The Irrawaddy was muddy yet clean, the vistas unspoiled, the green banks dotted with white and gold pagodas. Logs floated down the river on barges, dolphins leapt out of the water, workers dredged sand for cement, fishermen cast their nets, women washed clothes, children swam and carried home buckets of water on their heads. In some places, the jungle rushed down to the river and tall trees towered over the ship as it passed through the narrow defiles, close to the shore.
Of our destinations, I was most interested in Katha (pronounced ka-TAH), about two hundred miles north of Mandalay and the setting of Burmese Days—in the novel, borrowing the name of a district of Rangoon, Orwell calls the town Kyauktada. Katha was a long way from Rangoon, and in 1927 the lonely young Orwell was as isolated as a Peace Corps volunteer is today, but had infinitely more responsibility. I toured the town in a narrow-seated, rickety trishaw, through heavy rain and mud, accompanied by a local schoolteacher on a motorcycle (surely a government agent assigned to keep an eye on me).
The main streets run north-south, parallel to the river, and at the far edge of town a lavish market offers mounds of tropical fruit and many kinds of rice. But there is no maidan, or central common, which unifies the characters and locales in the novel. Orwell's autobiographical hero has an affair with a Burmese girl. I wondered if he'd left any descendants, and looked out for a tall, thin, seventy-five-year-old Eurasian who might have fit the bill.
I saw five places that surface in Burmese Days. Katha's old English Club, the social center of colonial life and the scene of a Burmese riot in the novel, was now a musty office with sales figures chalked on an old blackboard. It was adjacent to a wretched tennis court, hidden away where the river curves back around the town. A Western-style building, it had sliding windows with fixed metal grilles, a corrugated-tin roof and four pillars at the entrance. The lower story had a concrete floor that was once used for dances. At one end stood an ancient billiard table that had once distracted bored Englishmen.
The Anglican Church of the Province of Mandalay, where the protagonist John Flory's Burmese mistress denounces him in front of his English colleagues, was built in 1912. It collapsed in 1994 and was rebuilt on the same site with bricks, timber and a metal roof in time for services on Christmas Day in 1999. The Burmese priest opened the church and showed me around. His family lived in a house on the grounds, where a young woman sat on a raised platform, suckling her baby in the warm rain. The English cemetery—not next to the church, as described in the novel—was large, square, fenced and locked, overgrown with three feet of foliage that completely covered the old gravestones of those who'd died of bullets or fever. Though I found a hole in the fence, I was warned not to wander amid the poisonous snakes and spiders. The railroad station—where, in the novel, Lieutenant Verrall departs on an early train, jilting Elizabeth Lackersteen and bilking the Hindu merchants—was built in 1898. Surrounded by shabby food stalls, the tin-roofed building with grilled ticket windows stood across from the stationmaster's house. The open, doorless, second-class train cars, which average about fifteen miles an hour, were filthy. Although the railroad was still in service, oxen grazed on the grass that grew between the tracks.
Significantly, the prison at Katha was still an impressive structure, kept in good condition. Surrounded by a barbed wire fence, it had 15-foot-high, fortresslike stone walls and wooden watchtowers at all four corners. I entered the front gate but was not allowed to take photos or approach the main entrance. I later heard that the trishaw driver got into trouble for taking me to the prison, though I was actually led there by the schoolteacher/government agent, who carefully took down my name and address. At the end of the Orwell tour, the teacher refused a donation for his school, putting his hand on his chest and rather unconvincingly insisting: “My heart is your heart.” Later on, when immigration officials boarded our ship and made a show of scrutinizing the passenger list, one of the ship's guides teased me, whispering, “They're looking for you!”
Outside Katha, where Orwell's Flory toiled as a timber merchant, I saw working elephants dragging chained teak logs out of the forest, bathing in the river with their mahouts, and even carrying some of my fellow passengers. One elephant had had half his trunk bitten off; another had lost control of her bladder and dripped like a leaking faucet. Some towns had satellite television, and some village teahouses showed videos of violent American-made films. But the landscape and the people still looked much as they had when Orwell saw them. The bullock cart was the main form of transport, the fields were still plowed with water buffalo, the rice was planted and harvested by hand.
Unlike wet and crowded Rangoon, Mandalay, in central Burma, was dry and sunny, a spacious, sprawling city of artisans and craftsmen: silk weavers, gold beaters, wood-carvers, stonecutters and bronze casters. A rare British memorial tablet on Mandalay Hill, which has the usual pagoda and spectacular view, marked the bitter, costly Gurkha assault on that Japanese stronghold in March 1945. From aboard the plane I had taken to join the cruise, I had seen a fine view of Mandalay Hill and Fort, with its high, crenellated walls surrounded by a huge moat. The Burmese Royal Palace (which represented the center of the world in Buddhist cosmology) and the English police barracks inside the fort were destroyed by British bombers in May 1945.
When I reached Mandalay Fort, I paid an entrance fee and then walked across a wooden bridge, past guards, through a tall gate and down one of the wide avenues to inspect the place where Orwell trained and recklessly rode his motorbike. Hawkers at the souvenir stalls, calling out “Geo’ Orwe,’” sold pirated copies of the Penguin Burmese Days, with the print sometimes slanting right off the edge of the page. In the Maha Muni pagoda, an enormous Buddha was placed on a platform high up in a narrow niche. Only men are allowed to approach. The high platform has no railing, so as I walked around it, I had to clutch the shoulders of kneeling Buddhists who were gaining merit by pasting layers of gold leaf on the statue. The gold, thickened over the centuries, has now distorted the original shape of the Buddha.
Pagan was once one of Southeast Asia's architectural glories. Its distant mountains and dry flat plain, with palm, neem and tamarind trees, reminded me of Marrakech. Spread over twenty square miles, it has more than two thousand temples and pagodas. After climbing to the top of a high pagoda, I watched flocks of sheep and goats pass through the temple gates as a sudden, dramatic tropical sunset illuminated the spectacular landscape. The “Visit Myanmar 1996” campaign, which promised to attract half a million tourists, spawned more than fifty guesthouses in Pagan—all of them quite empty. Souvenir shops were attached to all of the major pagodas, and peddlers mobbed me wherever I went. Most of Pagan's pagodas are in ruins or are crudely restored, and I was rather disappointed by my visit. The site was certainly worth seeing, like Borobudur in Indonesia, but not nearly as thrilling as Cambodia's Angkor Wat.
I was much more impressed by Mount Popa, thirty miles and two hours east of Pagan, tucked into the high hills like a Himalayan retreat. As I drove toward the town, the desertlike plain turned into a luxuriant green landscape. Herds of spindly goats wandered along the road, and water buffalo immersed themselves in mud. From a distance, the enticing pagoda, perched atop a 5,000-foot mountain, looked like the Greek monastery on Mount Athos. As I climbed the 777 smooth steps (the last 500 in bare feet), grasping the handrail and shaded by a snaking roof, monkeys scampered about me. There were fine views along the way and a rewarding vista from the top of the mountain.
The cruise concluded with a flight back to Rangoon and an abrupt end to my pampered existence. I wanted to go south to Moulmein, the third-largest city in Burma, but it was nearly impossible to reach by plane, train or ship. The crowded twelve-hour “express bus” had (I was told) arctic airconditioning and Burmese videos that blasted all night, so I hired my own car and driver for $50 a day. Ali—a half-Indian, half-Chinese Muslim—owned a ten-year-old Toyota, a used car discarded from Japan, with a steering wheel on the wrong side for driving on the right side of the road. Ali drove very fa
st and constantly blew his horn while passing buses, trucks, cars, pedicabs, bicycles, tongas, bullock carts, pedestrians, road menders, goats, pigs, dogs and chickens, as well as sheets of rice drying on the road. Although he never actually hit anything, there were hundreds of near misses. As he plowed through the endless potholes at top speed, I found it impossible to relax or find a comfortable position in the cramped car, and felt as though I were bouncing on a bucking horse.
Ali's English was rudimentary, and he called all foreign women “sir.” But his comical face was immensely expressive, he was ebullient and eager to please, and he cared for me tenderly. After establishing that I was older than he—an important distinction in Burma, where age and status are enshrined in forms of address—he showed heightened respect for my age as well as my status as a client. When asking directions to the next town, Ali would shout out its name and ask the startled bystander: “Ya, le-le?” which meant “Yes, or no?” The roads were not only full of holes (even washed out altogether in some places, where water from the flooded rice paddies spread over the rough surface) but also had frequent roadblocks, manned sometimes by police or soldiers, sometimes by a nodding toll collector. Ali often went around or under the barrier (if the guard wasn't vigilant), and occasionally halted to pay a small fee. It was impossible to tell why he stopped at one gate or shot past another with a dismissive wave of the hand.
The government, obsessed with security and afraid of terrorist attacks, had set up a dozen of these roadblocks over the two-hundred-mile, ten-hour drive from Rangoon to Moulmein. America is demonized in the official press, but the armed soldiers who checked my passport and took down my name at the two new bridges across the Salween River were pleasant and polite.
After Pegu, the landscape changed dramatically from a flat plain with tall rows of fenced rubber trees to oval-shaped mountains—like those near Guilin, portrayed on Chinese screens—which surged above the emerald rice paddies. The road was flooded near Pa-an, so I hired a boat to see the deep painted caves and hilltop monastery. I glided there past high rocks and through a silent, spooky mangrove swamp. One cave depicted a local legend, with statues of chained and bloody prisoners brought before a merciful king; others had Buddhas placed in dark niches. One monk greeted me by sounding a gong, and another read his prayers aloud while a group of boys chanted their lessons in school. As I passed through the damp caves, water dripped from the ceiling, formed pools on the ground and created a strange, eerie atmosphere.
Moulmein was once the most beautiful town in Burma, and the Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 praised its gorgeous setting: “The river banks are crowded with the most varied of ever-green foliage…. To the north and west lies the meeting place of the rivers, the shipping in the stream, the wooded islands in the channel, Moulmein with its glistening pagoda overlooking the water, and the dark hills of Bilugyun.” Kyaikthanlan, the “old Moulmein Pagoda” in Kipling's “Mandalay,” is still a meeting place for young lovers. I saw what Kipling called a pretty “Burma girl a-settin” there. But, attached to a young man, she did not seem to be pining for a British soldier. The U Zina pagoda, on the hill above the city, also offers splendid views of the bustling town and the ships in the river. But the city, decayed since colonial times and with no electricity at night, now has a squalid market and a riverfront filled with garbage.
I stayed at the “best” hotel—very rundown (but with its own generator!) and situated in a park across from a little island where pilgrims meditate and Buddhist nuns tend the neat gardens. The hotel's hopeless waiters never changed the dirty-to-begin-with tablecloth, and brought food that was on hand rather than the dishes I'd ordered. My room featured squashed bugs on the walls, a large puddle in the bathroom, a filthy bath mat, two nonfunctioning lights, and a planklike bed. It was decorated with a gaudy elephant tapestry in high relief and green satin curtains that clashed with the bright red blankets. I was, for several days, the only tourist in the hotel—indeed, in the entire town of 250,000.
Bored with the hotel food, I had a decent meal at the Peking Restaurant. Decorated with cigarette and beer posters, it had a cement floor, bathroom-tile walls, worn Formica tables and low stools. While a young man massaged his friend by treading on his back with bare feet, I ate duck, vegetables, noodles, bananas and beer for $2 (paid in U.S. currency). I went to the Mon State Museum and found the gate ajar and the doors padlocked. But the museum was opened especially for me. The sleepy adolescent caretaker was too short to reach the switches for the lights and fans, so I turned them on myself. The toilet (always on your mind in Asia) was unspeakable. Though sadly neglected, the museum had an unusual emaciated Buddha, a stringed musical instrument in the shape of an alligator, and some royal robes and thrones, melancholy reminders of the Burmese princely families.
While in Moulmein, I made some new discoveries about Orwell's ancestors and the family business. His French grandfather, Frank Limouzin, was a teak merchant in Moulmein, and his mother grew up there in luxurious surroundings. The first sawmill was built in 1833, just south of the town in Mudon, and logs were floated down from the forestry stations to the Salween River. Most of the timber was exported to India and Europe; some was used by the local shipbuilding industry.
The Gymkhana Club and the English cemetery have both been destroyed, and no maps or tourist information were available. But traces of Orwell remain. “Shooting an Elephant” opens: “In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.” It then describes how he had to shoot an animal that had run wild and killed a coolie. Moulmein was, for a time, one of the main penal settlements for Indian convicts. The original jail—a collection of barracks within four walls, guarded by peons by day and soldiers at night—was replaced in 1908 by the Central Jail (now a municipal building), where Orwell worked. In his time, the police headquarters was an impressive colonial building with a covered veranda, high wooden shutters and tiled floors. Built in 1826 on a hill in Than Lwin Park, it had a fine view of the river and is still used for the same purpose. Nine friendly policemen watched me while I waited for permission to enter and photograph the view from the front entrance.
Despite the pervasive fear of foreigners and the usual reluctance to take responsibility for them, the police chief was surprisingly generous and allowed me to inspect the building. Inside the sanctum, the office girls, taking their morning tiffin of rice and tea, stopped to stare at me and giggle. There were mountains of yellowed paper tied with rough string, ancient typewriters, uneven floorboards, curtained-off partitions and crumbling sleeping quarters in the overgrown garden. The second floor could no longer be used because the roof was leaking and the twenty-foot-high ceiling was severely damaged.
Lyndhurst, a large two-story brown wooden villa in an unruly garden near the corner of Morten Lane and Judson Road, in the colonial quarter of town, may have been Orwell's house, I was told—or was very like the one he'd lived in. The present owner, the grandson of a Burmese district commissioner who'd bought it in 1949, invited me inside and showed me some faded photographs of his grandfather at a garden party in Buckingham Palace. Now fallen on hard times, he lived alone, served by a cook and a boy, in the damp, decrepit, Poe-esque house.
After Moulmein, Ali and I drove south to Amherst on a full-moon holiday. The market was closed, the boys played soccer, and many people, dressed in colorful clothing, visited the pagodas. Near Mudon, I saw the largest reclining Buddha in the world. Still unfinished and weirdly impressive, the concrete monster looked—from below—like a giant gray submarine. It too will eventually be plastered with layers of gold leaf. When passing a monastery on the way back to the main road, I saw a man incongruously hitting golf balls into an empty paddy.
At Thanbyuzayat, in a tidy park maintained by the British War Graves Commission, I saw the graves of hundreds of English, Australian, Dutch, Indian and Gurkha prisoners of war who died while building the BurmaSiam Railway for the Japanese. S
ome graves were of unknown soldiers, and one of the men had posthumously won the Victoria Cross. Officers had a much better chance of survival, and most of the dead were young enlisted men. This sad and moving military cemetery recalled Kipling's story “The Gardener,” in which a grieving woman visits her lover's war grave amid a “merciless sea of black crosses.”
Amherst, a few miles south of the war graves, was an old colonial beach resort with a Brighton-like pagoda pier extending into the sea on stilts. At the pagoda, I was amazed to meet someone I knew. The Moulmein police chief, now on a short pilgrimage and surrounded by barefoot policemen with guns slung over their shoulders, greeted me warmly. The beach was flooded and muddy during the monsoon season, so I dashed through the heavy shower to a modest Chinese restaurant, the best there was, where I dined on soup and noodles for a dollar.
The road through Pa-an on the way back to Rangoon was now impassable, so we took the ferry to Martaban, where the muddy river showed through the rust holes of the deck. I remembered Kipling's lines: “And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu, / And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.” But in that swampy, sleepy village, I saw no signs of prodigious depravity or sexual corruption, and Ali bounced off the ferry with his usual enthusiasm.
Everyone I had met in Rangoon told me that I had to visit the Golden Rock Pagoda at Kyaiktiyo, but they were all terribly vague about how to get there. Ali, swerving to avoid a few more obstacles, turned off the main road and drove to the base camp, which was as far as cars were allowed to go. Once there, I joined forces with an Israeli couple and three Spanish women, who were not at all surprised to find a Spanish-speaking American in the wilds of Burma. We negotiated a price of two dollars each for a thrilling half-hour truck ride up steep mountain passes and over torrential streams to the end of the road. I took a room (and was, once again, the only guest in the hotel) just above the truck stop. As in Moulmein, they refused to take traveler's checks or credit cards, and I had to pay in U.S. dollars. The others set off for the summit, where there was another place to stay.
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