by Tom Vitale
“Well… this is the true old English experience,” Philippe said. Tony’s good friend and former boss from Les Halles just happened to be in Burma on a transcendental search for Buddha and would be joining us for the rest of the shoot. Thanks to Philippe’s lilting French accent, relentless optimism, genuine curiosity, and classic good looks, for the last two days people had mistaken him for the TV star. “I wonder how old this car is,” Philippe said. “Could be the fifties, maybe the forties?”
“It’s steamy in here,” Tony said. “The fan’s not working…”
Despite the lack of a first-class sleeping coach, dining car, and any enthusiasm from Tony, it was hard to deny the train had character.
Clunking along at a snail’s pace over ancient tracks, it appeared untouched since Burma’s military junta seized power after World War II. Wide-open guillotine-style picture windows were flanked by threadbare curtains swaying in time with the rhythmic clickety-clack, clickety-clack of the wheels. A regiment of small key lime green fans were mounted to the ceiling. Those that worked oscillated in unison, though their whirring did little to move the heavy tropical air. We were the only foreigners among a mix of Burmese travelers, families, one or two businessmen, and Buddhist monks clad in vermillion robes.
From behind the camera, I tried again. “So Tony, perhaps you’d like to comment on the train ride?”
“I’d rather have a fucking water buffalo with a barbed penis chasing me across a rice paddy,” Tony said.
Breaking free from Yangon, the landscape opened up. Low-slung wood and corrugated tin shanties, power lines, and cars soon gave way to endlessly verdant countryside interrupted by the occasional dirt road or thatched roof. The temperature cooled off, and the air developed a sweet, spring-like quality. Out the window I noticed everyone stopped what they were doing to watch the train pass by. As kilometers slowly clattered behind us, the sky lit up neon pink, orange, and yellow. Mist rising from rice paddies incandesced with surreal color.
“Wow. It’s just sensational,” Philippe said, gazing across the horizon. “What a beautiful part of the planet to be at dusk.”
Unlike Philippe, Tony didn’t strike me as particularly impressed. He’d spent much of the day ignoring our surroundings while bemoaning the lack of internet, railing against vegetarians, and trashing the documentary he had watched on the flight over. I tried to console myself that with b-roll and voice-over I’d be able to salvage something from the ashes of my precious train scene. The crew had been on their feet for at least seven hours, so once the sun set it seemed like a good time for a break. The camera guys ravaged our emergency supply of energy bars, chips, and an assortment of unripe fruit while I collapsed into a chair and lit a cigarette. Darly, one of our camera assistants, pointed to a “No Smoking” sign above my head.
Before I could respond, the train took a terrific jolt as it pitched forward and began rapidly picking up speed. Lights flickered and the air pressure dropped, sucking curtains out of any windows that hadn’t slammed shut. The carriages started shaking and undulating; metal twisted, producing alarming squeals and claps. All of a sudden we were going fast. Really fast. The train rocked and rolled back and forth while at the same time seesawing up and down. Loose film gear and our bags tumbled onto the floor, where cans of beer and camera lenses rolled around in every direction. Josh and Patrick grabbed whatever they could, trying to prevent anything else from following the case of water that had launched out the window.
“It’s getting bouncy,” Tony said. “Bouncy not like in a fun bouncy-castle kind of way, bouncy as in a pulverize-my-spine, turn-my-kidneys-to-gel kind of a way.”
This was what we’d been waiting for. The train wheels screamed for the engineer to slow down and I shouted, “Battle stations!”
Within moments the cameras were rolling, with Zach, Mo, and Todd operating with one hand, grasping on to whatever they could with the other.
“Wheels have been falling off left and right. Now I understand why!” Philippe said, white-knuckling his armrest. “We must be going what? About forty, fifty miles per hour at this point?”
“Meh,” Tony said, reclining his seat. “I could sleep like this.” Which is exactly what he did, seemingly immune to the violent wrenching of the train as it shuttled along at an ever more frightening pace.
“Tony clearly got the best seat in the house,” Philippe said. “I’m hitting the ceiling every two seconds and he doesn’t even move!”
“Dude, it’s the pilot,” Zach said. “We came all the way here so Tony could sleep through this?”
I let go of the overhead luggage rack, trying not to lose my footing. Steadying myself against the yawing train, I leaned over and poked Tony with my walkie-talkie. “Wake up!” I said over the noise. Getting no response, I went for a Hail Mary pass. “Tony, you’re missing out. This is so Parts Unknown.”
His eyes instantly opened wide, then narrowed. “I got a part unknown for you right here,” Tony said, giving me the finger. Not the reaction I was hoping for, but at least he was awake.
“The other part that remains unknown is whether or not we’re going to make it alive,” Philippe said. “I mean this thing is going to derail at some point.”
Despite every indication the train was going to fly off the tracks and accordion up like a pile of crushed aluminum cans, somehow it hadn’t. Even better, the whole death-defying adventure was shaping up to be the best travel beat we’d ever filmed. One of the amazing things about making the show was that whenever things went wrong, plan B had a magical way of working out even better.
“This is Shwedagar,” Patrick said as the train slowed down and clanked into the next station. “Time to reconfigure for the night.”
The first-class sleeping coach had been swapped for one consisting of non-communicating berths, meaning movement between them was only possible when the train was stopped. This presented a number of logistical hurdles given we were expressing straight through until the morning. I worked out a plan to split up the crew, with Josh and me each supervising one member of the camera team. But of course, as always, nothing went according to plan. At the last moment Tony and Zach conspired to mutiny, exiling Josh, Patrick, and me to a shared compartment.
“But we need to film a night beat!” I protested. “And a morning breakfast beat!”
“Don’t worry, we’ll cover it,” Zach said. Seeing the look on my face, he added, “I promise… have some faith.”
Having faith was a tall order when it came to Tony spontaneously delivering transport beat content, but there wasn’t time to argue. The bell rang; we were pulling out of the station. Fuck it. The universe had smiled on me thus far, and I could use an evening off. I settled in with Josh and Patrick, and soon we’d put a sizable dent in one of the six cases of jungle-temperature beer stowed in our cabin. My eighties playlist blared at full volume on battery-powered speakers, Depeche Mode, New Order, Erasure, and Talking Heads barely audible above the rattle and clank of the train hurtling through dark countryside.
The full moon glinted off flooded rice paddies, and the occasional stupa sparkling with strings of electric lights whizzed by. We burst out laughing each time the train would take a sickening plunge and everything that wasn’t bolted down levitated. Once I resigned myself to dying in a train wreck, I started really enjoying the real-life roller coaster ride. The beer helped.
“Thank you, guys,” I said, offering a toast. “This is turning out to be one hell of an experience.”
Around the time we finished the second case of beer, the train had slowed to a crawl, and I seized the opportunity to take a much-needed piss. Though I was quite drunk, or maybe because of it, I calculated relieving myself while hanging out of a moving train was preferable to our shadowy and malodorous bathroom. No sooner had I stepped into the doorframe than a palm frond whacked me in the face, and my glasses went spiraling into the jungle.
“Fuck, where the hell did that come from?!” I shouted. “Josh, spot me.” When I was done,
we traded places, and I took the lookout squinting into the dark, blurry void.
“Ahhhh… yeeeeaaahhh… that’s soooo good,” Josh said.
“Josh! I see lights ahead! I think we’re coming up to a crossing!” I shouted midway into what was shaping up to be a Guinness World Record contender of a piss. “Put it away!!!”
“Oh god!” Josh yelled. “I’m trying! Oh god, I can’t stop!”
A wall of motorbike headlights illuminated our train car wobbling past, treating men, women, and children perched on the handlebars to a full-frontal view of Josh spraying back and forth.
“I’m so sorry!” he cried. “I can’t stop! I’m so sorry!”
I slept poorly that night, occasionally waking up midair before crashing back down onto the mattress. The next thing I remember was the shunting and screech of the train slowing down. Sunshine filtered through the gently swaying tatter of curtains. Outside, jungle rice paddies had given way to a vast stretch of arid yellow grassland. The train hissed and ground to a halt. We were surrounded by a rush of food vendors dressed in brightly colored fabrics selling fried fish, bean curd, and samosas from trays and baskets balanced on their heads.
I hopped out of bed and made my way through the crowd gathered around the train. When I found the rest of the crew, they were already filming Tony and Philippe looking for breakfast.
“How was your night?” I asked when the cameras cut.
“Fantastic,” Philippe said. “Eight hours solid.”
“I was bouncing around like a pachinko ball,” said a less than enthusiastic Tony. “It was just like bang, bang, bang, bang. I literally got whacked into the side once, it woke me right out of… well, I wouldn’t say a dead sleep. So do we have any idea when our mystery train arrives?”
“I’m told another hour and a half,” I said.
“That’s not fourteen hours,” Tony said, checking his Rolex.
“It’s looking closer to eighteen…” I conceded.
“Ten, fourteen, eighteen. Who’s counting? We could have literally flown to Hong Kong, had dinner at the Peninsula, and then flown to Bagan in the time this train has taken… or is taking.”
Nineteen and a half hours after departing Yangon, the Night Express to Bagan reached its final destination. We limped off the train a bit worse for wear: grumpy, hungover, exhausted, and injured. Zach was coughing up brake dust, Patrick’s hair was matted with what looked like the same dried puke on Josh’s shirt. I was squinting to see without glasses and rubbing at a palm-shaped welt on my cheek while Tony grasped his lower back.
“All right, Bagan, here we come!” Philippe said, springing onto the platform like an adolescent gazelle. “Mingalaba!”
A BILLOW OF MARS RED dust swirled skyward, dwarfing our van as it navigated a rutted dirt road. We passed horse carts, farmers working their fields, and villagers carrying yokes laden with buckets of water. It was a sleepy agrarian scene set against a gothic backdrop of pyramid-sized temples and stupas stretching to infinity. Bagan had once been the capital of a mighty ancient kingdom and was said to be one of the most impressive archaeological sites in the world, rivaling the likes of Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat. International sanctions and tourism boycotts had thus far left the crimson-tinged landscape spectacularly untrampled. With the recent changes in the country, though, cranes stood sentinel on the fringes, silent for the moment and poised to begin constructing hotels for tourists that were soon to come.
Early morning light revealed the scars from a millennium of earthquakes and neglect. Some of the grand and mysterious edifices were partially covered by shrubs, others rose dramatically from stands of palm and tamarind. Livestock grazed in what would surely one day be a parking lot. There was an eerie feeling of emptiness to the place, only heightened by the lone tour bus that bumped through. Other than the farmers and a handful of aggressive children selling trinkets, we had the whole vastness of Bagan to our cameras.
Taking it all in, though I couldn’t put my finger on it, I knew something had shifted. The move from the Travel Channel to CNN meant the show had a new gravitas. A giant leap toward what Tony had always wanted it to be. That ambition seemed to match his brooding, almost guilt-tinged outlook on his own celebrity, that it didn’t really mean a damn thing unless he made it mean something. So, yeah, that probably was why he’d been so insufferable since we’d arrived. Here we were, poised to introduce the world to a country few outsiders had seen in nearly fifty years. Surely Tony felt the weight of what he was trying to do. And to a certain extent, its successful execution was entirely in my hands.
“FIVE MINUTES TO TONY, FIVE MINUTES TO TONY,” the walkie chattered. The clock was winding down fast on this shoot. The cameras were ready to go when Tony and Philippe arrived. We removed our shoes and began climbing the crumbling stairs of a large bell-shaped stupa mounted on a decaying wedding cake base. Grass poked out of fissures, and small chunks of red clay broke off under foot, tumbling down the fifty-five-degree incline, which only got steeper the higher we went. Arriving out of breath at a platform near the top, we were rewarded with a stunning panorama of the temple-strewn valley. A couple hundred feet of elevation demanded a whole new appreciation of the landscape. The Irrawaddy River glistened in the distance while a low line of golden mist clung to the horizon, silhouetting countless intricately shaped stupas and rising hot air balloons.
“Oh, this is stunning,” Philippe said, his eyes wide with amazement. “This is so beautiful. So much like an ode to human, you know, beliefs and adoration and worshipping and—”
“Slave labor,” Tony said. “I don’t want to sound like a Debbie Downer here, but I’m thinking, you build this many temples—thousands of them—in a relatively short period of time, chances are, you know, somebody was working for less than minimum wage. Let’s put it that way.”
“Nevertheless, this is truly extraordinary,” Philippe said. “Totally unique, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“Yeah, pretty awesome,” Tony said. “Makes me almost wish I was a spiritual kind of a guy.”
Tony had spoken to remarkable people who freely discussed politics, their experiences, and expectations for the future. We were going home with a strong story set in a beautiful, fascinating, visually arresting country opening up to the outside world. I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. We were missing something. There was no question the move to CNN meant the stakes were higher. So much was riding on bringing back a kick-ass pilot episode for the new series, I needed Tony to express that he’d been genuinely moved or changed by the trip. I wanted Tony to be present this time. Fuck, I wanted to be present. The usual drill was weeks or months from now when the experience felt more like a dream than reality, the whole thing at a comfortable distance, Tony would write some poignant voice-over and then I’d know I’d actually been to Burma. But I didn’t want to wait for the edit to know I’d been somewhere amazing this time. I gave it one last try.
“Umm… so… how do you feel being here?” I asked.
“I feel hungry,” Tony said. “Like I’m waiting for my fucking chicken curry breakfast.”
My heart sank. When Tony connected… well, it was the most amazing rush, my reward for a job well done. I felt like I’d moved mountains to put him in front of perhaps the most spectacular vista we’d ever filmed and it still wasn’t enough… Prepared to throw in the towel, I had a thought. Could the problem be Tony was suffering from the same self-imposed pilot episode anxiety as me?
“Let’s get some deep thoughts,” I said, going for broke. “Deep thoughts” was production code for Tony silently looking out over a landscape. Maybe without the pressure to talk there was a chance he’d finally be able to get out of his own head. If that was the issue. It was worth a try. As Zach and Todd backed off to reset, Tony sat down on the ledge and gazed over the landscape backlit by the rising sun. A distant jangling of cow bells and the occasional bleat of a goat along with wisps from the perfume of a wood fire drifted on the morning breeze.
“Well… actually… I’m amazed being here,” Tony said, breaking the silence. “… I mean… generally speaking we’ve been to a lot of places where people aren’t happy to see cameras… whereas just about everybody here has been really, for lack of a better word, open and friendly. Which is really weird considering just last year and to some extent still, they’re living in a place where for fifty years all that most people remember is an incredibly oppressive government. It’s really extraordinary.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing! It appeared somehow I was getting what I wanted—what the show needed—and at the absolute last possible moment no less. I held my breath, worried that even exhaling would disrupt whatever magic we’d struck.
“You know I look at this as an essay,” Tony said. “I spend a little over a week in Myanmar, Burma, this is what I saw, this is what it felt like. But something that we very much have to consider is that at the end of this week, we’re all going back to New York. Where I can have myself a nice Frappuccino, and edit this show any way I want, right? But what we have to consider is whoever helped us off camera, whoever we hung out with, whoever we saw, whoever was nice to us, whoever associated with us during our time here, the point is, we don’t pay the price for that show. Everybody who helped us could very well pay that price, so that’s something we really got to balance especially when you know… we’re not journalists.”
Tony paused and looked back out over Bagan. His hand fidgeted. “What happens to the people that we leave behind?”