No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay…

– Rudyard Kipling, from “Mandalay” (1865)

BEGGING IN MANDALAY

Our waiter sat on a stool, cheroot in hand, staring at the dusty nothing night. At the only other table, a clutch of old men laughed over rice wine as we – R., M., and I: tourists, backpackers, still kids – drank warm bottles of Myanmar Beer, picked at grilled river fish and fried watercress and hard, white rice. The three of us were exhausted from the day’s cycle to Mandalay’s holiest temple, a glittering world of idols and woodcarvers and shops selling all colours of sacred this and that, and deep in the centre of the complex, the Mahamuni Buddha, layered fat with centuries of gold leaf, glowed dazzling in electric light. Ah.

And now, in this little restaurant, we were sitting, eating, not really talking when this woman emerged from the darkness, brown with sun and filth, a dirty baby tied into her rags. She could have been thirty or fifty – I don’t know. She showed us her betel-stained teeth, the palms of her hands. She swayed on her feet. Fatigue or drink. Her black eyes spoke hunger.

A tourist-free, impoverished, and oppressed country – we couldn’t help but stand out in Burma… I became well-acquainted with the palms of people’s hands. And what could I do?  I fumbled in my pocket for kyat and R. laughed and said, “Check it out! She’s dancing!” With a wide shit-eating grin, he got up from his seat and started in on the Chicken Dance – you know the one – him singing, “Doo doo du-du du-du doo, doo doo du-du du-du doo…” He flapped his wings. The baby started crying. The woman froze. R. finished a verse, sat down, took a pull from his beer and went back to picking at the fish. Yum.

Our waiter was staring at us, the men at the other table were staring at us, and the woman’s eyes had shifted from hunger to hate.

THE BUS TO KYAUKME

Another checkpoint. Sometimes they just wave you through, but sometimes they stop you in the middle of the night and pull everyone off one at a time to check papers, bags, etc. A young soldier shines a light in your eyes and asks, “You like Myanmar?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I like it fine.”

He copies the information from your passport and visa, then tells you to wait for the other passengers. You stand amidst a group of nervous uniformed boys cradling Chinese-made automatic rifles. When everyone’s cleared, you get back on the bus, and twenty minutes later… another checkpoint.

The worst bus in Burma was a rusty shit bucket with holes in the floor and hard seats placed so close together that I was forced to chew my knees for the entire eight hour ride from Mandalay to Kyaukme… Mist rolled thick and heavy in the valleys below as we chugged up a pass. Then the bus slowed and stopped: another fucking checkpoint.

Trucks lined the side of the road, their open beds filled with sacks of rice and vegetables. Soldiers in olive drab mounted the trucks with menacing two-meter-long steel spears. The soldiers straddled the sacks and plunged their weapons deep into the cargo, piercing through produce, looking for what? Refugees? Weapons? Rebels?

A soldier came onto our bus, young and nervous like all the rest. He held his rifle in one hand while he glanced at our papers. He peeked at the crates and bags stuffed in the back of the bus, then called out the window. Another soldier boarded, this one with a spear.

Goddamn him, I thought, if he punctures my bag I’ll… But my anger lapsed. Better my rucksack than some poor soul futilely trying to topple the imperium..

The soldiers poked around then left – my bag and all the others weren’t touched. The bus chugged into gear and we passed in the shadow of the mountain’s forest-shrouded summit.

In Maymyo we stopped and were surrounded by women with baskets of sweet, little strawberries – remnants of imperialism? In other towns, women sold rice cakes, cool bottles of Star Cola (Pepsi-esque and military-made), slabs of mysterious meats, fish with sugar cane rammed down their throats…

I bought plenty, shared with the other passengers and they shared their food with me. When language allowed it, they also shared stories.

I heard about the horrors of their military government. Arrests, torture, gulags, executions. Families ripped apart. Brothers shipped to only god knows where. Monks disappeared – a whispering of robes. Robes the colour of blood. Blood in the earth. The gnawing weight of poverty in this rich, fertile land. People suffering while their fat leaders live in cookie-cutter suburban mansions, are chauffeured along clean streets in grey-market luxury cars.

“I can tell you this,” one man said, “because you are a foreigner. I know you won’t talk. But my own people? The Burmese are dying to stab each other in the back.”

Back to the bus:

“Burma,” an old man in a worn Nike golf shirt and tattered skirt-like longyi says, pointing to himself. He then points at me.

“Canada,” I say.

He looks confused.

“Ca-na-da,” I repeat. The man shrugs. I try again. But he’s turned back to his window, back to the rolling tragedy of his country.

THE INSURGENT GUIDE

Little novice monks in stained saffron robes scurry around people’s legs in Kyaukme’s crowded and decrepit market. Their heads are scarred from dull razor shaves; their bare feet are black and hard. One of them sees me and they swarm the plastic-stool café where I’m having a breakfast of milk chai and fried Chinese bread. Buddha’s children raise their battered alms bowls and look up at me with hungry, imploring eyes. I surrender the bag of mandarins I just bought and they dart back into the grey morning bustle.

The man who shares my table smiles, his face and teeth the same yellow-brown. He takes out a little notebook that’s filled with the testimonials of his former customers.

“My friend see you get off bus and call me,” he says in halting English. “Very easy to find white man here.”

He wants to take me trekking to the surrounding hill tribe villages. Past adventurers finding themselves in this sleepy little town attest that he can take you anywhere.

“Last week I take two Russia man to Mogok,” he says.

Mogok is the heart of Burma’s lucrative gem trade. A trade, I’d read, that’s driven by slave labour. I say, “I thought foreigners can’t go there.”

“We take motorbike. I know back road with no army stop. They go to buy stone. Pay two thousand dollar for ruby like this!” He makes a fist. “Crazy Russia man. They have big bag with glass to look and make test. No buy fake gemstone.” Two thousand dollars, I think. Most people in Burma make do on only a few dollars a day. If that.

He hands me the notebook and I flip through at random. I stumble upon a Canadian couple’s warning: “We had to hide in the jungle from the army. Please don’t ask him to take you to the opium fields. If we would have been caught, we all would have been killed.”

“I hate government,” the guide says proudly. I look up from the book. “My family is Shan. We fight always government. In nineteen nineties we make peace and give our guns because they promise election and freedom. But almost twenty year and no freedom: they still kill us. They say, ‘Later, later. Election later.’ But no election. I have video of army burning village, killing women. I hide guns in jungle. We wait for twenty-ten election, and if fake, we fight.”

THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

Myanmar staged its “historic” election on November 7, 2010. I read about the protests in Yangon that followed the military junta’s overwhelming victory – a junta that had just switched from uniforms to civilian clothes. Little news, however, came out of the northern states, and all I could think about was the insurgent guide, armed with his wide smile and a rusted World War Two carbine, firing single shots into the massed forces of Myanmar’s Chinese-equipped army.

After decades of blanket condemnation, Western media lauded Myanmar’s superficial 2012 reforms (Western countries are eager to do business). The regrouped opposition, however, have taken only a handful – 20% – of parliament’s 664 seats. Buddhist militias, meanwhile, are leading pogroms against Muslims. Government agents are thought to be involved and the voice of democracy – Aung San Suu Kyi – remains silent.

2013. Trickles of news are finally coming down from Kyaukme: the area’s Shan rebels have resumed their fight.

Daniel Otis is a Cambodia-based freelance journalist. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Southeast Asia Globe, and Australia’s The Monthly. For more, visit exhaustandincense.wordpress.com.