EMBARRASSED!!!!!

Images of Rangoon.

The lady at Yoma's reception (Yoma is the name of my lodging) is very charming and helpful.
"Where is the place to buy a bus ticket for Mandalay?" she answered with:
"We'll get it for you. No charge." Her friendly smile displayed a scary set of teeth. All incisors were filed to sharp points. I thanked her and accepted the offer.
"Do you have reservations for accommodation in Mandalay?" she said.
"No," I said, "I never make reservations, just take what I find."
"That might be difficult next week during New Year. Everything tends to be fully booked," she said.
Her remark made me think of my default funky dormitory accommodation at the otherwise sold out Motherland guesthouse and the problems finding an alternative.
"Could you make me one?" I said.
"I can try," she said and presented another of her scary smiles. She ended up making one call after another, probably about ten, until she found a place in Mandalay that wasn't yet fully booked. She reserved it for me. I really started to like her smile.
"What would you like for breakfast?" she said.
"Do I have to chose now in the evening?"
"Yes, because it will be served in your room at the time you chose." She showed me a list of what was available; eggs, butter, toast, fruits, coffee or tea, and then the local fare, fish head soup with pork rinds and noodles. While I looked it over she said:
"I suggest you take the local food, if you don' mind spicy. It is more nourishing."
Fish head soup with pork rinds and noodles for breakfast turned out to be an excellent choice.
That reminds me again of the previously mentioned strange way we humans make choices. The offered cornucopia of fruits here in town is a pure delight for eyes and taste buds that are accustomed to what is offered in regular supermarkets back home. Street sellers display mountains of (I am not sure of the spelling for these tropical fruits' names): Lichee, logan, mango, papaya, jack fruit, mangosteen, durian, pineapple, all kinds of shaped and sized bananas, pomelones, star fruit, a big assortment of melons, berries and piles of other, interesting looking fruits I'd never seen or tasted before. But, the most expensive and most prominently displayed fruit on many of the vender's tables are apple with stuck on labels identifying them to be imported either from Japan, China or New Zealand. Compared to the prices of local fruits, their cost is astronomical.
As the Romans so aptly said: De gustibus non disputandum est!

Yeah, right!
On my street wanderings today I passed a sign with pictures of sushi, sashimi, tempura, katsu don. A sushi bar in Rangoon! With much heard stories about Japanese cruelties and mass enslavement of Burmese during WW II, it is hard to imagine that there exists a love affair between the two peoples. Not having noticed French, Italian, even Chinese restaurants advertised in town, seeing a Japanese was a surprise. Fully aware of my statements about human idiosyncrasies, about wanting rather the unobtainable than the readily available, I could not resist going in and try. True to form and its exclusivity, the Japanese meal in Rangoon, although absolutely perfect, cost a multiple of what an equally delicious Burmese feast would have set me back.
The other extreme to street fare prices was demonstrated at the bar in the Strand hotel. For old memory's sake I went there to see how time has dealt with that old venerable relic of Somerset Maughan's and Kipling's colonial lore. Together with Raffles in Singapore, the Strand was a shining crown in the empire where the sun never set, a place where jingoistic old boys slapped backs and ingested their gin and tonic, ostensibly to ward off Malaria.
The only feature of this empire jewel that appears authentic is the name, it is still called Strand. Inside as in the old version, there is plenty of mahogany wood paneling but now it has a kitchen cabinet look. All is spic and span as one would expect in a super expensive five-star hotel, yet the white marble floors, that in my memory had the worn look of time, now have the feel of a tiled and polyurethaned bathroom floor. The bar, except for the few liquor bottles, could, for all its charm, be in a hospital cafeteria. The similarity with a hospital is also demonstrated in the pricing. A gin and tonic cost ten dollars, the price of ten wholesome dinners in Rangoon's streets - even with noodles of your choice. There were no old boys, just a couple of morose tourists in shorts sucking beer.
Burma seems to have a functioning system to avoid unemployment. A twelve-story construction site had, as in an ant colony, a continuous stream of men carrying bags of cement, sand and huge loads of bricks up the partially finished stairs, presumable for the construction of the thirteenth floor. On the whole large site there was not one crane or pulley system to transport material up to near the clouds.

My fascination with old travelers did not stay in Bangkok's Khao San. Already on the flight from Bangkok, in a super cheap Air Asia flight where the seats are so close together and narrow that normal sized people have to suck in breath and curl up to fit, it felt like a geriatric convention. Among Rangoon's tourists, even thought not numerous as in Bangkok, a fair number qualifies for inclusion in the graveyard-blond set. I had to revise my Khao San nostalgia traveler assumption. Here in Burma it is not likely many of oldies are repeat visitors - traveling in Burma during their younger years was not the thing to do - and very few did. It was difficult to obtain a visa and affordable tourist accommodations were rare. Also, Daw Aung San Suu Kui, the peace Nobel price winner who was placed under house arrest after she won an election, advised against visiting Burma. "I only fills the coffers of the ruling junta," she advised.
With a French woman, the only other western traveler on the bus, I shared a taxi from the out-in-the-boonies bus station into town. She is a grandmother, her children are independent of her. She hopes to find some local crafts to buy that she then can sell back home with a profit to help finance her travels. "What do I have to lose?", she said. With super cheap fares on airlines nobody ever heard of, food and lodging costing less than cigarettes at home, she stretches her French social security check as far as it might go - and that is way further here than at home.

Where do I fit into that picture? Right somewhere into the middle, I am afraid. Maybe a few of the observed senior frailties and peculiarities aren't burdening me as much as some others. In a Rangoon sidewalk eatery I observed one of the oldies pulling a roll of toilet paper out of her bag then cleaning with it her plate, chopsticks (which are disposables that have never been used and never will be used again) and tea glass. Also, I am not buying crafts for resale or stretch social security checks, but try to acquire exiting happenings to add to my store of worthwhile, memorable memories.

The toilet paper cleaning lady reminds me of a theory I came up with. No matter how strange it might seem to you, please bear with me - because in the end you just might agree.
When eating from street food venders, as I regularly do here in Asia, in Africa, South and Central America, in short, wherever they are, and if the food is cooked and served in dishes, don't look for the pristine, antiseptic-looking ones - unless you like your food to taste as if, before serving, it had been submerged in a swimming pool. Almost all street food venders have no access to running water. Even if clean running water was available by his or her stand it is not practicable. Vegetables, dishes, glasses, utensils, are all washed in a bucket of water under the stand - all day long.
Sounds terrible, right? Yes, but....
Some of those street chefs, "to do right by their customers", heavily chlorinate the water in which they wash food and dishes. As a result, offered fare gets that not so yummy swimming pool flavor. The alternative, if you want vegetables that taste like vegetables, fish taste like fish, meat like meat, is frequenting the less conscientious street establishments.
Before gasping think of what you are most likely exposed to if you eat in hotels or regular indoor restaurants. Food and dishes are washed in water that might also be questionable. Even if you adhere strictly to the edicts of careful travelers; never accepting local ice cubes, never eating salad, never drink, or even brush teeth with water from the faucet, you are not home free. Water, no matter it's quality, is everywhere, in everything, every day. You will be exposed to it no matter how much you try to avoid it. Even the bedding you sleep in has been washed in it, the local's hands you shake have the same bugs like the local water. You wash your hands - with what? You can't disinfect them forever, everywhere, every time.
The answer, according to yours truly, is immunization.
The locals survive the onslaught of local bacteria, even though their system is no better equipped than yours. Give your body a chance. Most likely, at home, your system is never exposed to the same internal flora and fauna you come in contact with while traveling in some regions of our planet.
Immunization, according to my non-medical expertise, is exposing the body to weakened or small amounts of agents that are liable to attack the system. That way, though a normal process, our internal biological laboratory is stimulated to produce antibodies. If your machinery was never exposed to these alien onslaughts, it has no capability to resist attacks.
David, a Canadian friend of mine in Paris lived that theory to an extreme. Whenever he bought a baguette sandwich he first placed it on the ground in the street, rolled it around a few times with his shoes while muttering: "It you don't eat a few of the buggers all the time you won't be able to resist them when they attack."
The solution, again according to my non-medical but plenty of empirical experience, is to accustom the system gradually to local conditions. First, brush teeth with water from the faucet, then advance to rinsing the mouth, have a drink with ice cubes, wash the dust off a fruit with local water, have a little salad, and soon, your immunization is complete.

My Mandalay contact from way back is out of town 'til tomorrow.


EMBARRASSING!!!!!

When I came back from the internet café the reception lady said a man had called, asking for me. Because I know absolutely nobody else in this town, I assumed it was Thar Aye, my old friend from Mandalay whom I had informed by email about my arrival. "He will call back at two PM", she said.
It was about eleven, plenty of time for the planned visit to Mandalay Hill, 1,729 steps up from the street entrance, to visit the tall golden (gold painted?) standing Buddha. I went to the foot of the hill by taxi because it is about seven kilometers from my hotel. On my return, as came into the hotel lobby, Thar jumped up from a seat, embraced me, then prostrated himself in front of me and - kissed my feet. They were really dirty from the long walk. I tried to pick up the sixty-year old man, I pleaded with him to stop, I pulled while he kept kissing my feet. Total embarrassment! When he finally got up, tears were streaming down his face. He kept holding on to me and had arranged for a photo studio to take pictures of the two of us.
If all that sounds strange to you, it no doubt is. It came about because what happened when we first met, about seventeen years before.
Emilie and I tried to get from Mandalay to Imphal in India's Manipur. That journey, then and now, was off limits to everyone from the outside since right after WW II. The Brits, with the help of hundreds of mules imported from South America, built that road during the war to get behind Japanese lines. The war was over before the road was completed. Since then, Nagas and Kukis, two former headhunting tribes in the region, are at war with each other and, neither Indians, nor Burmese would permit anyone getting through the area because lawlessness prevailed.
In order to find our way across that off-limit territory we needed a local assistant to help organize a transport elephant, or whatever else was needed to get through the jungle to India.
Enters Thar Aye, a trishaw driver we'd met at the Mandalay train station. He had a surprisingly huge store of English words, but a very limited capacity of speaking it. He explained how, when he was a Buddhist monk, he gave himself the task of learning a hundred English words a day for a hundred days. He did, but had practically no opportunity to use his knowledge for speaking - 'till he met us. I offered him a thousand dollars if we could make it to India with his help. He agreed and we left. In the last town officially accessible to us, Monywa, we found out that we were shadowed by the secret police. Had we succeeded in our quest for reaching India, Thar, as out facilitator, would have been dead meat at the hands of Burma's ruling junta. We abandoned our attempt and returned with him to Mandalay.
"Why?" I asked him, "why would you risk your life for a thousand dollars?"
"With that my children could get an education and that is more important than my life," he said.
Needless to say, I gave him the thousand dollars anyway.
Roll forwards fifteen years.
I was contacted by a man from White Plains near New York city.
"Are you Ernst Aebi who traveled once in Mandalay?"
"Yeah?"
"Have you met Thar Aye there?"
"Yes. What's that all about?"
"I am a travel agent and was in Mandalay to make contacts to organize trips. I met Thar, a travel guide. At his house is a photo of you, like on a shrine. He says that his children all have a wonderful education because of you, that he is a licensed travel guide because of you, he managed to buy a house because of you."
"Well applied thousand dollars," I thought.
When I returned from my East Africa trip last year, there was a letter in my huge pile of accumulated mail. It came from a couple in Manhattan's Upper Westside. It also stated that they hope I am the Ernst who once was in Mandalay and that I knew Thar Aye. Included was a handwritten letter from Thar. He explained how one son is now a computer programmer, one a dentist, one a doctor and his daughter is married to a jeweler - and that he lives now in his own house, all thanks to you (me), he wrote. He expressed a wish that some time soon I might come back to Mandalay.
That's what brought about the foot kissing.
We drove on his bike to the government information office to find out, first officially, which of the routes I might be allowed to take.
The one from Mandalay to Imphal, we were told, is okay to drive on but I was not allowed to go there because the Indians refuse entry. It is like a war zone over there. Thar confirmed that claim by the government lady. The road between the border town in India's Manipur, from Moeth to Imphal, is closed to regular traffic.
The Ledo road from Assam in India through Burma to China, in many parts does not exist anymore. It was built by US troops under general Stillwell, also called Vinegar Joe because of his demeanor, during WW II to resupply the Chinese in their fight against the Japanese.
That leaves the old Burma road that was also off limits for most of the last sixty years because of ethnic conflicts between the Burmese ruling junta and, I think the Karens.
"Maybe you get a permit," one of the five ladies behind the counter said.
"How do I know I get it?" I said.
"You apply now, pay one-hundred dollars and in two weeks you get answer."
"Then I can go?"
"No, you will need a car and an escort from Lashio to the border, one-hundred and fifty dollars," she said.
"One hundred here, one-hundred and fifty in Lashio?"
"Yes."
So, my options are:
* Road to Imphal, but no permission to get into India. With the road from the border to Imphal closed, even if I managed to crash that border, I'd have to walk about 150 kilometers through a war zone.
* Ledo road doesn't exist any more, but reconstruction is under way.
* The old Burma road, lame, with a government handler, but historically significant. I could try to avoid the government dude, but for what? Save two-hundred and fifty dollars? On a road I could (probably) take officially if I was willing to hand over two-hundred-and-fifty dollars.
I paid the initial hundred dollars and now I get two weeks of exploring other parts of Burma. I have heard of worse fate.