Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  The main forms of entertainment and excitement in boring Brunei were wandering through the scrubby jungle that covers 75 percent of the small country, chilling to the AC at the extravagant indoor malls, visiting the free amusement park on the north coast, or paying tribute at the grandiose Regalia Museum, which immortalizes the outfits, swords, and medals worn by His Majesty Paduka Seri Baginda Sultan Haji Hasanai Bolkiah Mv’izzaddin Waddaulah, Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan Negara Brunei Darussalam since he became the 29th sultan in 1968. At some 600 years and counting, his is one of the world’s oldest surviving monarchies, and the only absolute monarchy in Asia, so absolute it tolerates no democracy, no opposition, and almost no political activity.

  Although some superficial similarity can be perceived between Brunei and the oil-rich Gulf States in terms of size, wealth, population, religion, form of governance, reliance on guest workers, and high expenditures on opulent buildings, Brunei pales in comparison. It lacks the drive, the business virtuosity, the brilliant entrepreneurship, the world-class architecture, the cosmopolitan attitude, and the throbbing vitality of Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

  What you get instead is a tranquil, law-abiding Familyland boasting one of the world’s highest GDPs per person, thanks to its vast oil resources. It’s a land where your health care is first-rate and free, your cities are spotless, your housing and other needs are subsidized, you pay no income tax, and you receive a guaranteed pension. The cooking, cleaning, and dirty jobs are done by Indian and Filipino guest workers, and your education—which stresses Malay culture, Islam, and monarchy—is free as far as you can go. Monarchical though it was, we saw no dissidents, heard no hotheaded revolutionaries, encountered no Arab Spring–type upheavals.

  Yet even the Sultan was bored with the easy life in Brunei and allegedly indulged in a harem of 40 ever-changing gorgeous women from various nations, each paid about $10,000 a week, all of whom, to shield the Sultan from criticism, were imported by his younger brother, the playboy Prince Jefri. Several women who claimed to have been lured into the harem had sued the Sultan for making them sex slaves, but the courts had granted him sovereign immunity.

  Prince Jefri owned 80 flashy autos and a luxurious yacht called Tits, that was accompanied by two yacht tenders, named Nipple 1 and Nipple 2. If I’d taken the morale job, I would have consulted Jefri on how to liven things up. And add some class.

  Dennis and Andrew headed home. It had been refreshing to have male company for once on these trips, and particularly men like Dennis, with his irrepressible Irish good humor, sanguine outlook, and impressive repertoire of droll stories, and fearless Andrew, ready for any adventure, except strange food. On the other hand, it had been a chore to constantly look for bars where Dennis could get Schweppes Tonic Water and Bombay Gin—impossible in bone-dry Brunei—while searching for McDonald’s and Pizza Huts to satisfy Andrew, and resisting his repeated requests to return to the club in Patpong, where the young superstud was likely now as welcome as a card counter in Vegas. I flew back to my hub in Thailand for a busy night of resupply and repacking before I sallied forth on the road to Mandalay.

  * * *

  Tip to the CIA: If you need to extract information from a captured terrorist, don’t waste your time, and risk international opprobrium, with waterboarding. Just take him for a visit to the Burmese countryside during their hideously hot and humid summers and seat him in one of the unimaginably uncomfortable two-wheeled horse carts they use for carrying tourists over their bumpy dirt trails, and he’ll soon confess to anything. They are hell on wheels. If he passes out from the ordeal, you can instantly jolt him awake him with just one cup of tar-thick Burmese tea (which I had to dilute 15:1 to bring it to the brink of drinkability). And when he’s confessed and has no further value, you can finish him off with a dish of Burmese hot-and-spicy fried finger eels.

  I’d delayed visiting Burma for more than 40 years to be politically correct, hoping that my boycott would bankrupt its tyrannical regime, which went by the marvelously sinister name of SLORC (the State Law and Order Restoration Council). With the passing decades, I realized that my position was more reflexive than reflective and, after giving it some serious study, concluded that my tourist dollars would not be propping up the despots, who made their millions by controlling the lucrative trade in rubies, minerals, timber, gas, and oil. I realized instead that tourism was one of the only vocations from which ordinary Burmese could make a few dollars to avoid the extreme poverty that afflicted the nation, which had the lowest per capita income (adjusted for purchasing power parity) of any country in Asia. Others might argue that if curbing tourism deprived the Burmese people of their dollars, they might grow so discontented that they’d rise up and overthrow the dictatorship, but that was unlikely with this docile populace. In the election of 1990, the people had given 80 percent of their votes to the opposition, yet when this was ignored and invalidated by the regime, the country remained tranquil.

  Whether from political correctness or the economic recession, few travelers or their dollars were present in September 2010. On my flight that landed at the tourist mecca of Bagan, I was the sole sightseer to disembark. In my Bagan hotel I was one of only four guests, served by a staff of 30 to 40. Yet Bagan is the heart of Burmese tourism, an ancient religious city where a thousand thousand-year-old temples, monasteries, and dome-shaped stupas stud the region—the ones left after Kublai Khan demolished the other 12,000 in 1268. It’s a stupa-endous place, deserving far more visitors.

  Another reason for the absence of vacationers was that the regime (renamed SPDC in 1997) had scheduled elections for the following month, motivating travelers to stay away for fear that the voting might lead to violence. I didn’t think it would. I assumed the process would be peaceful, and that the SPDC would count the ballots as it pleased—it had barred all international monitors—and render it a futile exercise, as it had done before, without active dissent. To curtail foreign activists and provocateurs in the run-up to the election, the despots had ceased granting visas-on-arrival at the international airport. You had to apply at the Myanmar Embassy in your own country, which thwarted spontaneous wayfarers.

  Workers in the travel industry told me they were hurting badly. At every place I visited, I was the only mark in sight, besieged by dozens of hawkers. It made for low prices, but it was sad to see so many nice people forced to scramble for so little.

  Burma has for many centuries been shaped by two forces, Buddhism and the Irrawaddy River (transliterated as Ayeyarwady by the military government).

  The Irrawaddy begins, as do most of the great Asian rivers, high in the glaciers of the Himalayas, more than 24,000 feet above, and 1,350 miles northwest of, the Andaman Sea, into which it flows. The Irrawaddy runs down Burma vertically before spreading into a gigantic, nine-pronged, nine-million-acre delta that is the lifeblood of the nation and the heart of its rice culture. For centuries it was, and remains today, the entryway to the country, navigable for almost a thousand miles. The river was actually the “road” popularized in Rudyard Kipling’s 1892 verse, which highlights its aquatic components:

  On the road to Mandalay,

  Where the flyin’-fishes play,

  An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ’crost the Bay.

  Burma is 80 percent rural, one of the least developed nations in Asia, a place that time forgot, a consequence of its isolation by the international community after the military took over in 1962, and especially so after SLORC gutted any real democracy in 1984. It had great economic promise, with commercial deposits of oil, gas, lead, silver, tin, tungsten, nickel, mercury, antimony, copper, cobalt, zinc, iron, gold, and rubies, but those proceeds went into the pockets of the Army, an army of more than 1.3 million in a country needing no army, a country long at peace with its neighbors (India, Thailand, and Bangladesh), and where even ever-acquisitive China is no military threat—because it just buys up whatever it wants. Most indigenes are poor, living on $1.50 a day.

  It has the world’
s highest mortality from snakebites—harboring two especially nasty specimens in the aggressive Russell’s viper and the Asiatic king cobra, which can grow to 18 feet—because the locals, being Buddhists, won’t kill the snakes, or any of God’s other creatures. The domestic animals I saw in the countryside were not pigs or cows being fattened for slaughter, but beasts of burden—oxen in the dry zones, water buffalo in the wet zones, elephants in the mountains—and a few goats raised for their milk and wool.

  The type of Buddhism practiced in Burma preaches that there are three planes of existence: the sensuous world, the animal world, and the worlds of hells and purgatories. These are, of course, in addition to the 16 planes of the subtle material world. Governing a person’s daily behavior are 37 Nats—demons and evil spirits combined with angels—who demand respect and (much like my ex-girlfriends) offerings of money, food, and flowers if one wants to live a peaceful and happy life. My favorites were Princess Golden Face, the Little White Lady with the Mule, the Old Man by the Solitary Banyan, and the Lord of Five Elephants.

  As I understand it—and I don’t swear I do—the Nats take care of day-to-day events and problems while Buddha guides believers toward the afterlife and reincarnation. The Burmese try to do enough good deeds to ensure they do not come back as a dog, rat, frog, female, or other lower form of life. The position of Burmese women has somewhat improved in recent decades, but girls are still the first ones pulled out of school to help their families earn money. Eight out of ten of the souvenir and soda vendors I encountered were girls, some as young as ten, sadly finished forever with schooling and the chance for a satisfying life.

  Theravada Buddhism means lesser, and it’s more conservative and stricter than other versions, with fewer pathways to nirvana. You really have to toe the line to avoid coming back as a frog. The monks who follow it must abide by 227 rules! They eat one meal a day, which they must obtain by begging, and are allowed only eight possessions: three robes, a razor, needle with thread, medicine, an alms bowl, and a strainer (so they won’t accidentally ingest any living thing when they drink).

  From what I experienced, the Burmese profoundly believe in Buddhism and live it devotedly. They are the most unfailingly polite and docile folks I ever encountered, rarely take offense, seldom get angry, and conclude every interaction with a gentle bow and a smile, with their hands clasped before them. I may just be a jaded Westerner, but I felt many of them took hospitality to an uncomfortable extreme, where attentiveness crossed the line into hovering, appreciativeness became fawning, and the provision of services tended toward servility. This unfortunately made them ideal subjects for a totalitarian regime, which may explain why they’d suffered under one for 50 years.

  Because Burma was so isolated, it was not until I reached Bangkok, en route to Bangladesh, that I caught up on the news, some of which did not bode well for the swift completion of my appointed rounds. Potential new nations were popping up over the horizon. The island of Bougainville announced its first move to end its association with New Guinea and become independent; Belgium was so beset by insoluble political problems, based on linguistic differences and cultural and economic incompatibility, it seemed ready to split into two new countries; and Scotland was contemplating a secession that would make Great Britain less great.

  The airport in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh (formerly Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan) almost did me in, as airports had throughout this trip. I arrived at the terminal at 5:00 a.m. for my flight to Bhutan, so early that the muezzin was just calling the faithful to first prayer over the loudspeaker. I was so sleepy that I staggered into the men’s room with my eyes half shut and failed to see the urinals against the far side wall. What I did see, right in front of me, was a tub-shaped tile enclosure about eight feet long with three spigots and a drain, which I drowsily assumed was a communal urinal, somewhat like the ones we had in the army at Fort Leonard Wood. So I did my thing.

  Only as I was zipping up did I realize it was not a giant pissoir, but the ablution fountain in which devout Muslims performed wudhu—washing their arms, face, and feet before they pray. Luckily for me, Al Jazeera was not on the scene to record my transgression. With the Muslim world in a furor that week because an American preacher had threatened to burn the Koran, I think that Podell pissing on a semi-sacred font might have been inflammatory. And one near-lynching in Dakha—however it’s spelled—was enough for a lifetime.

  * * *

  “On the Wings of the Dragon,” is the slogan of the Royal Airline of Bhutan, whose flight into Paro is breathtaking, as the plane threads a needle between 16,000-foot cliffs and makes a last-minute 90-degree turn to land at a 7,300-foot-high airstrip in a narrow valley.

  The Bhutanese believe their sublime alpine paradise is the original, and the only remaining, Shangri-la, and rigorously protect it by limiting visitation to “low volume, high value” tours. This Land of the Peaceful Thunder Dragon is a pristine kingdom bordered by 200 snowcapped peaks of the higher Himalayas, an idyll of thick forests and soaring mountains where gray langur monkeys cavort by the roadside while rushing rivers of foam, fed by towering waterfalls, irrigate divine valleys dotted with whitewashed farmhouses set amid rich fields of green lettuce, golden barley, and red buckwheat, all watched over by 16th-century castle-like monasteries, their prayer flags fluttering in the wind under a cloudless cerulean sky.

  It is the last of the Himalayan Tantric Buddhist kingdoms, what with Tibet now part of China, and Sikkim and Ladakh having merged into India.

  It has a homogeneous population of 800,000 sharing a common background and beliefs within a tradition of Tantric Buddhism that promises them peace, protection, and prosperity. It has an abundance of fruit and timber, and copious hydroelectric power, sold to India for foreign exchange. It is a land that has never known a conqueror, a country so isolated until recently that it has acquired few of the vices or shallow values of contemporary civilization. It’s all governed by an enlightened constitutional monarch dedicated to the preservation of that peace, prosperity, and a healthy environment—and it’s as close as one can get to heaven on earth.

  The people were as polite, kindly, and welcoming as those of Burma, but much happier and far less servile because they practiced a more liberal form of Buddhism, had a per capita income 20 times higher, and were not living under a dictatorship, but a benevolent ruler.

  I saw a large part of the country by driving 1,200 kilometers along some exhilarating (i.e., terrifying) mountain roads with passes close to 12,000 feet. I petted the national animal of Bhutan, the takin, an odd beast with the head of a goat, the nose of a moose, and the body of a cow, that reminded me of some of my worst blind dates. From a teenaged shepherdess who’d set up shop in a mountain pass I purchased a local staple, dried yak cheese, surely the hardest and most tasteless substance eaten by humans anywhere.

  I successfully made a six-hour climb up to 10,000 feet and Taktsang Palphug, the Tiger’s Nest, an amazing monastery set near the top of a powerful waterfall, incredibly carved into a granite cliff wall nearly 3,000 feet above the Paro Valley. The undertaking initially (C.E. 747) required the intercession of the gods, who propelled Padmasambhava—a sage guru known as the Second Buddha—up there on the back of a tiger, in the wrathful form of Guru Dorje Drolo, to subdue the evil spirits of the region. The vanquished demons were transformed into the protectors of the dharma, the monastery was built in 1692 around the cave in which Padmasambhava meditated for three years, and the Bhutanese have lived happily ever after. (I promised my aching knees—which were not living so happily—that if I ever tried this ascent again, I, too, would engage the services of a volitating tiger.)

  * * *

  The indisputable high point of this journey occurred when I got to see my old travel buddy, Steve, whom I—and his Thai doctors—had given up for a goner in the spring, after he was diagnosed with Stage IV lymphoma. But Steve’s sturdy constitution, the constant attentions of his loving wife (who spent 27 straight days and nights
by his bedside in the VA hospital), and six rounds of intense chemo there had beaten back the cancer, enabling Steve to return to his home in Bangkok four days before I arrived, and to meet me for a memorable Thai dinner spent reminiscing about friends and adventures past, but far from forgotten.

  Aware that the Big C all-too-often returns, I privately resolved, on that joyous night, with renewed determination, to visit the last 14 countries and complete this pilgrimage while Steve, who first got me on the foreign road, was still around to celebrate with me.

  I headed to Hanoi for four days before heading home.

  It’s hard for me to imagine how Hanoi would be any different if the U.S. had won the Vietnam War. The locals were guzzling Pepsi, shopping in stores named “Dapper Dan” and “Elle Fashion” and “American Apparel,” wearing jeans and Western clothes, using English letters on all their signage, and blaring U.S. top-forty tunes from every radio. They were devoted practitioners of free enterprise and capitalism; somewhere along the way, Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyén Gian Gap morphed into Donald Trump and Bill Gates.

  I had been in South Vietnam in the fall of 1965, when the U.S. was about to enter the war against the Viet Cong in force, and I admit I was in favor of our intervention. I liked the people I’d met in the South and naïvely didn’t want to see them crushed by the nasty Communists from the North. As I heard the artillery thumping at night in the distant outskirts of Saigon, I even thought of reenlisting in the Army, resuming command of my 155mm gun crew, and blasting the Cong. I was not aware then, or for many years—because our government had lied to us—that the people of all Vietnam preferred Ho Chi Minh—who had driven out the French colonialists and longed to forge a unified, modern nation—to Ngo Dinh Diem, whom the U.S. supported and kept in power, an authoritarian mandarin who yearned to retain the old feudal society despite his hypocritical speeches about the need for social justice.