The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  “Suu Kyi is worshipped by the people for sacrificing for them her children, her husband and her life but in practice she is dogmatic, arrogant, has few substantive policies and maintains a stubborn insistence on non-negotiation with the military.”

  The views of both guide and businessman may have been exaggerated but the problem was clearly complex when you tossed into the political wok the further ingredients of 135 different tribes – some of which had secessionist ambitions – ill-advised western sanctions, powerful drug barons in the Golden Triangle, succession squabbles amongst the governing 20 generals (some with surprisingly liberal views) and the country’s relatively unimportant position on the geo-political map.

  A tide of souls searching for salvation flowed around the great Schwedagon, the most sacred pagoda in Burma and the world’s largest. Small groups constantly moved in and out of shrines special to their cause bearing candles to light or gifts of money and flowers. They prostrated themselves or squatted for a while, their hands held out in supplication, before leaving their offerings and then, their moment of individuality gone, they were swallowed by the surging crowd. Strong currents of laughter, fun and festivity added a froth and sparkle to this great inspirational river of humanity and its vivacity was contagious. It was also bizarre: coloured neon encircled one Buddhist image, flashing lights surrounded another and mirror and pastel paint turned others into replicas of seaside ice-cream parlours. A bust of Bo Nin Guang, a celebrated wizard (the guidebook’s word not mine) was continually pressed with cigarettes since, as a heavy smoker, it was thought that this would help him cope with the afterlife. If the cigarettes did not account for his demise in this life, the seven smouldering fag ends and two cheroots stuck in his mouth and stuffed up his nose will certainly finish him off in the next. Everywhere there were brown robed monks, some joking, some praying; a group of novices in a corner were listening to the radio. Nuns, with shaven heads and wrapped in pink with an orange sash over their left shoulder were more serious. Every minute of every day of every year, these episodes of individual pleasure, devotion, redemption, hope and enlightenment pass around the Schwedagon. As the sunset emblazoned the gold leaf of the stupa and warmed the whitewashed walls of the monastery buildings, my initial impression of a fairground turned to one of magic and mystery and took on a more intense spiritual quality.

  The vicissitudes of the Burmese are many but beneath their languid and ever amiable exterior there clearly resides a resilience that has enabled them to overcome a poor standard of life and centuries of hardships. The Buddhist philosophy is central to this exterior charm and inner strength. In Pagan, in a monstrous act of bullying, the government cleared away the old village and bulldozed the homesteads of generations with the excuse of letting an archaeological excavation take place; it never did and the reality was an obsessive anxiousness that the villagers might talk to the many foreigners who visit this area of great historical importance. In compensation, each householder was given one dollar, a bag of cement and three sheets of corrugated iron roofing. Having sold the roofing on the black market, they established a new village which now exists largely off tourism and appears relatively prosperous. If ever there was an example of the tenacity and determination of these charming people, there it was.

  Our visit to Pagan coincided with the two months of the year that shyn-po, the novitation ceremony for young Buddhists to the monastery takes place, and propitiously, there was also a full moon. Shyn-po ceremonies are expensive and elaborate affairs with several families clubbing together and in the late afternoon one such group of participants was gathering. Six dancing girls, with much flicking upwards of palms and jete of feet pointing downwards, moved graciously in unison to lead the procession, followed by several loudspeakers blaring music painful in both harmony and decibel. The stars of the show came next: eight young boys on horses, gorgeously dressed in white with an array of costume jewellery banded around the chest, wrist and ankle and so heavily made up with lipstick and rouge and wearing such pretty earrings that I had the unsettling thought that they were some paedophiliac prey. Their mounts, led by turbaned syces, were caparisoned in colourful harnesses and each novice had an attendant holding a golden umbrella. Behind the riders, 100 or more girls graded with the shortest in front shuffled through the dust in a long line in their best clothes, with blossom in their hair. Several were incomparably beautiful. At the monastery, the dancing girls went into their routine again and the riders, all looking rather dazed and solemn, sat before a venerable abbot who, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, added some anxiety to the proceedings with the expectation that his spectacles would be shaken off his nose. In the evening there would be singing and dancing in the elaborate and dazzlingly colourful tent that had been erected, and a feast for the whole village. Outside caterers had arrived that morning, dug pits for their fires, unloaded sacks of rice to be steamed, peeled a mountain of onions and prepared six great three foot (1m) wide dishes of lentil soup. The dozen cooks showed well-rehearsed efficiency and were expecting to feed 1,000.

  From the central plains, the land rises to the east and here is found Inle Lake lying limpid and languid, mirror surfaced and framed by the Hazy Blue Mountains of the Shan State. As we arrived, chugging along the length of the lake, a glorious farewell of the setting sun in the west was met by a full moon rising over the mountain ridges to the east. Lotus and water lilies covered its margins and in the next morning’s early morning mist, I watched a couple of fishermen in their flat-bottomed boats slap the water to scare the fish into their traps of great conical bamboo baskets. If unsuccessful, they stood in the prow and, curling their right leg around an oar row with a gondolier’s corkscrew motion, moved to another spot. Later, on another day, sitting in a bamboo chair on the deck of a stilted hut with an iced G and T, a cheroot of cordia leaf, mosquito free, with rising fish occasionally rippling the calm water, Nirvana seemed to have been reached rather sooner than expected or deserved.

  We journeyed around the lake in a long boat powered by a noisy engine stamped Shanghai Water Pump Company and equipped with yellow life jackets marked Thai Airways. Umbrellas of various origins were provided for sun protection and a line of passengers flying these fully extended looked like colourful toadstools. Water buffalo took obvious pleasure from walking along the bed of the lake just showing their nostrils and small boys standing on their back seemed to perform a miracle of walking on water.

  The Burmese have some of the most attractive bodies on the planet. It is the lack of hips that make their silhouette so smooth and their walk so supple. Torsos start at the shoulder, pinch very slightly halfway down and then continue to the ground. The longyi emphasises the smooth vertical line as it drops from a knot at the waist to earth. Arriving in the country still smarting from Mr Cooper of Savile Row’s remark, “A little winter thickening, sir?” such beauty was both a delight and an irritation. Teenage boys, hipless and skirted, are almost indistinguishable from teenage girls. The boys have a flawless complexion, teeth that outdazzle pearls, eyelashes that generate a breeze with a single blink and long elegant fingers. An occasion of gender guessing occurred when I had to endure not one but two nights of traditional music and dancing. Since the hotel staff were the performers, I was trapped between the soup and the noodles while they went to do their bit. The first night’s performance was helped by votes taken around the table as to the sex of the gorgeous dancer got up in a tulle bodice, baggy trousers of silver brocade and a silly hat. The answer arrived the next morning in the shape of Huang the breakfast waiter with long greasy hair parted down the middle. The second night he performed an extraordinary dance holding two lighted candles and went into contortions that would have earned him a place in a travelling circus. He was again draped in several yards of nylon filigree and the patience required for sitting through this number was helped along immeasurably by the knowledge that a single miscalculation of writhing limbs would result in self-immolation.

  The great, golden, balancing b
oulder at Kyaikto sits on a small rocky outcrop and, by legend, two hairs of the Lord Buddha. At 4,000 ft (1,200 m) it looks out over the jungle clad hills to the Andaman Sea. Leaving town, pilgrims and visitors alike are packed into an open truck to squat on rows of matchstick-slim planks raised on brick high blocks. On a road that makes the Big Dipper seem like an amble over the Malvern Hills, the driver, possessed either by demons or more probably high on betel, shot off and then accelerated through the hairpins. On crawling out battered and almost speechless with fear, several dozen boys with large wicker panniers strapped to their forehead then clamour for the custom of carrying your crushed luggage another vertical 400 ft (120 m) to the salvation of the hotel.

  The path to the celebrated boulder was steep, hot and dusty. Along the way stalls provided walking sticks, drinks and assortments of herbal remedies from monkey guts to seedpods; prices rose relative to altitude. At the top, the Pagoda Precinct Dispensary was handily placed and a plaster group of Nats (spirits that embody human form and foibles) were comforting a fellow Nat laid out horizontally; I knew how he felt. A huge flat area was covered with a random selection of colourful tiles that seemed to have been salvaged from Victorian bathrooms and on one side were various buildings of tasteless design in shades of bright yellow and green. Here were happy family groups, pilgrims young and old, the penitent, the psychotic, the perspiring, a few curious tourists and a bus-sized boulder balanced on a hair of Buddha and covered with an inch (2.5cms) of gold leaf. A monk with a bad cough intoned spiritual words over a loud speaker as families squatted down for picnics. In a money-making wheeze, a replica of the mountain had little pockets around it to throw money into as it revolved under bright lights; the whole ill-repaired scene was noisy, gaudy and tacky. The famous rock was smaller than I expected but it shone nicely in the setting sun as more gold leaf was applied by the devout.

  Two hundred and fifty miles (400 kms) northeast, another revered geological oddity is Mount Popa. An upturned cup of volcanic rock, it is topped by a turreted monastery painted bright viridian and sits like a child’s sandcastle decorated with flotsam. I stopped to pay my respects to the Nats to ensure a safe journey. A dozen or two fashioned in their human form by plaster and paint were dressed as though for a fancy dress ball and were arranged in a line for supplicants to offer prayers or leave small gifts. One was hung about with bottles of gin and turned out to be the same fellow that in the Rangoon Schwedagon was pressed with lighted cigarettes; his first preference was apparently booze but this was deemed inappropriate in religiously austere surroundings.

  Kalaw was reached late and in the dark. Weak bulbs and kerosene lamps threw thin light over the cluttered interiors of the small shops and their proprietors were wrapped in thick sweaters and woolly hats. My short sleeves and shorts raised no eyebrows in the restaurant where a few dusty bottles of Merlot and an Australian Chardonnay were as unexpected as the poster on the wall of a Ferrari against an Amalfi backdrop. At the Pinehill Hotel an old dog lay before a blazing log fire, there was polished wood on every surface, a vase of old fashioned sweet peas scented the air and eager dark and sinewy hands unloaded the dusty luggage. On the beds were thick blankets woven with giant roses in colours of hallucinating brightness, there were soap bars of Imperial Leather and Thermoses of hot water. It seemed the perfect journey’s end.

  Rudyard K. never travelled the Road to Mandalay. Neither flying fish nor the thunderous sun of this ridiculous poem are to be seen; just a tarmac strip straight, flat, paddied on each side and full of huge trucks moving slowly north to Mandalay and crawling south, diesel-stinking logging lorries with their immense loads of teak and ironwood from the forests of the Bago Hills. Indian communities, descended from those who built the railway at the turn of the century, live along the roadsides and add flashes of colour with saris in kaleidoscopic patterns. There is no speed limit on the roads and although the state of the surface and the age of most vehicles effectively set a maximum of 50 mph, hazards abound in stray dogs, pigs and water buffalo which continually cross with no regard to traffic. Amongst unprecedented chaos and accidents, driving was changed to the right in 1964 and since vehicles are still right-hand steered – even the new ones – they have to pull out from behind the bullock cart, trishaw, cannibalised lorry or taxi bus loaded seven layers high. Killing somebody means five years in jail regardless of whose fault it is but this seems no deterrent to speed or daring.

  As we rattled northwards towards the teak forests the sawmills multiplied progressively, so that at Taungoo, 100 miles (160 kms) from Rangoon, I thought I might have come all this way just to view a mountain of sawdust. Turning off the highway, we bumped along a switchback forest road with precipitous slopes either side covered in bamboo and young teak. An hour later the forest camp was reached, clad in quisqualis, bougainvillaea and jasmine. It was quiet, windless and oppressively hot. I was in one of six rattan huts and Onido Suchi, a Japanese photographer, was in another; don’t mention The War! He was big in teeth, short on eyes, had a camera lens the size of a howitzer and an ‘assistant’. She was demure, giggled a lot and confided that she went to language school in Dublin; whatever course she enrolled in, it was not English.

  In the cool of late afternoon I set out for the forest with Aung, the local naturalist guide. “We go for a little amble,” he said and pausing only to shorten his longyi and tuck his curved knife into its waistband, he set off at a tremendous pace. I stumbled along behind with camera, binoculars and carrying my shoes – we spent a lot of time crossing rivers. Aung could spot an ant bending its knees at a hundred paces and two hours later we returned in the setting sun having seen green pigeon, woodpecker, hornbills, bee-eaters, sunbirds, egret, owls, rua, hawks, jungle fowl, brown and red squirrels and a wild boar. We had also slurped tea with a Karen local who demonstrated his astonishing accuracy with a catapult and chatted with another who had shot, killed and eaten three bears in the last year. Then I knew what the knife was for.

  In the dry season, the elephants only work early in the morning as they find the day too hot but for a few hours they tugged and heaved with great effort and much grunting, while their mahouts (they stay with them for all their working life) instructed them by working their feet behind their ears. After a bath in the river the elephants ambled off with shackled front legs to forage in the forest. Trees are felled and extracted from the steep slopes by elephant (there are 1,500 working in this forest), sectioned by handsaw, loaded on trucks and taken 100 miles (160kms) to the saw mills (those that are not ‘lost’ on the way). 10,000 trees are cut each year and 10,000 planted; those being cut now were planted by The Burma Teak Company in the 1920s.

  The barbecued barking deer for dinner was tough but tasty, the mosquitoes buzzed all night but the calling of birds at first light as the mist lifted performed its usual magic. Onido was in gumboots and a sort of sou’wester as he opened his bag of macrobiotic breakfast and Cho, my driver, tucked into a hearty curry. Onido fired off 100 shots, was amiable, impressively knowledgeable on trees, the assistant thought the elephants ‘vely stlong’ and none of us mentioned The War.

  Images that settle in the mind later are pretty standard stuff but real nevertheless. Banyan trees, delicate ponies and traps, bullock carts stirring dust against the sun, stilted houses, bougainvillea, bicycles and bamboo; water buffaloes with small boys legs akimbo, cinnamon monks, sugarplum nuns, ice-cream coned pagodas. Winnowing rice, school children everywhere in green longyis, bodies of balletic grace and the strength of mules. More lasting is the spontaneous generosity of the people, their apparent indifference to social advancement, their care of animals (it might be their grandmother!) and their tolerance of the inevitability of divine consequence.

  Postcard Home

  Here in the jungle tigers roam

  And apes and peacocks call it home,

  While pachyderms push through bamboo.

  I’m back to make a rendezvous

  With friends of old and places new.

  But o
n the road to Mandalay

  Trudge those caught in the tourniquet

  Of poverty and government

  That rules by threat of ’prisonment.

  When will this yoke be hurled aside

  And this great race retrieve their pride?

  Brazil

  September 1999

  ‘Not all those who wander are lost’ – J R R Tolkien

  The Varig in-flight magazine had a full page advertisement for armoured cars – effective against a .44 magnum. While South American politics have a reputation for turbulence, I had thought that truces were breaking out regularly. The implication that this might be premature added piquancy to the trip as I landed at Sao Paulo to change planes. Broadcasting the departure to Rio de Janeiro, the female announcer stroked the last four syllables with such mystery and sensuousness that anticipation for adventure oozed from the speakers; she followed up further flights to Recife and San Salvador with equal intrigue and excitement. Here, it is Mata Hari at the microphone breathing sedition and scandal.

  The flight west passed first over Sao Paulo’s shanty towns of rusted sheeting and then across grey-green, moisture-starved land, dotted with patches of ploughed red earth. No woods, no forest, no pockets of equatorial lushness, only a million acres hacked, burnt, harrowed and sown to feed the millions in their urban tin huts; then came the great coiling ribbon of the Parana River, ragged on each edge with fissures that reached far into the parched land. Near Campo Grande, areas of woodland appeared in strange irregular shapes like pieces of a scattered jigsaw and plumes of smoke rose where the arid picture was completed in charcoal and ash. The town sprawled over the flat grasslands and since the roofs of its suburban margins were tiled with the same red clay of the earth, it seemed smaller from the air than reality proved on the ground. At the airport, an incongruous mix of rotten wood and aluminium, there were public telephones concealed in giant plastic wood storks. Dark, tall, craggy men in worn jeans and scuffed high heeled boots, strolled around with self-assured swagger, their legs bowed from lives spent in the saddle, and gave a whiff of romance and ruggedness.