by Di Morrissey
She could see that someone had created a glass garden amid the jungle undergrowth at the rear of one of the workshops. Psychedelic mushrooms, animals and flowers in Dali-esque shapes sprouted around trees and undergrowth. There was also a complete gingerbread cottage, big enough for a child to play inside, made of coloured glass.
‘What a wonderland for children,’ she said, thinking how Charlotte would love all this. Quickly she took a photograph.
As May Lin moved ahead of them, Connie whispered to Natalie, ‘Neither May Lin nor her brother married, so there are no children to carry on this business.’
‘That’s sad. What will happen to this place? What will they do?’
‘They’ll live very well when they retire. They are waiting, like everyone else, for the day The Lady is released and takes up her role as leader and change begins in Yangon. May Lin and her brother can see the day when investors will come and build hotels and banks and other business buildings. This quaint place is actually four acres of land, hidden in the middle of the city. It will be worth a lot of money.’
Natalie gazed around, thinking how sad that this whimsical family factory would disappear beneath the cement feet of a modern structure because there was no-one to carry on its traditions. ‘I’d love to buy something.’
She chose three little glass ornaments: a blue rabbit for Adam, a tiny green bud vase for Charlotte and for Andrew a red elephant.
Back at the Peacock Studio, Win gave her some bubblewrap for her glass gifts. ‘I think you should leave these here until you are ready to go home, in case they get broken. I knew you would enjoy the glass factory,’ he said. ‘It’s eccentric and charming, like so much of Burma is.’
‘One more thing, a souvenir for you.’ Connie handed her the lotus-stem shawl.
‘I couldn’t possibly take this,’ began Natalie.
‘It will be useful in the hills, it can get cool up there. When you wear it at home, think of us.’
‘Thank you. I will,’ said Natalie.
When they set out together for Bagan the next day, Natalie appreciated how well Mr P had organised everything, how he’d arranged a taxi to take them both to the airport and advised her to bring a book to read while they waited for their plane. He kept charge of her documents, tickets, travel papers and passport, and said he would pay any fees as they were needed. As soon as they arrived at Yangon airport for the flight to Bagan, he whisked her bag away to check it in, arranged their aircraft seats, and brought her a bottle of water and some moist tissues to wipe her face and hands. He sat near her and didn’t interrupt her reading until the flight was ready to board. On the plane he sat several seats behind her. Mr P had arranged for her to have a window seat, but Natalie was disappointed because it was cloudy and she couldn’t see very much.
Mr P had suggested that he pay for whatever they needed each day – food, fares and fees – in the local currency and every few days he’d work out what they’d spent in US dollars and Natalie could reimburse him. There was no official foreign exchange, though a black market operated in larger cities, so it seemed to Natalie that Mr P’s system was far simpler for her.
After the plane had landed in Bagan and they had disembarked, Mr P told her, ‘Bagan is usually very dry, but now there is still quite a lot of water lying around. Your shoes will get muddy.’
‘I can wash them. It’s a shame I couldn’t see much while we were flying except some paddyfields and a few villages in the breaks in the clouds.’
‘Then Bagan will be more of a surprise!’ he said with a smile. ‘There is no modern city here, just hotels. People come from all over the world to see the wonders of this place.’
From the plane they walked across the wet tarmac to a bright modern terminal with an ornate gold-painted roof. Inside, monks sat patiently and families with excited children waited for their flight. Mr P collected their luggage and then they walked towards the exit, looking for their driver.
For the first time Mr P looked ruffled, even annoyed. He asked Natalie to wait with their bags for a moment while he went to talk to a man holding up a sign with Natalie’s name on it.
When he returned he said to Natalie, ‘That isn’t a driver I know. Something has happened to the man I usually use. But it’ll be all right. Let’s go.’ He swung his backpack onto his shoulder, and took Natalie’s bag and wheeled it to the elderly car, where the driver held open the boot. As Mr P placed the bags in the boot, the driver reached for Natalie’s shoulder bag to do the same, but she shook her head and climbed into the back seat.
The road was slippery with a slick of orange mud but Natalie was glued to the window of the taxi as the bright green acacia trees and patches of raw red earth slid past. Suddenly, on either side of the road appeared domes of mossy stone and ancient red-brick stupas.
‘That’s called a bu stupa,’ said Mr P, pointing to one of them. ‘Bu means gourd, and that stupa’s shaped rather like one.’
Natalie nodded, looking at an old building surrounded by tiered terraces. In the distance she could see huge complexes of temples whose spires rose like fairytale castles; closer to the road were well-preserved, simple, one-roomed stupas.
They drove on and passed a goatherd following his bouncing charges as they reared up to eat leaves from high branches of trees by the roadside, as well as the occasional man on a bicycle, and a family in a horse-drawn cart decorated with flowers. They passed several small villages and Mr P told her that people used to live among all the stupas and monuments, but now that the region had been recognised as an important archaeological area by UNESCO, they had been moved away into new villages.
‘So, we will stay in new Pagan and visit some of the best temples in old Bagan. There are thousands of them, so we will only have time to visit a few,’ said Mr P.
Natalie thought the landscape was amazing, a bit like she imagined outback Australia would look, with massive termite mounds scattered across its dry plains, except these mounds were temples. ‘How long has it been like this?’ she asked.
‘Myths say that Bagan started in the second century. It became the capital of Burma in the eleventh century and that’s when over ten thousand monuments, stupas for religious relics, temples and monasteries, were built. Some of them were built from simple clay, others were very elaborate with great carvings and artwork,’ explained Mr P.
‘It’s amazing.’
‘Everyone who comes here should see the Ananda Temple, but I have found that people like different monuments for different reasons. Perhaps it is the artwork, or the architecture, maybe it’s the religious significance or the carvings and the Buddha images, or for the views they offer. There is something for everyone.’
‘I’m so glad you suggested coming here,’ said Natalie, shaking her head in wonder.
Mr P had booked Natalie into a low-rise, older-style hotel set in attractive gardens that faced the Irrawaddy River.
‘I will stay in the town in a guesthouse,’ said Mr P. ‘In one hour I will come back here and we can begin our tour of Bagan.’
Their driver, keen to make a good impression, tried to take Natalie’s suitcase into the hotel but he was shooed away by the hotel staff. Mr P had told Natalie that there was no tipping in Burma but it seemed that in the tourist hotels it was not an unknown custom and it seemed that their driver had tried to earn one.
Her room had two hard single beds, a small bathroom (do not drink the water, Natalie reminded herself), a wardrobe and a small set of drawers. She carefully unpacked her few belongings and then went to explore the hotel. She wandered to the dining area and sat on the verandah that overlooked the wide expanse of the Irrawaddy River. Barges, low in the water, were ferrying teak logs.
There were several other tourists at the hotel. Most of them seemed to be middle-aged Europeans. She continued to watch the river traffic until Mr P arrived, this time in a small, gaily painted horse-drawn carriage with a smiling driver.
‘I thought you might enjoy this. We can take this carriage
off the road and go to some places few visitors go,’ explained Mr P.
‘This is wonderful,’ said Natalie as the driver helped her up into the carriage. His teeth were stained reddish brown from chewing betel nut, his hair was slicked down with a pungent oil and he wore a longyi and a dusty shirt. His thongs were ingeniously cut from a rubber tyre.
He introduced himself as Kyaw Kyaw.
‘Now we travel old style to long-ago Bagan,’ announced Mr P.
The horse clipped smartly along the unpaved road, a small plastic Buddha swinging merrily from the canvas roof of the cart. Natalie waved to the smiling children as they passed through villages and into the countryside of rice paddies, where water buffalo wallowed. Women, walking from the village wells, balanced tin jugs of water on their heads while carrying urns of water on their hips with poise and barefoot grace. In the stillness, monks walked slowly back to their monastery, carrying their alms bowls. The blue smoke of wood fires curled into the air and the smell of snacks cooking over charcoal at roadside stalls was tantalising.
Wherever Natalie looked she felt a sense of time having passed this place by. She took a photo of a lichencovered, crumbling stone wall of a brick stupa, its base overgrown save for a narrow path made by grazing goats. In the distance were thousands of ancient stone temples, their domes a reminder of an extravagant frenzy of building as the countless edifices spread from the banks of the meandering Irrawaddy River and across the plain.
‘It must look amazing from the air,’ she said to Mr P. ‘It’s like a lost world. Where did everyone go?’
‘Growth in Bagan started to slow when the capital moved away in the fourteenth century, but it remained a sacred city. It is true that the bats and owls and goats and cows moved in, but perhaps they were less destructive than the earthquakes and the more recent poor attempts at restoration. Here we are in the twelfth century,’ Mr P announced as the small horse trotted along the track and the magnificent spread of the Ananda Temple rose before them.
*
When she got back to the hotel, Natalie wrote down in her little notebook her experiences of that day, taking time to describe her impressions of what she had seen.
I felt I really did rush back in time. So little has changed here. Village life continues in its simplicity, and the people seem connected to these ancient monuments, but you can’t help wondering about the people who built these magnificent religious buildings. Were they just simple folk living in humble houses, eking out their living much as they do today, or rich donors hoping for merit?
Some temples have stalls inside their covered walkways or courtyards. Some have artists outside them, busy working on their sand paintings, copying versions of the old murals and wall paintings in the temples. They use a local technique and paint in brilliant acrylics on canvases covered with a thick sandy surface. Their pictures flutter across the grass to dry like illuminated leaves.
Inside the temples it is serene. Women pray and bring offerings while the men gild the patient faces of the giant Buddha figures. (Mr P told me that women aren’t allowed onto the higher platforms!) Some figures are so covered in gold leaf they have lost all detail and are huge solid gold lumps.
You walk through narrow passages like dungeons where stone archways give a glimpse of the sunny world outside. All is dim. But it’s very calming. Winding underground, Mr P had a torch to show me the outlines and faded colours of murals and the jatakas, the illustrated stories of Buddhist folklore. Every surface is carved. You could stand and study a small area of stone for an hour and still miss tiny details. But one showed scars from where some Germans cut out murals, which are now in storage in Hamburg.
I climbed a narrow dark tower where the stone steps are so worn that they dip in the middle, and stepped outside. It is beyond words seeing, spread across the 200 square kilometres plain all the buildings, small and large, scattered and without a plan but somehow one coherent giant jigsaw puzzle. And slowly curling beside this amazing spectacle is the immense Irrawaddy River. Secluded monasteries and old pagodas are dotted along the tall cliffs that tower over the opposite side of the river. It’s a breathtaking sight as they stand, seemingly ageless, glowing in the sun. Apart from the occasional bicycle, and the very occasional car, there is no sign of modern life.
In some dark, quiet, ancient vaults people pray, chanting their prayers, while in other vast temples it seems bats and birds and small creatures are the only worshippers. Despite the slow scraping of centuries, you can still witness the work of those long-ago artisans, the gash of a tool, the perfection of ornamentation painted over 800 years ago. You wish the architects and artisans who created these buildings could return and see their lonely handiwork still surviving.
Swooping pigeons broke the stillness. I didn’t like to chatter. If I asked a question, it was answered softly, but generally Mr P and I wandered in silence. Occasionally he pointed to something I might have missed. We saw half buried Buddha statues. There is so much detail, from the deep underground to the dainty depictions of Buddha’s life, to the enormous sky-reaching tiers of temples. Trying to visualise the old city with its palaces and pagodas amid these ruins is sometimes easy, but sometimes blurred.
Weaving between the walls, where lichen, grass and cactus grow, and mud sticks to your feet, there are echoes of the pounding of processions. It is easy to imagine how kings, queens, slaves, pious monks and village people once inhabited this unique landscape.
On the way back, the sun was setting and people were returning home to prepare for the evening. I could hear the gongs ringing from a monastery. There were village boys shouting as they played soccer on a patch of grass next to where a small stupa had squatted for centuries. My head is still bursting. Everything is so immense, moving and powerful it’s really hard to absorb it all.
My final memory of today was so different. On the way home, Kway Kway started to sing Queen’s ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’ in Burmese!
Later that evening, Natalie went down to the lobby to send Mark a short email.
She pushed the send button and nodded to the hotel desk manager. He was almost sure, he assured her, that her email would get through. ‘Today is good,’ he explained. Natalie didn’t ask why this was so because another tourist was waiting to use the old computer in the hope of also making contact with the modern world outside this living museum in which they’d found themselves.
In the hotel’s restaurant Natalie ordered a local beer and went to watch the glimmer of lights on the river. She could tell that the other guests who were returning from exploring Bagan were drowning in all that they’d seen, just as she was. They nodded and smiled politely to her but did not seem anxious for social chit chat. Anyway, thought Natalie, the day had been too overwhelming for trivia.
She decided to return to her room to read for a while and went to her drawer to retrieve her book. Immediately she saw that her carefully folded clothes were not as neatly arranged as she had left them. It was not the way she had unpacked. Hurriedly she looked around and saw that her small suitcase had been moved. Someone had definitely gone through her things. Nothing seemed to have been taken, but she felt disturbed. It was quite creepy.
She debated with herself about asking if she could move to another room. She wished she was having dinner with Mr P so she could ask him what to do, but tonight she would be having dinner by herself in the hotel. Suddenly the faintly lit gardens looked sinister and not as romantic as she had first thought. So she took the torch from beside her bed, thoughtfully provided by the hotel for the regular blackouts, and slipped it into her pocket.
As she walked quickly along the garden path that wound from her room to the hotel lobby, she patted her shoulder bag, feeling the hard shape of the kammavaca at the bottom as usual. She was shocked that someone had checked her room. Perhaps this happened to all foreigners. Everyone told her how there were people always watching you. She’d ask Mr P what he thought had happened when she saw him in the morning.
As she wal
ked past the front desk, she heard several tourists talking in fractured English to the staff, asking about local restaurants. The staff explained that there were several small eating places up the road within easy walking distance. Natalie decided she didn’t want to eat by herself in the hotel, so she asked the girl at the desk if she should go there too, and the girl smiled and nodded. ‘They are going to good place. Very simple, nice food.’
When the foreign tourists set off, Natalie trailed behind them.
Outside the hotel the rutted road was ill lit; a few pale lights hung from power poles sagging with spaghetti nests of looped cables. It was still early evening, and there was a lot of activity on the street. Along the roadside were braziers and small fires, illuminating cheerful Burmese faces in their glow. Whole families were eating at these roadside stalls and the smells were delicious.
At one eatery the tourists ahead of her stopped to ask what was being cooked and took a photo. Bicycles without lights glided past her. When she looked into the houses she could see that their rooms were lit by a single dim bulb. Candles were burning at shrines and at a small temple a seated Buddha statue was illuminated by a string of Christmas lights.
The small party eventually arrived at a large eating house, where loud disco music roared and a bulky old TV screen was showing music clips of Burmese singers covering American hits from earlier decades. The noisy music was obviously an attraction for the Burmese, but Natalie didn’t enjoy it. She was relieved when the tourists she’d been following stopped and decided to go into a smaller restaurant decked out in a lot of fluorescent pink but with no loud music. Natalie hesitated, then, as the others sat down, she brushed aside the coloured plastic strips hanging in the doorway and went inside.
A woman and her daughter, who looked to be about twelve, were running the place. The young girl smiled shyly at Natalie, who smiled in return and said, ‘Just me. One person, please,’ as she held up one finger.