Before we went to Myanmar, we really had no idea what to expect, food-wise. It wasn’t a cuisine that was well represented in the South East Asian culinary repetoire internationally.
We knew it was just across the water from all things Indian and Bangladeshi, and surrounded on the other side by Thailand and China, with just a hint of Laos. These are all excellent neighbours to have, culinarily speaking. We just had no idea what to expect from actual Burmese food.
We are both food nerds, and half-assed backpacker cheapo stir-fries in seedy bar/restaurants wear thin after the first dozen or so servings of oily fried cabbage and green pepper, doused in soy sauce. We wanted to avoid these as much as possible.
We were somewhat successful, though in some small towns we didn’t have much choice. Kinpun, the pilgrim-filled base town for the golden rock at Kyaikhtiyo, was almost absurd in its appalling food: tomato-tinted hot water filled with shredded cabbage being passed off as soup; a plate full of fried chicken bones being labelled ‘fried chicken’- I stuck to the tomato salad as everything else was going horribly awry.
Veggie biryani in Yangon
There were some amazing places that we found, however; places that we just kept going back to because they were so awesome.
These places ranged from tiny Indian holes-in-the-wall serving biryanis and chapatis and hot spiced chai, to tea shops, street vendors and low-key open-air places with pots full of lukewarm Burmese curries, to an Italian joint with a Myanmar chef taught by a passing Italian chef.
Our tastes leaned toward Thai and Indian (both very well represented in the country), with an emphasis on lots of spice and un-scary meat, if any. If you want a Bourdain-style skin-fat-organs-bones paean to food, you’ve come to the wrong place. More often than not, we went vegetarian. It was easy and, generally, it was very good.
In no particular order and in no particular geographical grouping, here are some of the best things we found in our 26 days in Myanmar.
I’ve been experimenting with ways to get my photos up on here without having to go through Facebook links each time. Below is my attempt at uploading my Yangon album into a WordPress gallery. If you weren’t able to get past the Great Firewall to access the photos I posted yesterday, here is my first series (there are about 4 more). They can be found after the jump, so as to not take up the whole page.
And we’re back. And I’ve been floored with a tummy bug that whacked me over the head sometime last night, after we got back into Shanghai in a taxi that thought it had a jet engine. After 7 white-knuckle flights in a month (3 of them on Yangon Airways, whose motto is, unnervingly, “you’re safe with us!!”), I didn’t want my death to come in a taxi. Anyway. The tummy bug is making sure that my updating isn’t going as quickly or as easily as I’d hoped. I mostly just want to go back to bed and sleep.
But anyway. For now, this.
I’ve been busy uploading photos all day and editing them to fit into coherent albums. Until I can find a good photo gallery plugin for WordPress, I’ll be simply posting a lead photo here with a link to my corresponding Facebook album. Feel free to comment here or there. If you are in China and haven’t got a VPN or reliable proxy, I do apologize.
First, we have Yangon. We were in Yangon 3 times: When we first arrived, then when we came back from Moulmein, and then finally just as we were leaving. These photos are from all three visits, in approximate chronological order.
Click me!
After we left Yangon the first time, we took a train down to Mon State, to Moulmein, Kinpun and Kyaikhtiyo. There were few if any tourists down there and the monsoon season kept the air soft and the evenings explosive. It was lovely. Disclaimer: Kinpun had the worst food we encountered on the trip. If you fancy seeing the golden rock on the edge of the cliff, you might want to pack a lunch before reaching the Kinpun base camp village.
It's a long way to Tipperary
We made our way back up to Yangon by any means necessary- on the backs of motorbikes (with backpacks and day bags balanced carefully), in trishaws, in pickup trucks (both front and back), rattly mini buses and rattly full sized coaches. From Yangon, we flew to Mandalay. Even though Mandalay city wasn’t a particularly interesting or even walkable city, we did explore it in great depth and spent more nights there than anywhere else in Myanmar, partly because it has interesting places around it and partly because it was a handy hub for Hsipaw and Bagan.
On the Road to and From Mandalay
From Mandalay, we rode in a bare bones shared taxi through tightly switchbacked mountain passes at speeds previously unfathomed to Hsipaw, in Shan State. Our co-passengers included a mother and her two children, who were not used to riding in cars and so spent a lot of time throwing up, and a young woman who, surprisingly, had a mobile phone. These are rare in Myanmar, as a sim card alone is said to cost $1000. In Hsipaw, only the children still shouted hello at us: the adults were sweet but reserved. Deservedly so. A few years ago, huge numbers of townspeople were arrested for having the wrong kind of contact with tourists passing through. What that means, exactly, I’m not sure. But the energy is definitely more guarded. In Hsipaw, we walked a lot. We looked for hot springs that were inaccessible due to monsoon river swelling, and we successfully found a lovely big waterfall. It rained heavily. Every day and night, children chanted their lessons from open classrooms all over town. It formed a steady, rhythmic beat to all walks, all rests.
After three nights, we got another shared taxi back to Mandalay with another mother and her two carsick children.
On the Road to the Waterfall
Finally, after a few more nights in Mandalay, we flew to Nyaung Oo, the town nearest to Bagan. We had thought about taking a shared taxi again (in spite of the puking and white-knuckle speeds), or the Ayerwaddy river slow boat (which in Monsoon season was very slow indeed and frequently cancelled anyway), or a coach (which left at 5am and was likely to be as rickety and slow and painful as all the others we had taken in the south) but we found a flight for $32 that magically landed a mere 5 minutes after it was scheduled to take off, and we found ourselves checking into our hotel before we were meant to even have landed. I can appreciate that. We spent 5 nights in Nyaung Oo and we explored every bit of Bagan. It was awesome.
We’ve been in Myanmar about two weeks now, travelling close to the ground (usually about 6 inches from the pavement when facing backwards on a trishaw) and grinding our way from Yangon to Moulmein to Kyaiktiyo to Yangon to Mandalay to Hsipaw and I’m tired.
For about two days I have been wanting to stay in bed with a book, a cup of tea (strong, milk, no sugar) and no need to look at things. I’m rather fried on looking. While we were hiking to the hot springs this morning, using a hypothetical map similar to the optimistically wrong one in Yangshuo(the one with the vital bridge that wasn’t yet a bridge), ankle deep in very sucking mud on ox trails deep in village territory in the pouring rain, I started snarking (in my head- I’m not crazy enough to snark aloud just yet) about the concept of endless travel as being a good thing.
I have been living abroad, for the most part, since I was 19, but my tolerance for and patience with long-term mobile travel seems to come shuddering to a halt somewhere around, oh, let’s say, the 2 week mark. My record so far has been 2.5 months in Eastern Europe in mid-winter (starving, freezing, poor) a dozen years ago, trying to kill time in a cheap place between my UK visa expiry and my flight to Cape Town. I believe I lost my mind a number of times during that trip. Similarly with the trip Doug and I embarked on when we left Turkey, 2 months from Mexico City to Costa Rica.
Why, you may ask, am I so bad at actually travelling when I seem to compulsively need to throw myself into scary, unknown situations on a regular basis?
Good question.
I’ve come to the realization that I’m much better at dealing with places when I have time to slowly work my way in. We’ve been spending around three or four nights everywhere we’ve been so far in Myanmar.
Soaked, muddy and tired
In those places, we’ve been running around, climbing things and shouting hello at everyone who greeted us (so many!) and flagging down motorcycle taxis and trishaws and trying to change money on the black market and trying to fathom what it is that we are doing here.
My introverted, hermitty brain has had a very hard time taking it all in and processing it. Hence the desire for bed and strong tea and a closed door to the outside world. Travelling like this makes my senses reel. I can barely even write about it.
Two years in Kayseri? Certainly! Four years in Istanbul? Yup! Six months in Cape Town? Three years in London? Aye! Places with a quiet space to retreat to, places where I can (slowly slowly) start to make sense of things.
That’s one aspect.
The other thing that’s been grinding through my brain is the idea that when travelling at speed, everything is pretty much a zoo or a theme park. No matter how much you research, no matter how humanely and consciously you travel, you’re still just speeding through someone’s town, looking at them, taking pictures of them, then buggering off. You may strike up conversations, learn some astonishing things, but really, you’re barely scratching the surface.
In the markets
When walking down the roads here, with doors wide open for brezes and shops half poured out onto the sidewalk, I want to peek in and ask the shopkeepers and inhabitants and cooks a million questions:
What are you doing?
What are you making?
What are you eating?
Where are you going?
I want to poke my head in and take photos of their sizzling pans full of curries and noodles, of their babies playing on the cracked bare wooden floor (the ones who shout out Hello!), of their marvelous melange of shop goods and bolts of cloth and electrical surge protectors (circa 1957).
But I find it very difficult to do so without feeling absurd and greedy and rude and horribly invasive.
I imagine being back at home in Canada, sitting on the front steps drinking coffee, when a tourist from RandomStan comes up and says hello in a language I may or may not speak, who then comes up to me and starts taking pictures of me drinking my coffee on my front steps, then says Goodbye! in that language I may or may not speak. Repeat this a few dozen times a day. I’m annoyed already.
When I live in a place for six months or six years, I have time to slowly poke my head into people’s lives, invited, welcomed. The subtle issues become apparent and recognized and dealt with. There are so many subtle issues in Myanmar that I can’t even begin to tackle them in only 25 days.
We aren’t unwelcome here (Myanmarians are remarkably sweet and open, considering what they’ve been through) but I feel like I’m tip-toeing through their sitting rooms at times (I’m not but, really).
You can actually fly to Mandalay from Yangon for about $75US, so the romance of the road is somewhat lessened. After bouncing around the Mon State south east of Yangon for the past week, I’ve come to value the brevity of flights.
I’ve learned a few other things here, which I’ll note briefly. I’m saving up most of my ideas and stories for when we return to Shanghai in early August. The three layers of proxies that I have to work through here are exhausting and I lose a lot of material when pages suddenly declare themselves to be invalid.
What I have learned (briefly)
1. After running around Shanghai in a tizzy before we left, trying to hunt down unmarked, uncreased, brand new American dollars in all denominations and failing (I got mostly $100 bills- Chinese banks and Chinese black market changers have very few smaller bills) I’ve discovered that the hotels we have stayed in in Myanmar have not only been not as fussy about the condition of the money as I’d been led to believe, but they’ve given change in dollars that was in better shape than what I’d given them. You must pay for hotels, trains, flights and most tourist sites in $US. Since you’re only allowed to bring in $2000US cash and there are no ATMs, no places that take travellers’ cheques and no realistic ability to use Visa , the idea that some (if not many) of your dollar bills might be not up to par was terrifying. On the Lonely Planet forums, one fellow said $600 of his $2000 was rejected. So far, only one $50 bill was rejected (by immigration at the airport) but it was later happily converted into new $10s by our guesthouse in Yangon.
2. The fact that we had a very limited chunk of funds that could be refused on a whim (my rejected $50 had a crease), combined with last summer’s debacle in Indonesia where we went horribly over budget due to every affordable hotel between Yogyakarta and Denpasar being booked solid in advance, made us quite nervous about money before we came here. This niggling fear lasted until last night when we did a quick inventory check and discovered that even though we’d been hiring cars and eating in not-so-cheap places and staying in mid range hotels with AC and fans and no bedbugs for nearly ten days out of out 25 total, I was down to $1700 from my original $2000. Yes. $300 in ten days. Ten comfortable days. I think we’ll be fine.
3. The lack of tourism (read: near isolation) has meant that Myanmar has been an absolutely calm and pleasant place to travel in.
She sells Longyi
People smile and say hello and you smile and say hello. No one stalks you or demands that you take their taxi. In the Bogyoke market in Yangon, no one launched into an unwanted sales pitch. No arms reached out to grab us. Our guest houses have contacted our next guesthouses and booked our accommodation for free; they’ve gone out and bought our bus tickets and train tickets for us. Yesterday Doug needed to get his scraggly scary beard trimmed (not shaved) and Miss Hla Hla (our guesthouse lady) sent one of her boys out with us to get it done properly at the barber down the street. It feels like we are being gently transfered from one nurturing safe hand to the next.
4. The food is marvelous. I’ll be doing a big post about that when I get back to Shanghai when I can upload my photos. Let’s just say we are considering moving here someday. It’s that good.
1. Burmese script initially reminded me of the patterns woodbugs make when tunnelling into a two-by-four, then I decided it looked like binary code without the 1s, as seen through a wonky dot matrix printer, and now I’ve finally reconciled myself to the idea that it’s really just a series of counterfeiters’ adaptations of the Chanel logo.
2. You can’t row up to see her house on that lake. Nor can you casually stroll past. There is security.
3. There are , very few tourists here. We went to a big park around a big lake with a lovely wooden boardwalk encircling the water’s edge and saw no one. We walked for half an hour and passed one other couple. We saw no foreigners except the Frenchman in our guesthouse. We are very obviously not in China anymore.
4. They really do scrutinize your dollars. So far, one $50 bill and one $1 bill have failed to pass muster. Luckily I’m spending all my money in kyats, drowning my unsorrows in tom yam soup with prawns the size of a small cat, chased down with fresh lime gin fizzes and taxi rides in disintegrating taxis.
Obviously no one briefed the censors that I was coming. This site is one of the only things out there that isn’t blocked. Thank you for your trust, Junta. Appreciated.
Sometimes there is a road; Sometimes there isn't
We arrived yesterday morning after a long (and yet not long at all) journey from Shanghai: our flight out to Guangzhou sat on the tarmac for hours, waiting for clearance.They served us meals and drinks and more drinks before we had even taken off. Not a good sign. It was well after midnight before we were able to steer our sleep-deprived bodies down the long industrial subterranean passages toward the Guangzhou airport hotel. Note to self for future: 3 minutes from Departures doesn’t necessarily mean it’s close to Arrivals.
Look up!
But Yangon. We are in Yangon or Rangoon or Bob or whatever it ought to be referred to as these days. It smells like incense and Tom Yam paste. It’s hot but not as hot as Shanghai tends to be. It’s humid but not unbearably so. I glow after a long walk. My skin looks better than it did in China and we’ve only been here 36 hours. It’s possibly from all the fresh lime juice and chilies.
We walked over 22000 steps yesterday after we landed, marching around the city, playing hopscotch on the mishmashed paving stones. Like in Ubud last summer, there are huge gaps in the pavement that a dog could get lost in. Others tip and tilt. If you walk home at night, it isn’t much lit and it is easy to find yourself in a ditch. We were careful.
In Yangon there are streets lined with fortune tellers and with bookstalls.
The bookstalls aren’t so much stalls as collections of old books: 1950s guides to repairing circuitry, carefully re-sewn collections of colonial writings on aged paper, useful phrases in English, books in Burmese in a scripts I have yet to fathom. People read a lot here. So many people can be found at their stall or on a step or in a tea stall, hunched over something, anything wordy. I find it very soothing.
Curled up with a good book
Fat, rich, well read
The fortune tellers are equally ubiquitous. We caved and had ours done near the end of yesterday before the afternoon rains broke. We had interviewed a few for the job to see if they had enough English to make sense to us.
The one we chose in the end told me that 1. I am good with books, travel and playing the lute and 2. I’m very fat and will get even fatter as my life progresses, which is apparently a really great thing and 3. I’ll write a novel, win the lotto twice, buy a white car, and 2 houses (I’ll rent the less-nice one out) and 4. I’ll have some stomach ailments in my 60s (not needing surgery) and will die in old age at home, very pleasantly.
Doug’s was the same, nearly, except he won’t get fat, nor will he write a novel or get 2 houses or a car.
He will win the lotto 3 times, besting my 2 times.
You can see it all here
Masala Toeshay and strong, spiced chai
In the mornings, the streets and their crooked pavements are lined with vendors, with their bottoms and their wares placed firmly down on the ground: all sorts of veggies, plucked chickens with uncomfortably wrung necks, vats of boiling oil frying long dough sticks for breakfast.
There are pans of samosas, pakoras and bhajis.
We walked a lot, before everything opened. When things started opening this morning, we stopped in the New Delhi restaurant and I drank strong dark spiced chai from a metal cup in a metal saucer and Doug ate many chapatis with dhal and tamarind and chutney. Breakfast of champions.
For lunch, we had biriyanis from another Indian place across town, with huge stacks of spiced rice and veggies and lime pickles for a dollar.
This city reminds me of Mumbai, which was unexpected given its geography.
Also unexpected is the very visible Muslim population and the plethora of churches.
Transparency note: If you want to sign up for this course, do me a huge favor and click through here. They'll buy me a coffee in return. And maybe a llama.
