A Travel Junkie's Diary

by Dina Bennett

  Unsinkable

  CHINDWIN RIVER, MYANMAR, 2012

  Having briefly straddled the India-Myanmar border from Nagaland in 2009, we’d felt homesick for Myanmar ever since, if such were possible given we’d never been there. But sanctions and the predations of the military regime precluded our planning a trip. But by the first quarter of 2012, pro-democracy fighter Aung San Suu Kyi had been released from house arrest. Then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had visited the country, the first such foray since 1955, even proposing the potential for an exchange of ambassadors. Myanmar was beginning to open and we arrived shortly after Clinton left.

  Intent, as always, on reaching parts of a country that tourists wouldn’t, we were heading into the northeast sector by car, a region of nearly impassable roads where foreigners had only recently been permitted to go. This time we would be driven, as in someone other than Bernard would handle the steering and other car essentials while we sat in the back seat. I don’t know which of us was more fussed about this, Bernard, whose body fairly twitches when he has to let someone else do the driving, or me, who would have to sit next to him while he fidgeted. I did not think that directing him to look at the scenery would suffice and I was concerned that absent our usual dialogue of directions, we might run out of things to say. Understand that letting ourselves be driven had nothing to do with preference and everything to do with the still-stringent constraints placed on foreigners, especially those who wished to travel away from tourist sites.

  So why was I now sitting on this slender, overcrowded barque, shivering uncontrollably, at eye level with the dark Chindwin River? Contemplating this question, I pressed myself against Bernard, hands jammed between my knees, my T-shirt no protection from the pre-dawn chill. Early in our travels, when I was not adept at managing physical uncertainty, such discomfort would have vexed me. In the years we’ve been on the road, I’ve learned a few things. For one, I know if I wait long enough, the sun will rise and I’ll warm up. Better yet, I can shrug Bernard’s arm around me and cuddle next to him for warmth. Around me, eighty Burmese villagers more physically modest than me—and better prepared—flung towels and spare longyis (sarongs) over themselves for warmth. So thick was the unexpected fog that, even had it been daylight, we could not have seen the nearby shore.

  On the prow, a thin youth sounded the placid water with a long bamboo pole. Left and right he probed, seeking viable channels among submerged sandbanks, transmitting his findings by hand signal to the captain behind him.

  Two hours into our journey, the boat shuddered to a halt. “I don’t think this is the usual stop to pick someone up,” Bernard said.

  “I know. Too abrupt. Plus,” I peered into the gloom, “no one’s moving. And we seem to be still in midstream.”

  As we sat in the dark, the sound of the engine straining in reverse reverberated off the invisible banks. And then there was a loud pop.

  Settling back on the hard bench, I noticed our guide, Saw, squatting on the deck next to me. “Stuck,” he said, not a man to waste words. “Prop shaft broken. But? No problem. New boat will come.”

  How a new boat would hear we needed help was a mystery. This was remote western Myanmar. That no one had a cell phone was irrelevant. There was no service anyway. I know. I tried.

  Usually I am one to take matters in my own hands, regardless of whether it’s helpful, but in this case, I decided to mimic the villagers. They weren’t making a fuss. Neither would I.

  Being on the river wasn’t our plan when we decided to get off the beaten path in Myanmar. We were supposed to do a car expedition, exploring the untraveled back roads of northwest Sagaing Region by day, staying near the Chindwin each night. This was our sixth extended road trip. I was a seasoned hand. I’d experienced what Rumi meant when he said, “Travel brings power and love back into your life.” I knew that every trip, no matter how it varied from my still incorrigible imaginings, would yield something of value, even if months later.

  Our first day’s drive went from Monywa to the former British teak depot of Kalewa. On the map it looked simple, a dirt road used mainly by a dozen shared taxis, a few buses, and local oxcarts, crossing a ripple of high ridges along the eastern perimeter of Alaungdaw Kathapa National Park.

  “This should take five to six hours, right?” I asked Saw.

  “Twelve,” he grunted, chewing the packet of kun-ya (areca nut, tobacco, and slaked lime wrapped in betel leaf) stuffed in his cheek and sending a stream of red spittle out the window.

  “It’s barely a hundred miles. How is that possible?”

  “Possible,” said Saw.

  Twelve hours later, after nursing the van’s geriatric suspension through bucket-sized potholes, inching over steep hills, and eating the dust of those taxis, we reached Kalewa. The place was bustling with people shopping at stalls packed with housewares and produce, customers at ease in teashops, parents shepherding children home from school.

  Our sky-blue concrete guesthouse stood high above the river, now twenty feet lower than during the summer rainy season. Within minutes of arriving we were shown rooms and offered our pick. Mindful of the layer of dust coating our skin, we chose one with its own bath trough, the last such luxury on the Chindwin.

  Back outside we found Saw confronted by three policemen, each with holstered gun on hip, all jabbing at copies of our passports and permits. Saw stood in what I came to call negotiating pose: arms crossed, face impassive, wild, wavy black hair escaping from his headband. He looked tense and avoided eye contact with me, which I took as a sign to stay away. Placing ourselves nearby in case we were needed, we gazed longingly at the river, so cool, so peaceful compared to the heat, dust, and dragging ennui of the road.

  When Saw finished with the police, we beckoned him over for the story.

  “Not used to foreigners,” he said. “Nervous. Say we must go.”

  “So, what do we do?” The thought of getting back in the van was too depressing.

  “Not leave. Can stay. Permits say so!”

  One conundrum of a road trip is figuring out when to ditch the car in favor of the local way of getting around. This isn’t easy, because we both would rather rely on Bernard’s driving acumen to get us where we’re going. To reference Marshall McLuhan, the shrewd philosopher intellectual of the mid-twentieth century, our car had become an article of dress without which we felt uncertain, unclad, and incomplete. Proceeding any other way but by car left us feeling as vulnerable as a squirrel crossing the interstate.

  Sometimes, though, a radical shift is not only expedient, it’s downright refreshing. And in this case, since we weren’t using our own car and Bernard wasn’t even driving, it seemed reasonable to broach what we had discussed while Saw was in the police stand-off.

  “If we were to switch to the river for the rest of the trip, would that cause permit problems?”

  “Permits for village. Use car. Use boat … okay.”

  “What about the boats. Do we need to reserve in advance?”

  “Buy every day, each village. Easy.”

  Switching to the river was sounding too simple.

  “And the van and driver. What will they do if we continue from here on the river?”

  “They drive back Yangon. Also okay.”

  Which is how I wound up hopping riverboats for 350 miles, till the Chindwin got so shallow we couldn’t go any further.

  Next morning, we were at the docks by 8:30 a.m. Only there was no dock. There were passengers, vendors, and porters swarming among an assortment of boats painted lime and turquoise with red trim, each nosed into the broad sandbank. Finding our boat, we followed pigs in handmade bamboo crates, furniture, and sacks of rice up the one-plank gangway. Families piled in dragging parcels and babies. A monk sat amidst barrels of oil. Snacks were hawked from skiffs and by deck vendors. And then, impelled by an ear-splitting horn, vendors scrambled to land, skiffs pushed back, and we were away.

  The river was its own sort of highway, accommodating everyth
ing from one-man fishing canoes to mammoth bamboo rafts floating teak logs downstream. Our boat stopped often to pick up or drop off passengers on the banks below their homes. None of the stops were set, nor could we disembark. Each, though, brought a chance to see river life up close, like peering in a neighbor’s window from the sidewalk.

  The Chindwin is narrow enough you can see what’s happening on the banks when you’re midstream. We passed fields of sunflowers and corn tended by farmers in traditional conical bamboo hats. Naked kids splashed about the river’s edge next to women doing laundry. A farmer swam with his zebu ox, then the two of them clambered, refreshed and dripping, up the steep sandy bank, the zebu’s hump towering over the small, bandy-legged man. White stupas with gold spires poked through the palms as the setting sun turned the dusk to orange. Myanmar is strongly Buddhist and these structures for meditation and housing relics, which look like portly sitting Buddhas with spiky hats, were everywhere.

  Life simplified. There was river time, spent visiting, reading, and watching the scenery. And there was shore time, finding the lone guesthouse with its stall-sized rooms, choosing a teashop for cold beer and peanuts, roaming village streets.

  In Mawlaik, our first stop, Saw was again confronted by the local police, an authoritarian welcome repeated in every village. When he finished persuading them our permits were valid, I asked if he needed to come if we went for a village wander. “Go,” he said. “Anywhere okay.”

  “Where will we find you when we get back?”

  “I find you,” he said, and gave a rare chuckle. “You only white people here. Everyone know where you are!”

  We walked quiet roads rimmed with broad-leafed shade trees where sows rooted in the vegetation. Schoolgirls squeaked along on rusty bicycles. A colonial mansion of dark teak listed, slowly dragged down by flowering vines. Each village faded into farms where water buffalos grazed and white egrets pecked for bugs. If we liked a village, or the next day’s schedule didn’t suit us, we’d stay another night.

  Evenings, we’d pick a restaurant for a dinner of fried rice, noodle soup, or my favorite meal-as-adventure: Burmese curry. Burmese curry has nothing to do with Indian curry. It’s served everywhere and here’s how it works.

  The restaurant will have a glass case with bowls of cooked food. Some contain proteins, like pork, chicken, or fish. Another five (or more, if it’s a prosperous restaurant) hold vegetable and bean dishes. At the case, choose your protein and return to your table.

  A number of small dishes will be brought, one with your pork or chicken, the rest with every vegetable on offer. Along comes a bowl of peppery broth, a large tureen of rice, and, sometimes, a plate of cucumbers and tomatoes.

  Serve yourself some of everything. Splash spoonfuls of broth on anything that seems dry. Refill your plate often. There’s no extra charge, as good an indication of the open generosity of the people of Myanmar as any.

  Our morning routine matched the villagers’. Rising around six o’clock, we’d see women heading to market, Naga villagers hawking grass brooms, a procession of monks with silver or lacquered bowls seeking food offerings.

  Breakfast was strong black tea with sweetened condensed milk, plus freshly fried doughnut sticks with a few spoonfuls of lentils. I might go to the kitchen and gesture for fried eggs. At a street stand, we’d get cool rice noodles smothered with sauces, greens, and a chopped hardboiled egg, blended with chicken broth.

  Street markets, the heart of each village, offered an astonishing variety of food: eggplants, bitter greens, immense gourds, onions, cauliflower, carrots, peppers, thumb-sized bananas, chicken, quail and duck eggs, slick silver river fish, brawny catfish, scrawny chickens, more beans than I knew existed. And rice, from premium at two dollars per kilo to the dregs for half that. Weighing was done with hand scales, the goods on one tray, D-cell batteries on the other.

  As the only foreigners in villages where no travelers had been for decades and only the elderly, born before the end of British colonial rule in 1948, spoke English, we were greeted with a wave and smile but otherwise left alone. Unlike in places that depend on tourism for income, no demands were made of us. And so we were able to join village life as much or little as we wished.

  I always headed for the local beauty salon. I discovered this indulgence in a Mawlaik teashop, where the traffic into a curtained area made me curious. The smell should have been a giveaway: the flowery scent of shampoo mixed with an acrid odor of bleaches and perms. Pulling back a drape patterned with cartoon ducks, I discovered a five-foot-by-twelve-foot alcove where a young woman was having her hair straightened while her boyfriend had his hair bleached. Intrigued, I gestured for a hair wash and then waited my turn.

  While a beauty shop’s smell is instantly recognizable, what happens in Burmese salons is unique. You lie on your back on a padded table, head over a basin as cool water is scooped from a nearby bucket and splashed over your hair. Expect your hair to be washed two or three times. In between, your scalp will be plucked, pinched, and squeezed in a head massage that will have you in raptures.

  It took only one hair wash for me to be hooked on this way of spending a blissful hour blending into village life. That I could do so while supporting women entrepreneurs and getting my long hair clean was a bonus.

  Life on the river was good. So good that on the day we got stuck, I didn’t care that we waited three hours for a boat, called by our captain via radio, to rescue us. I didn’t even care that it, too, got stuck, twice more, stretching a twelve-hour day to nineteen. I would have been happy to sit or drift on the Chindwin forever.

  But even rivers come to an end, and when the Chindwin got too shallow, we had to fly from Khamti to Mandalay. At the airport, I asked Saw, “When the water’s higher, is it possible to go farther up?”

  “Possible,” he said.

  EATING

  PREAMBLE

  Road trips are an involuntary alternance of feast and famine. On days when the latter is in force, the road is so long and empty that I inhale cookie crumbs and reluctantly peel the blackened skin from an old, bruised banana in between searching a plastic bag for stray remnants of the raisins and almonds I bought at a street market a week earlier. By no means is this starvation, and I’m not complaining. And yet it highlights something I find especially interesting about long drives, which is that a road trip meal is more than just a rudimentary necessity in the course of life. It’s a chance to look at both sides of Bernard’s face at the same time rather than his profile, to think about something other than rights and lefts and roundabouts, to watch others on their way to somewhere they’ll surely get to before me.

  The sometime absence of meals drives home just how full a sensory pleasure food is, replete with smell, taste, and texture. It’s something I can study minutely that doesn’t move, or at least it shouldn’t. And if I’ve ordered smartly, it even gratifies my hearing, with a crackling oil or sigh of escaping steam. For me, everything about food is hooked so deeply into indelible taste memories that regardless of which one I yank to the surface it makes me salivate.

  Despite the haphazard lack of food during our road trips, don’t imagine me as obsessed with finding the most fabulous food or the best-kept secret café in a village. That would be futile, since the places we drive through don’t even have a word for bistro in their language, let alone café. Or a direct translation of fabulous. And if one is into wish-fulfillment—and, by the way, isn’t travel itself the ultimate in that regard?—it’s important to start with a wish that has the possibility of being fulfilled. Or, to quote that magnificent tenor Luciano Pavarotti, a man who clearly knew more than a thing or two about food, “One of the very nicest things about life is that we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.” Now that I am more practiced at road trips, part of me does look forward to that first day getting on the road, because I know that the sooner we get moving, the sooner I can stop to investigate the local fare.

  What am I lo
oking for? Something to eat in the simplest of terms. I am happiest when I can eat whatever everyone else is eating at that moment. Accompanying my chewing with a beverage other than warm bottled water is a plus. I’m joyful about a bowl of homemade soup at a windy outpost before crossing the Straits of Magellan at Chile’s Punta Delgada. Freshly fried seeds and rice from a corner chaat stand in Kolkata provide just the right mix of salt, spice, and crunch to quell the belly gremlins screeching, “Feed me.” Handing a quizzical chef a few thumb-size eggplants and a fistful of slimy brown orbs from grimed baskets lining the dank, dark corridor of a café kitchen in Golmud, China, satisfies my lust for food novelty. And danger.

  Vivid as my own taste memories are, of my father bribing me to sample strong cheese by showing me how to squeeze a house shape from its waxy rind, or my mother tearing off a small orb from her pastry dough so I could roll and fill for my own apple tart, it is no wonder that food is the binding with which I can blend my life with the locals. The fizzy foulness of homebrewed barley beer offered by a hospitable farmer in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, does nothing to hydrate me and everything to quench a spirit thirsting for friendship after weeks on the road. That said farmer claimed to be a former Black Panther, with the stories to prove it, surely helped me down a beverage otherwise intent on making me retch.

  It all comes down to this: The rituals of mealtime are a refuge—an opportunity, dare I hope—to clean my hands with water and soap instead of moisture-sapping, skin-desiccating, antibacterial wipes. An interlude of rest and calm in a cool, quiet space, a space that, best of all, is stationary.