudden people were not so stacked up to get on, so a few of us walked out on the tarmac and got on the plane. The others worked up the courage and got on. It wasn't so bad; it wasn't bad at all really. It was kind of fun because it was the kind where the body of the plane was hung underneath the wings, and when we hit turbulence - which we did - it felt more like swinging in a hammock from side to side than "bumpy". I thought it was cool. The approach into Heho Airport in the Shan Region of the country was the most beautiful thing I had seen. The landscape was amazing. So Inle Lake - actually said Lake Inle - sits at about 2900 feet above sea level and at its deepest point is only 8 feet. Kind of an odd lake, but the scenery was amazingly beautiful, I have never seen a landscape that was like this. I can try and describe how beautiful it was until I am blue in the face and I won't even begin to hit it. I could try to explain the way the sun glimmered off the water of the lake and made the mountains look completely ominous against the baby blue sky with cloud wisps drawn by birds that flew through the air along side our canoes. Oh our canoes - how we thought they were so cool the first day. Thirty to forty foot hollowed out logs that planed like you wouldn't believe took us everywhere, and they were at first a huge novelty. But we soon realized that this was normal modes of transportation for everyone on the lake including the locals. Now I am going to TRY and explain how the canoes without motors got around. One person - always a man, would stand at one end, wrap his LEG around an oar and paddle using only one leg. Okay I tried, I know you can't picture this but that's pretty much all there was to it. We had lunch at a cute little place, and the food was great - kind of a cross between curry and stir fry, again sorry I can't really describe it all great for you. After lunch we went to the pagoda where we would return the following day for the biggest festival in all of Inle Lake. The Pagoda was huge and was completely covered in gold, everywhere you looked all over the land golden stupas rose up. In a land of poverty it was hard to see these huge religious monuments covered in precious gems like diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds while the people in that village are hungry and sick. It was funny though to look around see that even though there were dirty floors and thatched walls it was primarily clean, much much cleaner than I had ever expected. So we spent time at the pagoda - the boys in our group were allowed to reguild the Buddha, meaning that they were given gold leafed paper to stick on to the Buddha that was in the center - women are not allowed to do this so we sat on the side and lived through them. After the Pagoda we went to a monastery that was called "Leaping Cat Monastery" and the monks here had taught cats (hundreds of them every where - Dad you thought our house was bad!) to jump through different hoops. Maybe the hoops were six inches in diameter. But the monks brought these hoops out and all the cats came running and lined up in little lines (maybe fifty cats would come) and wait. Each monk would point at a different cat and then would bring out a hoop and that cat would calmly walk up to the front jump through the hoop and walk back to its spot in line. It was the most bazaar thing I had ever seen. It was so unreal - I really didn't believe that I was seeing it. I know my cats would do that. It seemed pretty useless, I mean what "karmic duty" does this fulfill, but hey who am I to judge it was pretty cool. We made our way to our "hotel" on the lake after that as it had gotten dark and our little canoes had no lights on them so it was pretty unsafe to be out at night. We were sleeping in little bungalows built on bamboo stilts over the water. It was very "Tahiti" without all the hype which was great. It was a family run place, a "private hotel" as they call it here which means they pay a fee at the beginning of the year so that the government does not take money throughout the year from the hotel. It was so much fun to stay there, it was like staying in KOA camping cabins basically, only with mosquito nets and screens on the windows. We lost electricity that first night, which I guess is pretty normal there. The family brought tall skinny candles to all of us in holders for us to carry around and put candles all over our rooms so we could see. It was in a sense very romantic and beautiful as we were all walking around in the silence of the lake holding candles and whispering for fear of breaking the beautiful mystique of the whole situation. We were all exhausted so it made for an early night after dinner.

October 9, 2006
It was an early morning again today. Today is one of the biggest days in the year for the Shan State for it is the Returning of the Buddha to its home in the middle of the lake. For four weeks it is paraded around each village on a huge, gold plated canoe. Along with the bring of the Buddha there are also the Shan State canoes races. About one hundred men and boys will line on both sides of giant canoes and race each other down the "straight away" approaching the temple in the middle of the lake. It is a huge festival with about 100,000 people attending. They had been "stands" along the sides of the water ways, again on bamboo stilts very near the center of all the action. It wasn't until I heard one of the local guides say "You can cheer for your favorite team but please do not jump up and down" that I realized that some of the men from the village were frantically cutting more bamboo stilts to keep the stands from falling into the water. Made me feel pretty safe  So I wandered off by myself and ended up running into Miss Amy who was one her way from the stands over to the main Pagoda with all the locals so I went with her. It was amazing to be with her, she has spent a lot of time in Burma, her house in Thailand she was telling me is about an hour flight from Heho Airport where we came in and its up in the high mountains of Thailand. She makes frequent flights to Burma to visit close friends. We watched the festival from the center of all the action at the pagoda, the Buddha was floated in on the giant canoe and all the dancing and music started. It was pretty amazing to be completely surrounded y all these people singing and dancing and then we were swept up in the fervor and began participating. It was just so much fun I couldn't stop smiling. It all made me so happy. We watched the canoe races which was pretty much the Olympic event of the year, the boats got going pretty fast and then they had to turn this corner at the end of the straight away and sometimes it would be chaos as some boats didn't make the turn and would run into the makeshift bank that was put up specifically for that purpose. I was rooting for the orange team - for no particular reason I guess and they did pretty well but the pink team ended up winning the whole thing and there was much yelling and cheering and booing and whatever else. It was so cool, nothing really like anything we have in the United States by way of unity and passion. Just different than anything that we have. After the races it wasn't quite afternoon yet as I had said it was really early in the morning when we left, we went to another monastery. This one had no real special "thing" to present like the cat one had, but a couple of us got off the path and found a back trail and hiked up to a ridge that opened up and we realized the entire valley below us was filled with stupas everything, all packed in tightly coving the entire floor. So we hiked back down into the valley and walked through the maze of monuments erected for every reason imaginable. See it is seen as a duty to erect a stupa, either for a dead family member, an ancestor, a special monk that helped you through a hard time in life, to a god for being especial gracious to you, it doesn't matter but t is a duty so family will spend lifetimes saving up to build a stupa at a particular monastery. It was really something out of a movie walking through the crumbling old ones and the glimmering new ones. Some of the dates carved into the stone of the ones falling apart we figure out were from the 11th century - and it made the whole area a little more magical. Not much had changed here we realized in a very long time. It was very powerful to have the surrounding environment being so quiet and peaceful and to be walking through these monuments that had been standing for so long and to be alone with them, no other people except the few of us an it became a moment where we all just stood and touched the clay blocks taking it all in. We left the place feeling energized and awakened and took the canoes to another place for lunch. This is when the rains came, and when I am talking about rain I am talking about buckets. It was like the rain was so thick you couldn't see ten feet in front of you because of the curtains of water. There wasn't much we could do by the way of weather so we just got in the canoes, some people who didn't bring rain jackets (come on seriously - I didn't feel bad for them) got soaked instantly and those of us that had rain jackets only became soaked from the waist down. The canoes had umbrellas in them and as you can imagine us brilliant Semester at Sea students pilled in the canoes and figured out how to keep the majority of the rain off of ourselves, but it didn't help much when the we got out of the canoes and had to leave the umbrellas in the boats. It didn't take long for us to become so wet that it really didn't matter anymore. So the umbrellas barely got used after that. We went to a silver smith, a black smith, a cigar rolling factory and weaving factory this afternoon. It was interesting, my favorite was the block smith because they made these really cool chimes that sounds beautiful and it was neat to see them cast the different materials and what not. By this time we were tired and we headed back to the hotel - tomorrow is our hardest day, it is our long day of trekking up to one of the highest monasteries in the Shan state so we have been "advised" to go to bed early, pack lots of water and maybe some snacks. We have electricity tonight, but I think we're all taking the advice about shutting off the lights and going to bed under our mosquito nets. 

October 10, 2006
We started off at dark this morning, in the canoes to the bank of the lake where the bottom village was. The villagers were all there to meet us and split us up into groups of two or three and took us into their homes and cooked eggs and cut fruit and made tea for us while the little kids all got ready for school. It was pretty cool - I have found that more people here in Burma speak better English than in Vietnam and its pretty interesting. So in our house two little girls went to school at the local monastery and when we finished our breakfast with them we walked them down the little dirt road to the school. The two little girls both kissed my hands and waved goodbye. It was pretty neat to see the hospitality and just general acceptance of us in the village. It was very powerful to see a group of people so poor but yet finding enough to feed us and make us feel welcome. We would come to find that through out the day this would be true no matter what. We continued up the sides of the mountains of this particular valley for quite a while and views as the sun came up became better and better - again indescribable. We hiked until lunch where we stopped at a boys monastery school, a few of us asked if we could walk back a ways to the girls monastery school and they said sure, so our trip leader Miss Jennifer walked back with us and the guide stayed at the boys school. The girls were so excited to see us and we unwrapped our lunch and they all sat around with us and talked. They spoke such good English it was amazing, and the conversation soon turned to us asking them questions. I asked one girl, who I thought was just beautiful what she wanted to be when she grew up and she looked at me and said I have no choice in that. I said of course you do. One of the monks came over and sat next to me and began explaining the system that was in place in most of Burma for the orphanage monetary run schools. Now let me clarify a few things - orphan means that you have lost one parent or the other, so either fatherless or motherless. Being orphaned means to have lost both parents and is considered different. So anyway, these were all girls that were either orphans or had been orphaned. The monk went on to explain that the girls at the school were between age three and thirteen and if by the age of fourteen the girls had not found either a job or a husband - to repay the monastery for the care they have received they are sold. Sold. I got stuck on that word and asked what he meant. And said they are sold to men in Thailand mostly because the Thai trade pays the best. I couldn't believe what I was hearing and I - as I am sitting here typing all this can't relate to you the feelings that are welling up inside me. He was so matter of fact, with no emotion he was explaining to me that some of these girls were going to become members of the human trafficking problem between Burma and Thailand. I still don't know what to do with all this. But as he looked around he pointed to different girls, including the girl that I had been talking to and said it is their last month here. It took every ounce of strength in me to not just break apart, I don't know how to describe it, but that's the best I could do. The little girl must have seen something in my face and she sat closer to me and said "that's just the way it is - I must have done something in a past life to deserve this, I just have to be good and do my best and in my next life it won't be this way." And she smiled. I was so paralyzed by everything. I still am when I think about it all. After lunch we played games with the girls, duck duck goose, the hokie pokie, red rover, and all I could think about was here were girls that were playing elementary school games and by the end of the month they would sold away like slaves - as slaves basically - forced to have sex with men or work until they died as prostitutes and bar girls. Talk about growing up fast. We left the monastery and I didn't feel good, I got lost in thought as we continued up to the monastery and when we arrived I felt like I had blinked and missed so much. But I didn't really care. The monastery was beautiful and the monks were very friendly. We rested there for a while, drank tea with them and chatted. Some of the group from here left and went back to the hotel and the rest of us continued on for another couple of hours to hike the ridges behind the monastery and back down to the canoes. It was beautiful being a part of nature and being surrounded by such amazing beauty. But always in the back of my head was the realization that although the land was beautiful, and the people were more beautiful there was an ugly underpinning holding the country together and I just don't know what to make of that. How can I feel so good about some things and so horrible about others, both feelings being equally strong. Sunset on the way back to the hotel on the lake tonight was phenomenal. I have not found anything beautiful or worth tearing up about, but tonight on the way back to the hotel riding in the canoe looking around me at the beautiful sunset that was completely un-comprehendible my eyes became teary and I had the strongest urge to thank God for everything that he had given me because it was very very apparent in this place that I was one of the lucky ones and I thank Him for opening up my eyes to this.

October 11, 2006
This day goes down in the record books for "most things going wrong in a 24 hour period." I am not going into detail as to why - but Burma is a very unpredictable, unstable, unsafe place to be and we experienced all that and more on the drive to the airport, our flight home and getting back to the ship. It was an all day affair today and I am going to bed thanking the Big Guy upstairs that nothing terribly disastrous happened to anyone traveling with us. This place is defiantly hitting us all like a brick wall.

October 12, 2006
I spent today at another orphanage monastery school which was even more impact full than the first if you can imagine. We had a larger group with us this time but there were many more children, both boys and girls this time and the ages ranged from two to fourteen. I noticed though that the boys all were young and that as the lines of students got older fewer and fewer boys occupied them. I asked the monks why and they informed me that it was because the boys had found jobs in the city or whatever and didn't have to be in school anymore. The girls on the other hand have a harder time finding a job and he continued telling me that if they don't find a husband or a job they get sold to pay back the monastery. Again - here again I am hearing this as if it is normal practice, well it is normal practice. This is what happens to the orphaned girls in Burma. I played with a group of ten of the older girls all by myself, they came up and grabbed my arm and wanted to show me all their songs and dances and then they started teaching me Burmese school games. It was the most fun I had had all trip. We played a game very similar to duck duck goose, only you stood in a circle, all holding hands and two people would start running around the outside - still holding hands - and they would slap the arms of two girls and those two would run in the opposite direct and try to get back to the same spot....whoever got back to the open space and connected with everyone else was essentially "not it" and the other girls would continue and pick another pair. We played a game similar to hokie pokie as well, only a little different - the last one to finish the phrase had to stand in the middle of the circle until another person was last to finish. Then they taught me some Burmese dance and they sang and me and another girl danced. By this point some of the other kids in my group were standing around watching. It was interesting because I had been so drawn to the older group - while EVERYONE else went drooling over the tiny little kids in the younger classes. It was like the "puppy syndrome" at the Humane Society - everyone wants a puppy because they are so cute.....but I have never been that way. I loved dancing and singing with the older girls. They shoed me there "non uniforms" and were so proud of their pretty dresses, which were so dirty even a poor family in the United States would probably throw them away. The girls smiles were the most beautiful I had ever seen, just beautiful smiles. They never smiled in pictures though - and I took very few of them because it just ruined everything that we had. After a series of unfortunate events that happened around the city that afternoon our time at the school was cut short -and again in the mist of all the chaos one of the girls stood on the road and waved at me until she couldn't see, and then she continued to run down the road trying to keep up with us. She and I had been together the whole day, she was the first one I smiled at when we walked in that morning. She was one that hadn't found a job yet, or a husband, she was 14. She loved touching my hair, and told me we had the same color eyes so we must be from the same place. She told me I was beautiful and I couldn't hold back the tears. She was more beautiful than I ever could be. I fell in love that day. There was just something about her. There was just something about this entire place - along with all the bad unpredictable things - I left a part of myself there and those kids, one in particular, gave me a piece of them, the greatest gift someone could ever give.

I learned in Burma that life is about suffering, it is hard, it is sickness, it is poverty, it is learning to do with what you have and not ask for more. I learned that to be human is to allow yourself to love, completely unconditionally. It taught me that - yes - you do get hurt - yes people do betray you and do bad things to you - but unless you love without fear of rejection and pain - you are not human at all.

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