Top ten from Myanmar
by prudence on 18-Jul-2012
We are not long back from two fabulous weeks in Myanmar. Here is a list of my favourite things:
1. Yangon. Beautiful. The Shwedagon was even more magical than I'd imagined it. The city's many colonial-era buildings may need a little TLC, but they are still big-league picturesque. Its lesser-known temples are also extraordinary. And it's a city that is very walkable. Big, big tick.
2. The food was a wonderful surprise. Not that I'd expected it to be bad -- I just hadn't expected it to be SO good. The salads are awesomely tangy and crunchy. One fascinating variety involves pickled tea-leaves (faintly bitter, but very good), which you mix with nuts, crispy beans, sesame seeds, sliced garlic, and maybe a few vegetables. Extraordinarily nice. Burmese curries are mild but tasty. In traditional restaurants, all you have to do is choose your dishes from the large array (without worrying about the protective oil, which you manoeuvre around), and they are then served to you accompanied by rice, vegetables with a spicy dip, a bowl of soup, and sometimes a tea-leaf salad or a piece of jaggery to finish off with. Thick "Shan noodles", meanwhile, come in a comfortably sustaining peanutty sauce. Indeed, the Shan cuisine we experienced was a delight -- we particularly enjoyed the green tomato salad and the yellow rice cooked with salted fish. Mohinga, which appeared on our breakfast menu one day, is a delicious soup made with thin noodles and a robust fishy liquid, topped off with a scattering of fresh herbs, dried chilli, something crispy, and a squeeze of lemon. It was also mango season while we were there, and I think the mangoes were the best I've ever had.
3. Still on the subject of bodily sustenance, tea-houses are among the best (and cheapest) places to eat. They're a very popular local institution, and people spend a long time over very small cups of sweet, milky tea while reading the newspaper or chatting. Bigger glasses of Chinese tea seem to be thrown in for free at most places.
4. No-one can predict how it's going to go in the long term, of course, but the political opening up is heart-warming. You can now drive or walk past Aung San Suu Kyi's house, and T-shirts with all manner of renditions of her picture are freely on sale (in fact, one travelling companion who bought and wore one received teary salutations from locals). And while I was taking a picture of an NLD office in a provincial town, an old guy who was cycling past shouted out approvingly, "Democracy!" Inevitably there'll be a long, hard road ahead, but with all my heart I wish their reform process well...
5. Sometimes, when you've seen lots of pictures of something, the reality disappoints. But not Bagan's plain of temples -- much photographed, and still awesome.
6. Contrary to much popular supposition, you can't actually see too many Buddhas... That is because every one is different. And for extraordinarily divergent depictions of calm, serenity, and the ability to rise sublimely above pain and suffering, you just can't beat Myanmar's Buddhas.
7. Taking a slow boat from Nyaung U to Mandalay on the legendary Ayeyarwady River is an extraordinary experience. Hot and uncomfortable, certainly. But there's nothing quite like forging your painstaking way up this amazing, lake-like river, watching all the different kinds of river craft that share your watery space and all the different kinds of domestic activities that occupy its banks, and sleeping out on deck under the soft night breeze.
8. The highlands -- as represented by Kalaw in our case -- offer a glimpse of a totally different world. Just a few hours' slowish drive from the hotplate of Mandalay (partly on the Chinese superhighway, along which still trundle horses and carts, bullocks and carts, and cyclists, both motorized and pedal-powered), you're in the cold storage of this southern Shan hill station. Ethnically, this area is highly diverse, and we encountered many people groups in the course of our walk in the nearby hills. It's also extraordinarily productive. The sheer volume of vegetables being grown, harvested, shifted, and sold outran anything we'd ever witnessed. Not to mention rice, wheat, tea, coffee, ginger, taro, and fruit. All the more worrying, then, that many of these rural people remain terribly poor...
9. The colours of Myanmar will live in my memory for ever -- the soft yellow of the thanakha with which people paint their faces; the myriad colours of that most elegant of garments, the longyi; the bright wares of the travelling markets; the shimmering mirror work of the temples; the maroon, rust, and pink of monks' and nuns' robes; and gold, gold, gold...
10. I would have been happy to be boated around on Inle Lake for several weeks, I think... As well as the wonderful scenery (reminiscent of New Zealand in places), we got fascinating glimpses of unique practices (such as leg-rowing or the tending of floating gardens), great opportunities to shop (Nigel and I replaced our lost/ill-fitting wedding rings with silver ones, to celebrate our 25th anniversary), and the chance to see more highly significant temples.
All up, I loved Myanmar, and I'd be back in a minute given half a chance.
1. Yangon. Beautiful. The Shwedagon was even more magical than I'd imagined it. The city's many colonial-era buildings may need a little TLC, but they are still big-league picturesque. Its lesser-known temples are also extraordinary. And it's a city that is very walkable. Big, big tick.
2. The food was a wonderful surprise. Not that I'd expected it to be bad -- I just hadn't expected it to be SO good. The salads are awesomely tangy and crunchy. One fascinating variety involves pickled tea-leaves (faintly bitter, but very good), which you mix with nuts, crispy beans, sesame seeds, sliced garlic, and maybe a few vegetables. Extraordinarily nice. Burmese curries are mild but tasty. In traditional restaurants, all you have to do is choose your dishes from the large array (without worrying about the protective oil, which you manoeuvre around), and they are then served to you accompanied by rice, vegetables with a spicy dip, a bowl of soup, and sometimes a tea-leaf salad or a piece of jaggery to finish off with. Thick "Shan noodles", meanwhile, come in a comfortably sustaining peanutty sauce. Indeed, the Shan cuisine we experienced was a delight -- we particularly enjoyed the green tomato salad and the yellow rice cooked with salted fish. Mohinga, which appeared on our breakfast menu one day, is a delicious soup made with thin noodles and a robust fishy liquid, topped off with a scattering of fresh herbs, dried chilli, something crispy, and a squeeze of lemon. It was also mango season while we were there, and I think the mangoes were the best I've ever had.
3. Still on the subject of bodily sustenance, tea-houses are among the best (and cheapest) places to eat. They're a very popular local institution, and people spend a long time over very small cups of sweet, milky tea while reading the newspaper or chatting. Bigger glasses of Chinese tea seem to be thrown in for free at most places.
4. No-one can predict how it's going to go in the long term, of course, but the political opening up is heart-warming. You can now drive or walk past Aung San Suu Kyi's house, and T-shirts with all manner of renditions of her picture are freely on sale (in fact, one travelling companion who bought and wore one received teary salutations from locals). And while I was taking a picture of an NLD office in a provincial town, an old guy who was cycling past shouted out approvingly, "Democracy!" Inevitably there'll be a long, hard road ahead, but with all my heart I wish their reform process well...
5. Sometimes, when you've seen lots of pictures of something, the reality disappoints. But not Bagan's plain of temples -- much photographed, and still awesome.
6. Contrary to much popular supposition, you can't actually see too many Buddhas... That is because every one is different. And for extraordinarily divergent depictions of calm, serenity, and the ability to rise sublimely above pain and suffering, you just can't beat Myanmar's Buddhas.
7. Taking a slow boat from Nyaung U to Mandalay on the legendary Ayeyarwady River is an extraordinary experience. Hot and uncomfortable, certainly. But there's nothing quite like forging your painstaking way up this amazing, lake-like river, watching all the different kinds of river craft that share your watery space and all the different kinds of domestic activities that occupy its banks, and sleeping out on deck under the soft night breeze.
8. The highlands -- as represented by Kalaw in our case -- offer a glimpse of a totally different world. Just a few hours' slowish drive from the hotplate of Mandalay (partly on the Chinese superhighway, along which still trundle horses and carts, bullocks and carts, and cyclists, both motorized and pedal-powered), you're in the cold storage of this southern Shan hill station. Ethnically, this area is highly diverse, and we encountered many people groups in the course of our walk in the nearby hills. It's also extraordinarily productive. The sheer volume of vegetables being grown, harvested, shifted, and sold outran anything we'd ever witnessed. Not to mention rice, wheat, tea, coffee, ginger, taro, and fruit. All the more worrying, then, that many of these rural people remain terribly poor...
9. The colours of Myanmar will live in my memory for ever -- the soft yellow of the thanakha with which people paint their faces; the myriad colours of that most elegant of garments, the longyi; the bright wares of the travelling markets; the shimmering mirror work of the temples; the maroon, rust, and pink of monks' and nuns' robes; and gold, gold, gold...
10. I would have been happy to be boated around on Inle Lake for several weeks, I think... As well as the wonderful scenery (reminiscent of New Zealand in places), we got fascinating glimpses of unique practices (such as leg-rowing or the tending of floating gardens), great opportunities to shop (Nigel and I replaced our lost/ill-fitting wedding rings with silver ones, to celebrate our 25th anniversary), and the chance to see more highly significant temples.
All up, I loved Myanmar, and I'd be back in a minute given half a chance.