The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  For perhaps 40 seconds, we didn’t speak. “It’s so quiet,” Thomas said, and laughed nervously. I saw him searching for a topic. “Do you have brothers and sisters?” Before answering I looked at him, tried to read his expression. “Three?” he said. “Oh: great”—and he did look like he thought it was great. “I have two. But I never see them. They are still in my village. I have not been back.” Now he was the one who let the silence resume. I wondered if this meant he hadn’t seen his girlfriend in that time.

  The silence extended; again, he looked mortified. Then he said, in what appeared to be an analysis of causation, “I think my English is not good.” I assured him it was. He looked at the ground: unthinkingly following his gaze, I saw the precision of his footwork on the rock-strewn path. He said, “My father died when I was small. He spoke very good English. So after that, for many years, I couldn’t practice my English.” Sadness suddenly emanated from him like a heat.

  All morning we walked along the ridge. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant that advertised itself as Nepalese. I said I would eat only a little because of my bowels and Thomas looked startled, as if I had discarded some carefully prepared script, and he feared for the consequences. He reached for his phone. I glanced at his screen, saw him playing a Tetris-like game: by stabbing at the screen he was smashing colored blocks, attempting to clear a straight path for himself. He collapsed that game, then I saw squiggles of Burmese text on the familiar blue and white of Facebook.com. “Are all these messages from friends of yours?” I asked. He pursed his lips, as if thinking about the question. He scrolled and scrolled, as if searching for some piece of information that was eluding him. He talked of TripAdvisor and Booking.com, about travelers posting critical comments; he mentioned, with an embarrassed grin, the benefits of me leaving a five-star review. His expression, staring into the phone, was tight-lipped, pensive.

  As the Nepalese staff served curries and breads, I noticed that Thomas’s features looked more than slightly Indian. Certainly he was physically distinct from the typical Bamar, Myanmar’s dominant ethnic group. Interested in the presence of South Asians in the country, I asked about his ethnic background. Thomas looked at me with surprise. “I am Burmese,” he said. So much else was fluid, undergoing transformation: but this assertion landed in our conversation solid as a rock.

  Now we walked downhill, into the valley. We began following a train line. Thick, dry undergrowth was on one side of the tracks, rice fields on the other. Inevitably I thought about the laying of the rail lines by the British Empire, about that well-worn trope of trains as symbols of modernity. “What if a train comes?” I asked. But Thomas knew the times: he said the next one was not due for five hours. The track gauge was strikingly narrow. The wooden planks were beginning to rot. A small train station, with a village wrapped around it, appeared on our left. A man sat on a bench on the platform. I wondered if he could be waiting for the distant evening train. Perhaps he was waiting for something else. Perhaps he was not waiting for anything.

  Fog was now back around the treetops. I saw two bulbuls in a tree. We arrived at the outskirts of the village where we would spend the night. The houses, basic two-story constructions, all had electric paint jobs. One had purple doors and green walls, another green doors and blue walls. The colors stood out in the foggy dusk. Thomas turned left, into our homestay. A Burmese family greeted me with the wordless wide grins by which people with no common language communicate. I sat exhausted on the front step.

  There, abruptly, I remembered other news and analysis I’d read about Myanmar, things I had chosen to ignore since my arrival, preferring airbrushed accounts. That still-unmet expectations were causing rising frustration. That people’s predominant feelings were not merely or even mostly of dramatically opened possibilities, but of a scramble for resources and opportunities which they saw as palpably finite. That change, displacing traditions and disrupting communities, was causing anxiety and disorientation—and prompting searches for reassuringly simple racial-religious-nationalist ideas of identity.

  I found myself watching Thomas as he unlaced his hiking boots and put on flip-flops. I saw his feet. They were wrinkled, calloused feet, the feet of someone who’d grown up walking without shoes. He’d been tied into village life enough to want to marry from there. But the old rural patterns had been disrupted—not only had Thomas himself moved, to Mandalay for factory work, then Kalaw, but back in his village, his prospective wife was demanding more money. Thomas was attempting, through the tourist industry, to plug into a nascent Myanmar of greater economic opportunity. Yet his constant talking to me, tending me like an overwatered plant, suggested an entrenched notion that foreign travelers were a scarce and precious resource. On his phone Thomas always had anxiety on his face, as if he believed Mark Zuckerberg’s “connected world” could bring as many disasters as windfalls, as if one bad TripAdvisor review could sink all his dreams, as if all that he’d built for himself remained fundamentally insecure. His hiking boots now sat on the balcony, socks scrunched into them, juxtaposed against the rural dusk. I remembered his words inside the Nepalese restaurant: I am Burmese. The only truly confident declaration he’d made.

  Night came. In the house three low-wattage light bulbs flickered on. Each illuminated perhaps four feet. In the kitchen, Thomas and the homestay family chopped vegetables I didn’t recognize. He spoke to the family familiarly in Burmese. I offered to help; he switched back to English to tell me it wasn’t necessary, resumed talking Burmese. His face looked washed of the concern I’d seen earlier. I heard water trickling in an irrigation channel of a neighboring rice paddy: I wondered how many generations had tended it. A puttering sound: a motorbike came up the driveway. Its sole headlight glowed, far stronger than any light in the house. The driver parked; chatted briefly in the kitchen; left again. I watched the headlight’s glow become smaller, then disappear.

  Through the small porthole of a window beyond my bed’s mosquito netting, I could see only fog. I stepped outside. Although fog enveloped the multicolored houses, in the rice field I could make out the long green stalks, heavy rice grains at their tops. Next door a young girl was on a swing made from rope and a hessian bag. I felt better this morning, in this house, amid this countryside. The girl swung with an unchanging, entirely predictable rhythm. Thomas put away his flip-flops, wrenched on and laced up his hiking boots. We started walking.

  Bright yellow squares appeared on the hillsides. Thomas said they were sesame fields. Old women were spreading chiles on blankets on the road, to dry in the sun. Thomas told me about that, and other crops, and harvesting methods. In his pocket his phone beeped. “Over there they are growing potatoes.” His phone beeped again. “And that is corn.” His phone beeped again.

  Then, a pivot: after speaking about Myanmar’s countryside, he wanted, amid the sesame-checkered hillsides, to know about my country.

  “Is there rice in Australia?”

  “Only a little.”

  “Is the weather warm in Australia?”

  “It depends. In the south it gets cold in winter.”

  “I like wintertime the best,” said Thomas. In Kalaw, he told me, it became quite chilly in December. I told him that in the Australian city where I used to live there was often frost on the ground in the early mornings, and it looked almost like snow.

  “Oh: great,” Thomas said. Then he said, “I like this about my job. I meet people from everywhere. France, the Netherlands, America. And they tell me things.” He paused. “I have not seen snow.” A plane was flying overhead, and he said, “Actually, I have not been on a plane.” He laughed, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again. Another rice field. Thomas told me that in this area, farmers got two harvests per year. Then he said he had a cousin working in Malaysia, in construction, and maybe one day he would visit him. I watched his hiking boots scuff the ground, left, right, left, right, as our conversation shifted between inwardness and outwardness, between old and new worlds.

  We b
egan climbing again, into another set of hills. Blue-black clouds appeared on the horizon.

  “Are there earthquakes in Australia?” Thomas asked.

  “Not many.”

  “Oh: great,” Thomas said. “Here in Myanmar we just had an earthquake in Bagan”—the ancient city, comparable to Angkor, filled with archaeological monuments. “Two hundred buildings were damaged,” he said. “It is terrible. It is terrible, because it is like our heritage is disappearing. We are in mourning.” He said the word “mourning” very carefully.

  I said, “We’re certainly getting more extreme weather in Australia. Fires, floods, rain at strange times of the year, things like that.”

  “Same in Myanmar!” said Thomas, and I noticed his excitement at finding a point of commonality. “Like now. There shouldn’t be rain like this, in November. This is not normal.”

  As if on cue, we saw, below us, a rice field that had been flattened, the rice stalks horizontal against the ground—it was like a movie scene of a UFO landing. “This is from heavy rain last week,” Thomas said. “It is damaging because it is coming at a different time in the rice cycle. It has destroyed a lot of crops.” He paused. “I think the world is changing very fast.”

  I said, “In Australia farmers can buy insurance against poor crops or bad weather. Sometimes they get help from the government, as well. Is there any talk of that, yet, in Myanmar?”

  Thomas asked me for clarification. Then, he said, “No.”

  “It started in Australia in the Great Depression,” I said. “After the economy collapsed, a lot of farms had big difficulties, a lot of people had it very tough.” Then, listening to myself, I stopped speaking.

  The clouds were closer to us. We put on raincoats. It began to bucket. Brown water poured down our path; the earth turned to sludge. Thomas calmly found footfalls in the muck; I stepped where he stepped. A large monastery appeared. Thomas gestured for us to enter. We walked into the courtyard, then stood under a sloping red roof at the main entrance. Rain poured off the roof. Monks in yellow robes walked slowly up the steps.

  Thomas said, “Are you religious?”

  “I’m not, no.”

  “You have no religion at all,” he said, declaratively. “A lot of my clients from the West are like that.” I had a feeling he’d been about to instinctively say “Oh: great,” but had pulled back just in time. I noticed his use of “client.” He looked at the rain, adjusted his jacket. Then he said, “But you know, in Myanmar, that would be very difficult—to have no religion at all.

  “Villages around here are all losing the old religion,” Thomas continued. “Here people practice a Buddhism, but an old-fashioned Buddhism, with animism and other traditions mixed in. Now the old still believe that, but the young don’t.”

  “Why do you think the young don’t follow the old style?”

  “It takes a lot of time,” Thomas said. “Young people now, they don’t have time.” Back on the path, two locals were attempting to walk in the rain. They squinted, held up their hands to shield their faces, disoriented.

  “So you’re more of a conventional Buddhist, Thomas?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am a Buddhist.” A second confident assertion from him, and it seemed to me again, given all his other freely expressed doubts, jarringly so.

  The rain lightened; we left the monastery. Our boots squelched in the earth. Visibility was still poor, so it took a while for me to see a large poster stuck on a house. I opened my jacket, wiped my glasses on my shirt, then saw pictures of a man I didn’t recognize, and Aung San Suu Kyi.

  “Who’s the guy on the left?”

  “That’s the new president.”

  “What do you think of the new government, then?”

  “For a long time things were terrible. Now everything is better. We are very happy.” From his tone, he made it sound like the well-worn verse of a school song—he sang it dully, as if by rote. Whether he did so for my benefit or his own, I didn’t know.

  The rain stopped, and the valley and next range of hills became visible again. Now I could see a startlingly conical-shaped hill among the range, and Thomas said, “A hermit lives there.”

  “Really?”

  “He went there and became a monk. He lives up there and works on his religion.”

  I looked. On the hill’s summit was a small hut, surrounded by maybe a half dozen pine trees. For a second I thought I could make out a figure, but of course I couldn’t.

  “He gave up everything,” Thomas repeated, “and became a monk.”

  On some impulse I said, “You ever feel like doing that?”

  He said, “Do you?”

  “Sure, some days.” But I said it with a dumb grin on my face. When he replied, “Yes, sometimes,” he looked contemplative, and grave.

  We arrived in the village where we would stay the night. One shop on its outskirts had several outside tables and was selling beer to tourists. At one of the tables was a group of newly bronzed northern Europeans, and one of them said, “Hey, Thomas!”

  He had escorted them to Inle Lake several days ago. They had stayed there, and were now heading back to Kalaw by another route. There was a shouted recollection of some mid-trail embarrassment which left ambiguous who was being mocked; they invited Thomas to have a beer with them. We walked quickly to the homestay so he could drop off his things before heading back. He asked if I wanted to come; I declined.

  At the homestay I went to the outside shower, poured cold water from a bucket over myself, put on my last clean clothes, went to the house’s second floor, and opened my book. Night came. I had a sudden appreciation for simplicity. Old routines in an old house, I thought to myself. Thomas still wasn’t back. On my arrival the old man at this homestay had nodded to me only slightly. As I read he sat on the floor on the opposite side of the room, underneath framed pictures of presumably deceased relatives. But my presence in this house likely complicated any practice of household routines for him. At around nine o’clock, a confused rooster began to crow.

  When I woke up and went outside, I found Thomas already on the veranda packing his bag. We walked on, in more fog. He hadn’t shaved: it made him look older. On the village’s outskirts was a field of corn, dead. After two hours of walking Thomas realized he had left behind his rain jacket.

  Now we were passing through different country again, an open grassy valley with scattered banyan trees and rocky limestone cliffs to our left and right. Inle Lake, gray, calm, was visible ahead. A thin trail of Western tourists was moving through this valley from various tributary paths in the hills. I saw once again the country’s potential—this could indeed be a major tourist attraction.

  Then, I felt again the dreaded sensation in my bowels. Why now? I told Thomas through a self-deprecating joke, then went broodingly quiet. Yet Thomas still insisted on speaking, asking one question after another. Preoccupied with Richter scale rumblings in my intestines, my responses became terser until I was answering in monosyllables. I looked at him, saw his now familiar anxiety. Eventually he said, simply, “We are silent.” I looked at him. He was desperately unhappy.

  In an attempt to reset the situation, I said, “But people can be silent, sometimes, Thomas. There’s such a thing as a comfortable silence.”

  It had no effect at all: his face was the same. I thought: But he isn’t “comfortable.” He is in no position to be comfortable. And I found myself asking again—what was it, precisely, about silence which Thomas couldn’t tolerate? Was it the importance he ascribed to each trekking trip, elevated by an idea of the scarcity of trekkers in Kalaw? For the tourists around us in this valley were still few in number, given this was peak tourist season. I thought again of those would-be guides loitering by the café, desperate for business. Or was he genuinely searching for a human connection? He had moved only recently to Kalaw, I reasoned; he would be spending a lot of his life on trekking trips with strangers. Amid his disrupted, dislocated life, far from family and other anchors, did he, qui
te simply, want to talk?

  “Do you have pets?” Thomas asked. I told him a dog and a cat. “Oh: great. In Myanmar, we keep mostly dogs,” he said. “I had a dog—here, in Kalaw. I had him for a while. Then, he got sick, and he died. I guess in Myanmar there is a lot of death. When I went trekking he would sit outside my house and wait for me when I came home.”

  I asked to sit. We entered a banyan tree’s shade, rested our backs against its roots. I shut my eyes. Thomas sat pensively. I could feel his concern that I’d stopped speaking, knew he was interpreting it, again, as a setback. A cool breeze came from the lake. I could see he was thinking of a new topic. But it seemed to me that all his anxieties conditioned the one he now chose.

  “Today in Myanmar,” he said, “we have a problem with the Rohingya.”

  I looked around: at gray rock, yellow grass, the banyan tree’s fat trunk and leaves, the distant lake. I felt another quake in my bowels.

  “Burmese people don’t like them because they are so violent,” Thomas said. “They carry out many terrorist attacks. They live inside Myanmar but they are not from Myanmar. They are from Bangladesh.”

  The banyan tree’s enormous roots, knee-high, curled in all directions; to me, now, they resembled a tentacled monster rising from the earth. He asked—and I recognized the same sentence structure from our conversation yesterday—“Is it like that with Muslims in Australia?” Searching for a new point of connection between us, he’d settled on this. So many differences separated us. But he knew—from previous trekkers?—that our societies had this tension in common. He was looking at me expectantly, hopeful this would solve the problem of the silence between us.

  I did no calibrating, no soft-pedaling; I did the opposite of what people do who want to make a connection with someone else: lobbed my own differing perspectives and values straight at him, unvarnished. “In my country,” I said, “it’s similar in that too many people believe ugly things about Muslims.” A butterfly floated past. “It’s unfair, because of course, all but a handful are as peaceful as you or me. But people like to have somebody to blame.” As I said it, I watched hurt spread across his face. He had suggested a commonality between us; I had pointedly denied it.