From Burma to Myanmar by Lydia Laube

Author:Lydia Laube
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, WTLC, TRV003060
ISBN: 9781743051399
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2015-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

12 Pyay

I left for the bus station at nine next morning in a taxi. It was a very long ride in dense traffic. The two seats I had bought, one for me and one for my legs, were in a big purple bus. The ride to Pyay (pronounced phewy), took six hours with time off for good behaviour halfway there. Pyay is situated on the Irrawaddy River north of Yangon on the Bagan Road that follows the eastern bank of the river.

At first we drove through the sprawl of outer Yangon for a long way. Then we followed an almost continual procession of little low village houses and shanty stores and stalls that lined both sides of the road, interspersed now and then with a monastery or gilded stupa. There were trees and grass on the verges and tropic-stained white stone walls.

After about an hour, green patches of paddy began to appear, followed after another hour by large expanses of crops, mainly corn. There were goats and chooks, the odd pig, and many cows. Twice I saw groups of boys sharing a soccer field with a herd of cows. I had been told that cows are so expensive in Burma that they are smuggled across the border from Thailand. They always had a guardian—sometimes a boy would be sitting watching just one cow. If they really are so valuable I suppose it is necessary, but I wondered what it was like to sit and watch a cow all day.

Then it rained; bucketloads of water fell. The pale grey sky along the horizon was slowly obliterated as dense charcoal-black cloud spilled in loops and whorls down into it. This cloud contained more rain that, when we made a comfort stop, descended with a vengeance. The path to the line of loos in the rear of the roadhouse was across an open yard, and a young girl kindly lent me her umbrella.

The roadhouse was merely an open-sided shed containing rows of long wooden tables on which at intervals sat thermoses of tea and hot water and most unsanitary looking communal cups. From the selection of edibles on offer, I bought boiled eggs and a bag of unidentifiable sticks of what looked like biscuit material, passing on anything with claws and legs that could have been insects or spiders.

On the bus music videos played nonstop on a screen that unfortunately, I sat almost in front of. The tapes were long and the songs all sounded the same to me, while the films that accompanied them were mostly of young men and their mothers who seemed to be doing the prodigal son act. After a while this became a bit of a worry. Did all Burmese boys have Oedipus complexes?

I heard spitting sounds and then realised it was people ­spitting their chewed betel into the black plastic bags that hung by each seat. When full they were left, hanging, for the poor cleaner to remove. Betel chewing was also the cause of much spitting not just on the bus but everywhere, as evidenced by the red stains on footpaths.

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