Everywhere I go, people always ask me…..

….who I am and where I come from….

The Myanmar people are either the friendliest or the nosiest people in the world, they all seem to want to talk and find out all about you, they call out to you in the street, chat to you in restaurants and temples, sometimes they only want to know the basics and other times it’s an
in-depth interview.

And it’s not restricted to the young people, anyone who has a few words of English will want to know all about me, I’m certain it must be like collecting stamps, everyday at the dinner they compare who they’ve collected that day – “I got an Irish guy today, age 33 and travelling on his own, and I got a French woman too”, and I get the feeling Irish people are more valuable too as they get a lot of Japanese, French, Italian and Spanish but Irish are a rare gem!

Whenever I say I’m from Ireland if I’m talking to a man then immediately I’ll be told how my country is good at football and several Irish football players will be named, some even I’m vaguely aware of but their favourite Irish football god is “Ryan Keane”! The whole country is crazy about football and if I knew anything about it would no doubt talk for hours to me about it’s every nuance, and like most Asian football fans their favourite team is Manchester United, so naturally since Roy Keane played for them, they all know him, it’s almost embarrassing that nearly every male in Myanmar knows more about Irish football players than I do!

While I was in Yangon (formerly Rangoon, yes that name change thing again) I didn’t get that much sightseeing done, I kept getting into conversations with people. I talked with a lot of monks and novices, it seems that nearly every monk in the country is learning English and their teachers tell them to get out and chat to any foreigner they see. It’s almost as if they’re lying in wait above the streets waiting for an unsuspecting foreigner to pass before they pounce, I’ve talked to a lot of monks in the last 10 days and they’re a very strong force for change in this country, some will just chat to me about football, while others will have religious discussions or talk politics, some have very strong opinions of the government!

They’re learning English partly to communicate with visitors and be able to explain Buddhism in English to them and also so that they can go to poor communities and teach them English. Some are also learning law so they can advise the same communities on legal issues, it’s really quite
refreshing to hear.

It was a very weird sensation yesterday, sitting in a temple trying to explain proportional representation to someone who has never had the chance to vote, and also emphasising that even with democracy you don’t always get the government doing things that benefit or help you….

But everyone I meet wants people to come to visit Myanmar, some to see how the people live and what they have to put up with but others because they love their country despite its problems and they want to share it with visitors, they’ll always be ready with a list of places that I really should visit.

One man I met as I was climbing up to a temple on top of a hill today was quite emphatic, he told me to go to a place which I’m actually going to tomorrow. He told me to take loads of photos to show to my friends and family so they could learn about Myanmar and maybe come to visit as well. He wouldn’t let me go until I’d agreed to all these reasonable demands!

Not being much of a photographer, I’ve decided to follow his intructions and take a few more photos……

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You want to go where?

One thing that surprised me while I was in Yangon was that the taxi-drivers really don’t the city at all, it seemed that anywhere I wanted to go, my hotel, my friend’s house, their workplace, they never knew where it was, it was amazingly consistent!

There’d be huddled conversations between groups of taxi-drivers as they tried to work out where the place was and once the lucky driver was selected he’d be coached by the group in how to get to my mystical destination…..

There was another guy who assured me he knew where to go and then proceeded to stop three or four times to ask the way and it’s not confined to Yangon either! Central Mandalay is based on a grid system, all the streets are numbered and once you know the cross streets, it’s easy to get to your destination, or so you’d think…..

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What’s in a name?

Is it Myanmar or Burma? Is it Beijing or Peking? Mumbai or Bombay? So often now names of countries and places have changed from what we once knew and were comfortable with to strange alien names that confuse us and we never can quite remember…

And so it is with Burma, the country was called Myanma for hundreds of years before the British came and called it after the majority population group, the Bamar, and so Burma came into existence.

One of the few admirable things the military government did was to change the name of the country back to its historical name. It did this because at the time of the name change, just after independance, the country was being torn apart by civil war with every minority group in open rebellion so they decided to revert back to the more inclusive original name as first step to bringing peace to the country….

It’s hard to think of any other admirable things that they seem to have done……

The sanctions have probably hurt the government but as with all sanctions it usually hits the people first. I had a prime example of this today while sitting on a tricycle being ferried around Mandalay. The driver was telling me how the price of a tricycle has gone up from about $20 over the last few years to over $100. This is because the prices of all the component parts, wheels, tyres, brakes etc have shot up (and these aren’t cutting edge tricycles either, think 1950s bikes), so these people are finding it harder to earn their living here with rising costs….

The sanctions affect me as well, there are no foreign banks here, no ATMS, no credit card or travellers cheques handling, so the money I brought in with me has to last my entire stay as there’s no way to get any more once it’s gone…..

And enough money for a month is a lot of money to be carrying around on your person so maybe the lack of crime in a military state is a plus in a way…..

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Money makes you fat….

… but spending makes your slimmer.

Money is always a bit of an issue here in Myanmar, I have it, the locals want it and it’s usually a question of how much they get, but its not simple….

There is an official exchange rate between the dollar and the Kyat but no-one seems to know what it is, all that is known is that it is significantly lower than the “real” rate that you get on the black market.

Naturally everyone uses the black market and while it’s not quite covert meetings in dark alleys, you still have to be careful of who and where you exchange money.

My first money changer was a student who carried his moneyaround in his bag and after agreeing a rate we went on a meandering walk through side-streets on the way to the tea-shop to conduct our business.

As he was a student and only exchanging money part-time, we were able to sit and chat for a while. Besides I needed time to count the money, the unoffiicial exchange rate is $1 = 1320 Kyats which means that $100 =132000 Kyats with the biggest note being 1000 Kyat, that’s a lot of banknotes to count and check…

So now I walk around with a rounded belly, my money belt stuffed with kyats and my new objective is to spend myself slim…..

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A Tale of Two Beaches – Kuta

After the quiet of Nusa Lembongan I really wanted some action so I went to the ultimate beach, Australia’s unofficial colony, Kuta.

This is first, and sometimes the only place, that people go to when they get off the plane, there’s a long sandy beach, plenty of facilities and big waves for surfing. It’s funny, you read the Lonely Planet and it seems that all the coastal sections were written with surfers in mind, everything else is secondary…..

The whole town seems to be geared towards making money off the tourists and everything is available, I would be regularly offered hash, marijuana, “massages” and young girls as well as the usual options of sunglasses, t-shirts and transport.

Another thing that was big business was time-share holidays and the ruse was that you get given a scratch-card and in order to claim your prize,all you have to do is sit through a 1 hour presentation on the resort. It was a hot day and 1 hour in an air-conditioned room sounded good so I gave it a try. I listened, I asked stupid questions, I said I wasn’t interested in their timeshares and I came out of it with a week’s free holiday in their resort….

At the same time I had the chance to see the friendliness of the locals. I was only just off the bus and wandering the side-streets in search of accomodation when I got adopted by Wayan who spent the next hour taking me on a tour of the lanes and alleyways until I found a hotel with what I wanted, he never tried to sell me anything and was always ready for a chat when I bumped into him of the streets over the next couple of days. With it being a quiet season a lot of the retailers were bored and had little to do I could sit down and chat with them for a while, it really added a bit more depth to the beach town.

I got to the beach on the first day and had a look around, walking along the strand, watching the surfers tumble into the waves (these were obviously learners). The holiday gods obvisouly weren’t happy with my desire for action and decided to take action themselves as after a seemingly innocuous chicken sandwich later that day, I was knocked out with food poisoning and took it a lot easier than planned for the rest of my time there! And didn’t quite get back to the beach…

Kuta is known not only for the beach but also for being the site of the 2002 bombings and in the heart of the town, right where one of the nightclubs was is a large memorial dedicated to the victims and there’s a long list of names, it’s very sobering to just stand there and read the names….

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A Tale of Two Beaches – Nusa Lembongan

I couldn’t just spend my time in a cultural oasis like Ubud, there was more to Bali than good food, nice people and culture – there was the beach!

I chose a nice quiet beach on a small island called Nusa Lembongan which is known for it’s good diving and snorkelling, after 5 days of relaxing a bit of action would be a nice change. As with everywhere in Bali it didn’t take too long to get there, just a 30 minute bus trip, a boat trip over very rough seas and I was there. About an hour later I was wondering how to get off the island!

As I checked into my guest house I was informed that I’d be staying at least two nights, as the boat to the Bali wasn’t leaving the next day, (suddenly the irrational desire to escape starts to rise….). I then got to check out the diiving, which I’m told is amazing with plenty to see, only catch is that there’s no diving the next day – or snorkelling, or surfing, or even swimming, nothing water related at all.

That next day was a special yearly celebration dedicated to the sea so to pay respect to the sea, no one travels out onto the sea at all, all the boats are tied up and the people who spend their whole lives getting their living from the sea have a day off. And the beach where I was staying was a lovely white sandy beach but it wasn’t there solely for the tourists, it was a working beach.
The beach is enclosed by a lagoon which protects it from the huge waves that crash upon the reef at the lagoon’s edge, as you come into the island on the boat you can see waves of surfers in formation riding to the reef….

Inside the lagoon are wooden frames which are only visible when the tides go out. Every morning and evening you can see the islanders walking out and collecting the seaweed that gathers on the frames. Seaweed is the primary source of income for most of the people on the island. They dry the seaweed under the sun and then kept in storehouses until it is taken to the mainland and sold for use in medicines, food stabilizer, cosmetics and gelatin for ice cream…

So what exactly do you do on an island for two days with nothing to do? Well the only thing to do was just sit back on the porch of my beach cottage, sip some cold drinks and look out at the sea…..

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Bali

When you think of Bali you think of beaches and then more beaches, so it got me to wondering why did I come to Bali, it’s not really a very Dermot-place, is it?

Well it’s not just beaches, a hour inland from the beaches is the small town of Ubud, not far from the beach but a whole world away….

Ubud is not really a town, it’s more a group of villages that grew together as there’s not just rice fields surrounding the town but they’re an integral part of the town itself, you’ll find fields hidden behind buildings and sometimes on the edge of the streets themselves. My guest house was nice and quiet and each morning I woke to the view of rice fields….

Ubud is said to be the cultural centre of Bali and it’s very easy to see why, there are regular performances of Balinese dance and even the chance to learn Balinese dance – don’t worry, I didn’t try to take any of those classes!

It’s also apparent in the number of galleries and art shops in the town, you could spend a whole day rambling through them and still not see all that was on offer. It was good place to relax, rambling around art galleries and book shops, eating good food and sitting reading quietly by the rice fields…

There are temples everywhere in Ubud, every street has one or two, they’re scattered all around the island, temples of all sorts, cave temples, rock temples and sea temples but while I was there I only went to see one set of temples and they were special….

There were three of them and they were located in the Monkey Forest. In my small amount of travelling I noticed that temples seem to attract monkeys like honey attracts bees, there’s always a few hanging around but the Monkey Forest certainly lived up to its name, the place was filled with them, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was over a hundred monkeys there and they weren’t shy either. They’d come up to you looking for food and they wouldn’t always believe you if you told them you had none, they’d check your pockets to make sure! The young ones would just climb over you as if you were a larger monkey, so you’d want to like monkeys!

Besides there was no need to go travelling anywhere to see the people practising their faith, it was all around you from the morning offerings of rice and flowers to the spirits, you’d see these offerings everywhere, around your guesthouse and even on the streets. Not only that but everyday in Bali there seems to be a celebration in one of temples around the area and you see women and men in their best clothes taking larger offerings to the temples, even the temples are dressed up….

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And for your next course…..

It’s said that a soldier marches on his stomach and the same can be said about the traveller, everywhere you go there are strange and exotic foods to try, though it wasn’t quite like that in Tibet, Tibet was filled with the familiar, the two staples were yak meat and potatoes, what more could a travelling Irishman want?

Yak was everywhere, when you travelled on the roads of Tibet, they could always be seen roaming the hills and plains and on your plate they were there, fried, as a steak, in a curry, in momos (dumpings), yak yak yak everywhere you look. There was a great moment in the Yak’s Head restaurant in Shigatse when Nami declared a dish as “the best yak ever” – it was lamb! You can only have so much yak!

Xi’an is home to the Terracotta Soldiers, but my main memory of the city will be of food, I met up with Nami again and together in the rain we explored the markets and side-streets in search of our next food high….

We ate in fancy restaurants and with the locals, in food courts and in the greasy spoons beside the train station, in fast-food noodle shops and off the street, we ate and we ate….

We had the famous Sichuan hot pot (of course we weren’t in Sichuan province when we had it but it was good all the same!) which is like the shabu shabu hot pot I had in Taiwan, except in this case the pot is split into two sections, one with water or a mild sauce and the other with a hotter chilli sauce and you can cook your meat and vegetables in either section as you fancy. We also had a lovely mixed spices sesame dip to dip everything in after it was cooked.

Both of us love dumplings and so we sampled quite a few while we were snacking but we also went to a restaurant which boasts 200 different types of dumpings. We ordered a set meal and got to try about 18 different types of dumplings, mainly savoury but some sweet ones as well, we had dumplings filled with pork, duck, chicken, several types of vegetables, egg, peanuts, walnuts, pumpkins and much more, some gorgeous and some just okay but a great way to explore a meal!

After a while though the rain and the grey started getting to me and all this travelling was wearing me out, I was badly in need of a holiday, somewhere warm and sunny, so I flew to Bali…..

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Spit on it!

There’s this terrible habit people in the west have of sealing a deal by spitting on the palm of their hands and then firmly shaking hands – thankfully this particular Western habit hasn’t been adopted in China because boy can they spit! Each spit is a performace in itself, there’s the long drawn out HOCK which echoes around the area as they try to dredge up as much content as possible (extra points for loudness and size) followed by the delivery – you never want to be in the path of one of them.

Fortunately this culture of spitting could soon be a thing of the past, no longer practised by old and young, men or women, this performance art could be banished to the past if the Chinese goverment has it’s way. It’s realised that visitors don’t seem to like this habit so as part of its clean-up drive for the Olympics, spitting has been effectively banned, everywhere you see signs encouraging people not to spit, it’s a huge campaign, though I’m not sure how well it’ll work!

The Olympics are huge in China, there’s so much hype going on you’d think it was all happening next month and not in two years time. It’s all about the olympics, you see the 5 mascots everywhere, they’ve only just had a really big ceremony to reveal the mascot for the Paralympics, it’s crazy! It’s a completely different feeling to living in Sydney in the run-up to the Olympics there.

One thing the Chinese are masters at is bargaining, I’ve never seen that level of bargaining before, almost everything is open to negotiation, labelled prices are just a guide, you seldom seem to pay what the stated price actually is.

In the west, when a hotel has room prices chiselled into the wall behind the reception desk, these prices are literally written in stone,unchanging, any requests for discounts will be met with a haughtyattitude.

In China, you’re more that welcome to pay these prices but in reality they’re just the opening bid in the negotiations, no-one really expects you to pay those prices, the challenge is to see how low a rate you can get!

There seems to be 4 levels of prices in China, the foreigner price, the price for foreigners who think they’re bargained a good price, the Chinese price and the local’s price. It’s amazing to watch the Chinese bargain with each other, it’s like a mating dance as the two parties slowly weave their way towards an optimal price, I wish I was that good!

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If you go down to the woods today…

When I arrived in Chengdu last week just off the train from Lhasa it was grey and smoggy and I really didn’t the looks of the city at all. My first thoughts were to get out and go anywhere but there and that’s pretty much what I did (and this was before I found out that my hostel was in the middle of a building site), I booked a plane ticket for the next day…..

Now I didn’t leave without getting to see Chengdu’s main attraction, pandas! It was a wet rainy day and I wasn’t sure if we’d see all that many pandas as if I was a panda I wouldn’t want to go out and see tourists when it’s raining. Fortunately I’m not a panda and we got to see quite a few damp pandas, especially when it was feeding time.

Cute and all that the black and white pandas are I have to say that the little red pandas are much cuter, they look a little like red raccoons and are a lot more lively than their slower elder brothers.

One highlight of the park was getting to see the little panda cubs, some so small and young that they were kept in incubators and had plenty of tourists gazing lovingly at the little teddy bears…
We also got shown a film all about pandas in which we got to see things we probably didn’t want to see like mating and birth. They casually say on the film that birth is quick and it is, it’s so quick that it takes everyone by surprise including the mother itself! It’s like that scene in Alien where nothing much is happening and then all of a sudden there’s this screaming creature running around – very scary!

Smog, rain and aliens, it was time to get out of Chengdu!

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