That Pagoda Moment

I heard about Burma from a work colleague in Singapore, called Thin. She was born and grew up in Yangon and had family there, and told me how wonderful it was. At the time, it wasn’t easy for foreigners to get a visa (this was 2004, when the first military junta was still very much in power) but she reckoned that if I forgot to mention I was a journalist I should be able to go there, as long as she went with me and I stayed with her family.

I rolled up to the local Burmese embassy — the living room of a house just off Tanglin Road in Singapore. I filled the form in and handed it over, and was told to come back on Tuesday. I went back on the appointed day, and was told no I couldn’t have a visa. Bummer.

I complained to Thin (who intimated she was well-connected) and she said she would ‘make some calls’. She did, with some effect. I was summoned back — this time to the kitchen of the house just off Tanglin Road. As well as a desk, it had a kettle and some teacups, and a man who seemed much more important and communicative than the one who had previously told me I couldn’t go. He looked at my application.

“When do you want to visit Burma?” he asked. I told him during my next leave, over the Christmas holidays.

“Hmm. Are you a Christian?” Funny question that, for a visa application. Short silence.

“Burma is a Buddhist country you know, so you won’t be able to go to church on Christmas day with your family. I think it is better if you stay in Singapore.”

If that sounds like a weak excuse to you, it definitely did to me. I protested that even though I might be a bit Christian, I wasn’t really a super-active one, and the chance to visit Burma was surely unmissable anyway.

I pleaded; he shook his head.

Thin’s call-making ramped up into second gear. She obviously had contacts outside the kitchen as I was called back again and this time another less chatty man reluctantly took my passport, stamped my visa, nodded and handed me back my authority to enter the previously forbidden territory. I flew to Yangon a week or so later. After a couple of days acclimatising in Yangon, Thin’s mother suggested we go up country to visit some ancient sites including Pagan, where there were lots of lovely pagodas.

The trip was to be a group one. There was me, Thin, her sister Hnin, her cousin Mimi, Thin’s mother, her uncle Aung plus a few other cousins of uncertain (to me at any rate) linkage to the clan; because we were a biggish group, we rented a minibus.

The driver estimated we would arrive in Pagan (600km away) about 14 hours later; this was because the roads were not quite western motorway standard, to say the least. We carried spare fuel cans in the back because there were no petrol stations on the way. You could apparently buy fuel at the side of the road out of 40-gallon drums, but people warned it always had dirt in it and was bad for the engine.

Unfortunately, the original tankful in our minibus must have come from one of those drums; after about five hours the bus sputtered to a halt. The driver was obviously used to this kind of thing, popped up the engine cover, pulled off a fuel line, gave it a hearty suck and spat out the gummy blockage. The engine purred back into life again, and off we went. For another half hour, then it stopped again. The driver (looking a bit green this time) repeated the sucking, spitting procedure and we resumed our journey.

Then it happened again. This time the driver added some shenanigans with a hammer, screwdriver, spanner, a piece of rag to re-filter the fuel, and we got going, again. It happened once more. By now the driver was looking decidedly unwell — and maybe unsuck-worthy. But we (he) had no choice. Repeat, stop, repeat.

This stop-go dance was happening at the side of the road in the middle of what looked like medieval nowhere, on some very uncertain roads. To make it even more scary, we passed a real chained-up chain gang, breaking stones under the eye of armed guards at the side on the verge. I shivered, and sank low in my seat.

By now, way north of Yangon, there were no villages, no phones, no garages, no friendly passing vehicles, no rescue services, no tarmac — no nothing. Even the light was disappearing. The few other passing vehicles on the road seemed loath to stop at our fuel-first-aid stops in case they couldn’t start their engines again. That dirty fuel thing was a real pisser.

Eventually we lurched into a small town called Pyay. A man repairing a wrecked jeep told us the problem was bad fuel; we could have told him that. He said our fuel pump was ruined but luckily he had another he could fit for us. Once it was bolted in place, the driver revved off excitedly for the next twenty kilometres or so. By this time it was getting very dark which allowed us to see (and tell the driver about) a little red light flashing on the dashboard. It was the low oil light. We stopped and the driver topped up the oil.

Unfortunately, the red light and the extra oil were a bit late. The engine now sounded like the Burmese Army was inside the casing trying to pound its way out with a sledgehammer. We rattled agonisingly slowly through the gloom into another small town.

We were still hours from Pagan, with the worst of the roads to come, our minibus was kaput and it was virtually dark. The obvious solution to our fix was to eat something, so we did.

We sat in an open-fronted house/barn and ate noodles and fish soup out of a bucket and watched TV. Then a truck reversed into a nearby pole and the power went out and everything was plunged into darkness to the accompaniment of a huge cheer from the other TV watchers. Maybe they didn’t like the programming.

So there we were, in the middle of nowhere, about 16 hours into the journey and well and truly stuck. But Uncle Aung knew a local who, he hinted, fingers crossed, might just know about replacement transport. He made some calls.

A ute (pickup truck) arrived. It had a canvas cover over most of the back, and the obliging new driver (I think the previous minibus one was having a lie down) threw in a couple of mattresses and rugs too. The comfy passenger seat was taken by the driver’s mate who had to work the cassette player: a contractual issue, we assumed. We wedged all our suitcases, bags, food, and contorted selves into the tray of the ute and blasted off up the road at 60kph.

The road (that’s a joke) was bumpy. Very bumpy. Atrociously bumpy. Every few minutes we would all levitate as the speeding ute hit a lump or furrow. We jammed ourselves in place by squeezing our battered limbs under the edges of the tray. Nobody could sit; we merely endured. Occasionally we swerved suddenly off the main track to avoid a huge rice or timber truck which was travelling towards us (down the centre of the road) at night because nobody else was on the roads. We wished we weren’t.

Conversation was impossible due to the noise; the other downside to the driver’s 60kph-or-bust approach was that the extra speed kicked up huge clouds of dust. It got in our noses, eyes, ears, hair, clothes, underclothes — absolutely everywhere.

To give the driver credit, it would probably have been worse if we had gone slowly as we could plausibly have got stuck in one of the deeper holes. Eventually, at about 3am and over 20 hours since we set off, we made it into Pagan.

We were all incredibly tired, but laughing with relief. We fell out of the back of the ute with our joints snapping and popping with the unaccustomed movement. Then, behind us, spears of light shot through the dawn clouds.

All those stories about the sunrise over the Irrawaddy are true. It’s utterly, utterly, breath-takingly sublime and humbling. We watched as the sun came up over an immense savannah-like plain covered by an equally immense number of astonishingly beautiful buildings.

In front of us were over 3,000 pagodas and temples in what seemed like a whole universe of designs and colours, but all speaking a culture of elegance, devotion and belief that strained my paltry understanding. Some were brick, some pure gold, some painted brilliant white, and they stretched as far as the eye could see with the magnificent Shan mountains forming a guarding line on the horizon behind them.

Moisture leaked into my eye as the sumptuous, vibrating, enduring grandeur washed silently over us.

I felt my pathetic, tiny, insignificant body shrink to a speck in the face of such magnificence and beauty, such complete harmony of nature and built landscape.

I had never seen anything so lovely, ever. I turned to Thin and smiled. I felt like I had fallen in love with life, just by standing there.

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