Burma

Two years ago I wrote a blog posting on "Twenty Reasons I am Happy to be Back in Bangkok." A Burmese friend was amused by this and asked me to do the same for Burma. In addition to the innate gentle decency of the valiant, put-upon Burmese people, here are ten reasons Joe and I are always happy to return to Myanmar.

1. It is a nation where nearly every educated person is a computer genius. This is necessary for getting around the Internet blocks and filters thrown up by the paranoid junta. Myanmar has three national sports: soccer, cane-ball (a circle of men keeping a rattan ball in the air using only their knees and ankles), and computer cunning.

2. Burmese drollery in the home. Electrical power is available in Yangon only a few hours a day, and nobody knows which few hours they will be. An artist we visited in his house apologized for the oven-like heat, and said, "My fan is not used to electricity."

3. Burmese drollery on the road. Before visiting the U.S., a Burmese friend was interviewed at the U.S. Consulate visa section. He said, "The man asked many stupid questions. It was okay. I am Burmese, so I am used to stupid questions."

4. Myanmar is a place where the United States is still liked and respected. (Europeans we have met on this trip have followed the health care "debate" and think the U.S. is doomed.) In Mawlamyine, an old man minding a ramshackle closed cinema asked where I was from. When I said America, he grinned and shook my hand. Others smile and say, "Ah, Obama!" There are mixed views on the economic sanctions, but everyone appreciates the U.S. vocal opposition to the hated regime.

5. Life in Myanmar can be precarious and unpredictable, and one way people have coped is by perfecting the language of uncertainty. On our travel agency program, Joe's March 11 day in Chin state is described like this: "From Aye Camp, continue to Mindet. Depends on triangle matters; time/local situation/travelers' anticipation, trek to Kyarto Village! (Conditional)."

6. Educated Burmese are generally nimble with English. We liked the way the gorgon who controls the purse strings in a Yangon business was described by another employee as the boss's "extra wife."

7. Thailand specializes in what is often called medical tourism, but Myanmar may actually have pioneered this practice. The old sayadow (abbot) at a Mawlamyine monastery told Joe and me that he had cured a German tourist's arm injury in ten minutes with holy water. He made some water holy for us by dipping his beads in it and reciting a prayer, and we sipped some of this. We were concerned about the water's source, but afterwards we felt neither better nor worse than before.

8. A friend from Yangon who was with us at the monastery asked and was allowed to take a puff on the sayadow's cheroot. He inhaled some actual holy smoke.

9. Myanmar is a great place for jazz fans. We went to a nat festival in Bago---and I don't mean Nat Adderly. Nats are protective spirits that are pre-Buddhist in origin and whose images often exist on levels below Buddha images in temples. At a nat festival, a wonderful racket is raised by a band made up mostly of percussion instruments---drums, gongs, cymbals, xylophone-like gadgets---and this draws the nat spirits inside the temple and makes them happy. Dancers in colorful outfits, many of them ladymen, make frug-like motions, or move around slinking like Harpo or slouching like Groucho, and sometimes spectators join in. We saw a woman get possessed by a nat, and she had to be exorcised. Sometimes the music at Bago sounded like a ten-car pile-up on the Long Island Expressway, but some of it was marvelously fanciful. In one piece, the percussionists and a man tooting a little tin horn of some kind were playing in different times, the drummer and gong guys in 1/4, the horn player in 2/4. It reminded me of Dave Brubeck's Blue Rondo a la Turk, and it was thrilling.

10. Where else in the world but in Myanmar can you take a ride in an authentic World War II Willis Jeep that is still running? We piled into this unlikely contraption for a ride up to a mountaintop temple near Bagan overlooking the Irrawaddy. I had been reading Donovan Webster's excellent The Burma Road, about the campaign to re-take Burma from the Japanese, and this machine was right out of that era. It ran like a champ, and I asked our guide how old it was. He said, "Eighty or a hundred years."