As soon as we landed at Rangoon, Burma’s international airport, numbers of taxis slid out of the darkness using only sidelights. They made a haphazard collection of 1940s and 1950s cars held together in make-do glory because of international sanctions. The taxi interiors were also tattered and torn. Among many other things, Burma could no longer import necessary vehicle spares. If something broke down, a mechanical replacement had to be fashioned by hand. In the case of gear changing, this often resulted in excruciating crunching and staccato lurching as homemade cogs struggled to connect. It was diplomatic not to ask about the brakes. 
There were no street lights and although the night was pitch black, drivers made their uncertain way along the main road on sidelights only, because, they argued, they didn’t want to shine headlights into the eyes of oncoming drivers.
Rangoon was at the beginning of my week in Burma, now renamed ‘Myanmar’ with Rangoon recast as ‘Yangon’. Two travellers and I arrived in a crumpled taxi at Rangoon’s Strand Hotel. In a tourism push later the junta government polished the hotel up, but it was the original builders, the Sarkies brothers, who poured the 19th century pomp and circumstance into its soul. When I stayed there you could still catch the whiff of 1901 rigorous formality, even if the air was a little musty. The hotel rejoiced in a certain scruffy demeanour and although delightfully dilapidated, was still thoroughly majestic. Its solid European design carried the dignified ambience of its eminent siblings, Singapore‘s Raffles Hotel and the E & O Hotel in Penang. Another Sarkies venture was Annie Grey’s Hotel, in Apia, Western Samoa.
The reception desk was in a towering hall with decorative columns and huge whirling fans. Booked in, we were guided to a lift with ornate ironwork gates and handsome brass handles. Eleven of us piled in, with baggage, but when the operator tried to get the lift to go up, it refused to budge. After several attempts, he said ‘We jump a little,’ in tourist English. So eleven strangers solemnly jumped up and down under his instructions until the lift suddenly took off and sailed from floor to floor.
My room was huge, with polished floors, grand furniture and a vast double bed. I remained impressed with it all until that night – for then the bed bugs bit. Reluctant room staff eventually showed up next morning with ancient metal Flit pumps which wheezed small squeezes of insecticide spray around the room and about the bed. The smell was reassuring but did nothing to alarm the bugs. They bit again, even worse, the second night.
For all its dark bars and dowdy reception rooms, the hotel became really lively most evenings when, in addition to foreign guests, wealthier local people gathered for a social drink. A number of well-built, well-off men, elegant in colourful sarongs, strutted about the bars like war lords, usually with a beautiful girl in tow. Their confidence and buoyant spirits suggested they were highly successful businessmen, but more likely, they were army officers in mufti.
That evening I had decided to walk down the stairs to the dining room. It was a curving, wide-sweeping and altogether glamorous staircase which lent a guest a certain grandeur and mystique. Until, that was, the lights cut out. Halfway down and clinging to the balustrade, I made my way down the rest of the stairway into a strange, darkened dining room, and almost bumped into an American couple, a professor of criminology and his wife, from Santa Fe.
We introduce ourselves, still in the dark, and elected to share a table.
The lights came back on in time and we had a thoroughly conversational and enjoyable evening, although each course took half an hour to arrive. In their own good time, the waiters, with impeccable manners and spruce in their black turning-green-with-age suits, brought our food now quite chilled on huge white, stone-cold plates.
Towards the end of the meal the same waiters retreated to wash up behind a long line of screens – also black turned green and elderly looking – at the end of the dining room near our table. The clatter of pots and pans and the chatter of their long pent-up, polite hours erupted over the top of the screens. It became impossible for us to hear each other above the noise and so my American dinner friends and I, who had met in darkness, now mouthed and nodded our farewells in silence.
Pagan (aka Bagan), 145km south of Mandalay on the banks of the Irrawaddy River, was founded by King Pyinbya, the 34th king of his dynasty, in 847 AD. It was the capital of a realm geographically matching much of Myanmar today.
Heaven, or nirvana, was what Pagan’s eleventh century kings sought, when, filled with religious fervour, they could not stop building temples, stupas and pagodas. Probably no one knows exactly how many there still are as they crumble in various states of decay. Kublai Khan, the warring Mongol emperor of China, put an end to the building when he overran Pagan in 1287 and it has never recovered its status. It was January when I was there and the countryside around sat in golden sunlight like no other. The depth and brilliance of the afternoon light streamed across the thousands of shrines, turning grey stone into gold, dried moss into jewels. The landscape glowed, while a soft haze hung in the air like a gauze curtain ready to drop on some theatre of illusion.
Women in bright, ankle-length sarongs, and sandals, carrying heavy loads on their heads, still walked the dusty main street of Pagan, a small village where people mostly lived in bamboo and wood houses. The women have enviable elegance and their young children, some of them with cheeky grins, invariably straggled behind. As we discovered, transport for people was mostly on foot or by the steady clip clop of horse and buggy. Not far from the main road, laden bullock trains slowly wound their way down a sheer, deep riverbank to load waiting barges on the Irrawaddy. The scene was biblical.
Three hotels at the time were operating in Pagan and the choice was basic-basic (repetition intended), not-so-basic and luxurious and expensive, between which a driver and horse and buggy clip-clopped delivering tourists. In 1981 things were pretty primitive. I chose the second hotel but soon had to ask to be moved to another room. For when the lavatory flushed, water shot all over the floor. In the second room, I noticed that, above the bed a large ceiling fan was hanging by one wire at an incredible slant as it slowly circled. Too tired to ask for another room but fearing the fan would free itself from its moorings as I slept, I turned it off. Stuffy heat was better than having your head chopped off.
Back at reception, two girls in their thirties, an Australian and a New Zealander, and I started to chat. We were swiftly waylaid by the manager to order our evening meal – by 3pm – for a 7pm meal. We ordered a curry each and some sort of pudding. Later and on time, the three of us sat at one table and waited. We were still waiting twenty minutes later when a Japanese businessman, accompanied by a young Burmese, who looked like an escorting diplomat, sat at the next table. They were served within minutes.
We continued to be ignored. We could not walk out because there was nowhere to walk out to. My table companions complained loudly to the manager. In the meantime, the Japanese leaned over to tell us he was 72 and had climbed over 100 steps to a temple that day. Whether he was boasting his virility or his availability, or both, was not clear, but he was managing to give a bottle of whisky a deep nudge.
Food arrived for us after further protests. Instead of the three curries ordered, we were handed one chicken curry to share between the three of us, a bowl of tepid saffron rice, a fried egg each, two pieces of toast and a splash of strawberry jam. That was it.
The manager confessed a new cinema was opening that evening in Pagan, with a free screening of three English films. All his staff had decamped. There was no more food in the kitchen, he said. Would the three of us like him to take us to the cinema instead?
Much travelled and weary, with more travel ahead the next day, we all opted for bed but sleep that night for me proved problematic. The Japanese man, who had so enjoyed his whisky after going up and down one hundred steps, was accommodated in the room next to mine and the hotel walls were wafer-thin. His noisy snores ripped the long night apart.
The two girls and I continued as a trio to Maymyo, once a focus for Raj ‘fishing fleet’ gals looking for a military husband. It was an orderly English-looking hill town with neat gardens and clipped hedges surrounding houses that looked as though they had escaped to Burma from the London commuter areas of plush Epsom or Reigate. We were booked on flights to Mandalay but the day before we left we were contacted at the hotel by In-tourist police to tell us our bookings had been changed – we were told, not consulted.
The next day we were taken to the airport and directed into a special viewing area. No reason was given. We soon realised there was some sort of occasion afoot and all westerners were grouped together not far from a red carpet that led out onto the runway. A military band was at hand. Just as an aircraft was about to land, an anxious soldier broke ranks and ran with a hammer to a corner of red carpet that had had the impertinence to curl up. He was soon retrieved by senior officers and hustled out of sight.
The VIP landing turned out to be the president of North Korea. We were there as a token audience for the occasion, together with a number of rounded-up local civilians. Eventually an escorting cavalcade of cars disappeared and we were free to catch the next flight to Mandalay.
Travelling the road to Mandalay, the old song softly humming in my head, was a childhood dream realised. I could hear the sound of marching soldiers and the clip of an order. Courtesy of Kipling, in my imagination I had been there long before.
Next day at a market in Mandalay I noticed how a trader immediately dropped his head and refused to answer when a bombastic Burmese in a European suit tried hard to begin a debate about the government between the three of us. He spoke good English and had crassly interrupted our bartering session. Noting the trader’s reaction, I likewise refused any comment. The man eventually gave up and walked away. Burma is a watched country where citizens swiftly cast down their eyes and say nothing. They know fear.
From early in the visit it was not hard to sense the unobtrusive presence of the In-tourist police and other watchers of whom the citizens were only too aware. My hire car driver, who so politely and patiently drove me around for a whole day, refused an invitation to join me for lunch. I got the impression he did not dare accept although I suspected he had no food with him. Twenty years later people still did not dare.
Sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union to persuade Burma’s ruling generals to hand over power to an elected civilian government and, in particular, to free pro-democracy leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, have been of no avail. Peaceful protest by marching monks has been met by savage reaction, death and imprisonment. Countries, in their own interests, which need for Burma’s resources, prop up the junta financially, apparently indifferent to its violent repression. Aung San Suu Kyi has been held mostly in isolation in her Rangoon home for nearly two decades. Yet, in her own homeland and in international eyes, she still remains both the hero and the hope of Burma.
The junta’s original coup took place in 1962. In 2007 the generals shifted the nation’s capital from Yangon to a new site called ‘Nay Pyi Daw’, at Pyinmana, in the Mandalay district. They said the move was made because Pyinmana was more central but a fear of a possible US invasion or urban unrest may be nearer the reason. It was an ironic choice of site since Pyinmana was the base for Burma’s army of resistance, led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, General Aung San, against WWII Japanese occupation.
My visa was about to expire and sadly it came time to leave. A visitor is loath to leave behind a beautiful country of beautiful people, who seem to have been too patient and too passive for too long. Such is the extent of the fear instilled by the junta. The world saw in 2007 what the army would do to monks who marched in peaceful protest and bravely joined by others. People were beaten and killed. At the time of writing, Burma remains a very sad, oppressed and deeply distressed country.
Aung San Suu Kyi has asked tourists not to visit Burma because money from tourism could assist the junta in its grip of her country. Hopefully one day we can return to a Burma where people can again safely take flower offerings to their brilliant temples and pray fervently for their heart’s desire; see again a people smiling and still gentle, like the young flower seller with babe in arms, who gave me a pink rose because I admired her baby. And to find out whether Rangoon taxi drivers still giggle in embarrassment as they struggle to connect grinding gears.
When we edged our way along the still-dark airport road, I became aware of vague crowds of sylph-like figures, barely discernible but moving rhythmically among the avenue of trees on each side of the road. They were not the spectres they looked, but workers, already up at 4.30am, exercising before the day began. It was as though, for a moment, Burma’s ghosts had come out dancing.
Story from “Hot Feet and Far Hills”. The book is available from our shop