On the 17th I left Shwebo, taking the train north. I had bought my train ticket my first day in Mandalay. The express train, such as it is, is scheduled to leave Mandalay (heading for Myitkyina and supposedly taking 16 hours to get there, but often far longer) every day at 4:30 in the morning, so I decided to catch it in Shwebo, where it is scheduled to arrive at 6:50, affording me a couple of extra hours of sleep. I bought the ticket in Mandalay for $15, for an upper class seat, from the tourist agency at the train station. Apparently, some tickets are reserved for foreigners. I noticed the face value of my ticket was 9200 kyats, about $9.20. (Just over 1000 kyat to the dollar.)
I took a motorcycle taxi to Shwebo's train station about 6:30. The express train from Mandalay arrived at 11:45, almost five hours late. It turned out it had left Mandalay more than four hours late. I actually enjoyed my morning at the busy train station, with lots of friendly and politely curious people. And I expected the train to be late, though not five hours late. While I waited, two freight trains and two very crowded passenger trains came and went. A man fell asleep on the concrete floor in front of me until awakened by a stern woman whacking him with a stick. He raised himself sleepily and without complaint. She yelled at him and then took his small plastic bag of possessions and flung it onto the carriage of the train at the station. He slowly got up, climbed into the carriage, and sat on the floor next to his bag.
The station master (I think) was very attentive to me. A couple of times he came over to me, asked to look at my ticket, and explained carefully which carriage and seat I had. Just before the train arrived he motioned me to follow him to where my carriage would stop. He spoke to another employee as we walked to the spot. This employee later reappeared with a plastic bag containing a bottle of water and a can of Sprite. The station master handed the bag to me and said, "A gift for you." When the train arrived he saw me to my seat, which reclined and was padded and very comfortable. Ordinary class seats are wooden benches.
The train left at 11:50 and I enjoyed the trip north through the green countryside on the rocking ride. Burmese train tracks are so poor that carriages bounce up and down and rock left and right. The scenery was largely rice paddies, with lots of trees among them. I also saw quite a few bullock carts and we passed through towns and villages, making only a few stops. We crossed the Tropic of Cancer on the way north. I talked with a former sailor who had been to New Orleans and Portland, Oregon. I ate quail eggs, banana chips, and cookies.
It got dark about an hour north of the town of Wuntho. We seemed to be passing through forest just before I got off the train at Naba just before 8. From Naba I took an open air three wheeler over the hills, the road rising only about 300 feet and then dropping 500, on a very bad road to Katha on the Irrawaddy. In Katha, a town of about 12,000 people with an elevation of about 400 feet above sea level, I checked into a guest house on the waterfront. Walking along the riverfront, I could see various boats on the river despite the dark, moonless night. The river is about 30 feet below the bank. The night air felt cool this far north and next to the river. The cold bucket bath was tolerable, though, and felt good after the dusty ride from Naba to Katha.
At 5 the next morning I heard the daily express boat downriver to Mandalay blowing its horn and getting ready to leave. I got up about 7 and walked along the busy waterfront. After eating a breakfast of quail eggs and cookies I watched the express boat head upriver at 9 and then set out to explore a little of Katha. In 1926-27 an English colonial police official named Eric Blair lived here and later (in 1934) published his first novel, under his pen name, George Orwell, set here and entitled "Burmese Days," which I read last year when I was in Burma. Some buildings from his era and mentioned in the novel are still standing. A girl let me into the yard of a deserted old colonial type house and nearby I found the deserted former two story house of the British District Commissioner, built in 1928 after Orwell had left. It has a fireplace and a teak staircase but is falling apart. I could peer inside through the broken windows.
I saw some other colonial looking buildings and found the church mentioned in the novel, now rebuilt after having fallen down a few years ago. The friendly Anglican priest (he told me he has a congregation of 200) directed me to Orwell's former house, now occupied by a Burmese police official. A truck marked "Police" was parked outside.
I ate lunch at a good Chinese restaurant with very friendly staff and then sat and watched the waterfront and river activity for a while. I had asked where I could wash my dusty shirt and one of the women at the guest house offered to wash it for 20 cents. I saw her take it down to the river and wash it in the water. I didn't see her use any soap but I did see her pounding it on a rock with a wooden paddle and then hanging it on a rail along the waterfront to dry. No buttons were broken.
A very fancy luxury tourist boat from upriver docked in the early afternoon. I had found out where the old British Club, a major locale in the novel, was located and was walking there in the mid afternoon when a long train of about 20 pony carts, each with two foreign tourists from the boat, passed me by.
The former club is now quite derelict, though not as bad as the former District Commissioner's house. I could peer through the windows of the upper story, now the offices of a cooperative association, I was told. The club once fronted the river, but now the river has shifted and it fronts vegetable gardens, with houses on stilts beyond the gardens. Some friendly uniformed school children were playing in front of and on the porch of the club.
I walked around to the former river side of the club, where the entrance to the lower story is located. The big lower room is now a school. The kids were in recess and a teacher was writing on the blackboard, which was mostly in Burmese, but with some simple English grammar sentences. The teacher told me this was the former billiards room. School resumed after recess, with a teacher using a long pointer on the blackboard and the kids reciting in unison. The boat group showed up and I talked to an Australian among them. They were traveling from Bhamo to Mandalay on a week's cruise.
I walked back to the riverfront and watched the activity before dark. Just after dark a big ferry arrived, the slow ones that take days between Mandalay and Bhamo. Stevedores began unloading cargo and I could see people camped out on the decks. Later, about 8, they had finished unloading cargo and were now loading other cargo. Great stacks of unloaded cartons of eggs stood on the riverbank. Young men in flip flops or barefoot were carrying big boxes, two at a time, on their backs down the steep embankment to the boat. The boat left soon after 8, headed upriver, I think.
The next morning I walked along the riverfront, noticing a congregation of hundreds of little chicks on sale in an enclosure on the street. After a noodle breakfast I left on the 9 o'clock boat upriver, heading northeast, then southeast, to Shwegu, about a four hour trip. On the wide river, with steep banks, we passed a few logging boats and made brief stops in two towns. The boat, despite the wood seats, was fairly comfortable. The long wooden boat had seats for maybe 100 passengers, but I think there were only about 50 of us. I was the only foreigner. You could get up and walk about.
In Shwegu, a town of about 15,000 people, I had a little trouble finding a guest house, until I asked at a restaurant and they dispatched a little boy to show me the way. From the guest house I walked inland from the river, through a wooded area full of wooden houses, pigs, and dusty paths, eventually reaching a little stream that flows into the Irrawaddy. Eventually, I reached the pottery making district. Shwegu seems to specialize in making small pots for drinking. I found several sheds where pottery was being fired under heaps of ashes. In one shed two women were carefully stacking pots on a bed of rice husks preparatory for firing.
I watched them for a while, as they stacked pottery and brought in baskets of rice husks from a big pile outside. Nearby rice was being cooked in bamboo sections over a small fire. A man came out with a machete and cut away much of the bamboo until it was quite easy to peel. He cut off a section, showed me how to peel it, and gave it to me to eat. It was warm, sticky, and very good. Some women watched me and laughed as I ate. One showed me the fruit of a nearby tree that was used to flavor the rice. I sat on a little wooden bench and ate it while watching some little children playing on the dusty path. They seemed to be having a great time, using little stones to play a game similar to jacks and later playing hopscotch and then a sort of jumping game, a little like jump rope but with a long string of rubber bands. One little girl, maybe five, was particularly friendly, and mischievous.
Towards the end of the afternoon I again watched the two women stacking pottery. They finished for the day and indicated they would resume in the morning. In another shed nearby a woman was beginning to rake away the ashes, exposing the fired pottery and coughing from all the ash as she did so. I walked to the riverfront before dark, and then back to the hotel.
The next morning I walked to the kiln shed which I had visited the afternoon before. The two women seemed happy to see me again. They had finished stacking the pottery and were now covering the big stack with rice straw. A man brought them two big baskets of straw, carried on either end of a pole over his shoulders. An English speaking guy showed up on a motorcycle and told me the two women were mother and daughter and that the firing would take three days. The mischievous little girl showed up again and again was very friendly. The motorcycle guy told me her mother and father were dead.
After the mother and daughter had finished covering the stack of pottery with rice straw, they covered that with basket fulls of rice husks. Finally, the daughter covered everything with a layer of ashes from a pile in a corner of the shed, a very ashy affair. The mother went outside to smoke a thick brown cheroot. In a couple of other sheds women were either raking the ashes or pulling out the fired pots from the ash heaps. There was a lot of ash in the air. In another shed three or four cows had bedded down on the ashes next to the walls, perhaps for the warmth during the night.
The daughter having finished covering the pile with ashes, the two women placed straw all along the edges of the pile and then lit it in several places. At first it was very smoky, but eventually settled down. They closed the doors and I watched the smoke seep out of the roof and walls. A man showed me the area under a nearby house where wet clay was stored and where there were several potters' wheels. He also should me a wooden pounder used to break chunks of dirt into a sort of powder to be added to water to make clay. I again walked through the wooden house district until lunch at a Burmese restaurant about 11, with several dishes of often oily, but tasty food, including lots of vegetables and some chicken.
After lunch I walked for more than an hour upriver along the riverbank past wooden houses and friendly people. I watched the river activity and saw boats full of logs coming down river. I passed a very loud wedding celebration, with music blasting from giant speakers. At one point from the high riverbank I watched a young woman apparently panning for gold, using a shallow wooden pan perhaps a foot or more in diameter. She used a hoe to scrape soil and water from the river into her pan and then very expertly swirled the pan to remove the stones and dirt, leaving just a black silt, which she poured into a small container. I watched her do it again and again. Nearby, another woman was washing clothes in the river.
Eventually, I reached the ferry crossing to a mid river island. I crossed in the small, canoe-like boat and then crossed the wide sand bank now exposed to an almost deserted temple called Shwe Baw Kyaung. ("Shwe," by the way, means "golden.") I explored the temple, filled with hundreds of little stupas, and then walked through the very nice village under trees next to the temple. The village had electricity and hand operated water pumps. Most of the children were at the two story, wooden school house and the village seemed quiet, except for the noise from the school.
After about two hours on the island I took the ferry back and walked back to town the way I had come. On the way back I watched some men making and cooking rice noodles, first pouring the wet flour mixture through a sort of sieve bag into a pot of boiling water for a few minutes, and then scooping out the cooked noodles and cooling them in a pot of cold water.
I relaxed most of the next morning in my hotel before a Burmese lunch at about 11. About 12 I walked down to the express boat landing and caught the boat coming from Katha and headed upriver about 1. Again, it wasn't too crowded and I enjoyed the trip to Bhamo. From Shwegu the river route took us first southeast past the island with the temple and eventually into a very scenic defile with forested hills and rocky cliffs on either side. Leaving the narrows of the defile, we headed east, passing under a big bridge, and then northeast. The river widened, with lots of sandbanks. The boat cut back and forth across the river to avoid them. We made a few stops on the way and eventually could see the high mountains, rising to about 7000 feet, to the east. China lies just beyond the mountains.
We arrived in Bhamo, a town of about 25,000 people only about 20 miles from the Chinese border over the mountains, about 4:45. I checked my altimeter and it was a 36 foot climb from the boat up to the top of the riverbank. I found the hotel I was looking for, but its $10 rooms were all taken, so I took a $25 one. It was very nice, with a flat screen tv and hot water.
The next morning I checked into a $10 room. I had hoped to take the two day boat trip from Bhamo to Myitkyina, with an overnight stop in Sinbo, but foreigners are no longer allowed on that trip. I have heard several explanations why. One is that because of Kachin rebel activity. (Shwegu, Bhamo, and Myitkyina are all in Kachin State, Burma's northernmost.) Another is that there was a boat sinking recently that killed 23 people. A third is that the river is too low. Foreigners are also prohibited from taking the bus north to Myitkyina. The only alternative is to fly, unless you want to backtrack downriver to Katha. There was a flight to Myitkyina the next morning and after several hours I was able to secure a seat, at a cost of $54. (My ticket had a price of 38,500 Kyat, crossed out, with $54 written above it, so it seems foreigners pay about 50% extra.)
I walked to the waterfront in the morning and again in the afternoon. The people selling chicks, which I had first seen in Katha and later in Shwegu, were now offering their diminished flock of chicks in Bhamo. They were very interesting to watch, especially when they tumbled all over each other to get water from a container. The high waterfront riverbank is lined with huge rain trees, affording lots of shade. I watched the express boat arrive from Katha and Shwegu about 4:30 and watched the sunset over the river just after 5. For dinner that evening I found an Indian restaurant and had a delicious chicken biryani. The bearded Muslim proprietor told me his grandfather had arrived from Hyderabad during World War II, and that both his father and he had been born in Bhamo. He said he spoke Urdu, but didn't seem to know where in India Hyderabad is located.
I took a motorcycle taxi to Shwebo's train station about 6:30. The express train from Mandalay arrived at 11:45, almost five hours late. It turned out it had left Mandalay more than four hours late. I actually enjoyed my morning at the busy train station, with lots of friendly and politely curious people. And I expected the train to be late, though not five hours late. While I waited, two freight trains and two very crowded passenger trains came and went. A man fell asleep on the concrete floor in front of me until awakened by a stern woman whacking him with a stick. He raised himself sleepily and without complaint. She yelled at him and then took his small plastic bag of possessions and flung it onto the carriage of the train at the station. He slowly got up, climbed into the carriage, and sat on the floor next to his bag.
The station master (I think) was very attentive to me. A couple of times he came over to me, asked to look at my ticket, and explained carefully which carriage and seat I had. Just before the train arrived he motioned me to follow him to where my carriage would stop. He spoke to another employee as we walked to the spot. This employee later reappeared with a plastic bag containing a bottle of water and a can of Sprite. The station master handed the bag to me and said, "A gift for you." When the train arrived he saw me to my seat, which reclined and was padded and very comfortable. Ordinary class seats are wooden benches.
The train left at 11:50 and I enjoyed the trip north through the green countryside on the rocking ride. Burmese train tracks are so poor that carriages bounce up and down and rock left and right. The scenery was largely rice paddies, with lots of trees among them. I also saw quite a few bullock carts and we passed through towns and villages, making only a few stops. We crossed the Tropic of Cancer on the way north. I talked with a former sailor who had been to New Orleans and Portland, Oregon. I ate quail eggs, banana chips, and cookies.
It got dark about an hour north of the town of Wuntho. We seemed to be passing through forest just before I got off the train at Naba just before 8. From Naba I took an open air three wheeler over the hills, the road rising only about 300 feet and then dropping 500, on a very bad road to Katha on the Irrawaddy. In Katha, a town of about 12,000 people with an elevation of about 400 feet above sea level, I checked into a guest house on the waterfront. Walking along the riverfront, I could see various boats on the river despite the dark, moonless night. The river is about 30 feet below the bank. The night air felt cool this far north and next to the river. The cold bucket bath was tolerable, though, and felt good after the dusty ride from Naba to Katha.
At 5 the next morning I heard the daily express boat downriver to Mandalay blowing its horn and getting ready to leave. I got up about 7 and walked along the busy waterfront. After eating a breakfast of quail eggs and cookies I watched the express boat head upriver at 9 and then set out to explore a little of Katha. In 1926-27 an English colonial police official named Eric Blair lived here and later (in 1934) published his first novel, under his pen name, George Orwell, set here and entitled "Burmese Days," which I read last year when I was in Burma. Some buildings from his era and mentioned in the novel are still standing. A girl let me into the yard of a deserted old colonial type house and nearby I found the deserted former two story house of the British District Commissioner, built in 1928 after Orwell had left. It has a fireplace and a teak staircase but is falling apart. I could peer inside through the broken windows.
I saw some other colonial looking buildings and found the church mentioned in the novel, now rebuilt after having fallen down a few years ago. The friendly Anglican priest (he told me he has a congregation of 200) directed me to Orwell's former house, now occupied by a Burmese police official. A truck marked "Police" was parked outside.
I ate lunch at a good Chinese restaurant with very friendly staff and then sat and watched the waterfront and river activity for a while. I had asked where I could wash my dusty shirt and one of the women at the guest house offered to wash it for 20 cents. I saw her take it down to the river and wash it in the water. I didn't see her use any soap but I did see her pounding it on a rock with a wooden paddle and then hanging it on a rail along the waterfront to dry. No buttons were broken.
A very fancy luxury tourist boat from upriver docked in the early afternoon. I had found out where the old British Club, a major locale in the novel, was located and was walking there in the mid afternoon when a long train of about 20 pony carts, each with two foreign tourists from the boat, passed me by.
The former club is now quite derelict, though not as bad as the former District Commissioner's house. I could peer through the windows of the upper story, now the offices of a cooperative association, I was told. The club once fronted the river, but now the river has shifted and it fronts vegetable gardens, with houses on stilts beyond the gardens. Some friendly uniformed school children were playing in front of and on the porch of the club.
I walked around to the former river side of the club, where the entrance to the lower story is located. The big lower room is now a school. The kids were in recess and a teacher was writing on the blackboard, which was mostly in Burmese, but with some simple English grammar sentences. The teacher told me this was the former billiards room. School resumed after recess, with a teacher using a long pointer on the blackboard and the kids reciting in unison. The boat group showed up and I talked to an Australian among them. They were traveling from Bhamo to Mandalay on a week's cruise.
I walked back to the riverfront and watched the activity before dark. Just after dark a big ferry arrived, the slow ones that take days between Mandalay and Bhamo. Stevedores began unloading cargo and I could see people camped out on the decks. Later, about 8, they had finished unloading cargo and were now loading other cargo. Great stacks of unloaded cartons of eggs stood on the riverbank. Young men in flip flops or barefoot were carrying big boxes, two at a time, on their backs down the steep embankment to the boat. The boat left soon after 8, headed upriver, I think.
The next morning I walked along the riverfront, noticing a congregation of hundreds of little chicks on sale in an enclosure on the street. After a noodle breakfast I left on the 9 o'clock boat upriver, heading northeast, then southeast, to Shwegu, about a four hour trip. On the wide river, with steep banks, we passed a few logging boats and made brief stops in two towns. The boat, despite the wood seats, was fairly comfortable. The long wooden boat had seats for maybe 100 passengers, but I think there were only about 50 of us. I was the only foreigner. You could get up and walk about.
In Shwegu, a town of about 15,000 people, I had a little trouble finding a guest house, until I asked at a restaurant and they dispatched a little boy to show me the way. From the guest house I walked inland from the river, through a wooded area full of wooden houses, pigs, and dusty paths, eventually reaching a little stream that flows into the Irrawaddy. Eventually, I reached the pottery making district. Shwegu seems to specialize in making small pots for drinking. I found several sheds where pottery was being fired under heaps of ashes. In one shed two women were carefully stacking pots on a bed of rice husks preparatory for firing.
I watched them for a while, as they stacked pottery and brought in baskets of rice husks from a big pile outside. Nearby rice was being cooked in bamboo sections over a small fire. A man came out with a machete and cut away much of the bamboo until it was quite easy to peel. He cut off a section, showed me how to peel it, and gave it to me to eat. It was warm, sticky, and very good. Some women watched me and laughed as I ate. One showed me the fruit of a nearby tree that was used to flavor the rice. I sat on a little wooden bench and ate it while watching some little children playing on the dusty path. They seemed to be having a great time, using little stones to play a game similar to jacks and later playing hopscotch and then a sort of jumping game, a little like jump rope but with a long string of rubber bands. One little girl, maybe five, was particularly friendly, and mischievous.
Towards the end of the afternoon I again watched the two women stacking pottery. They finished for the day and indicated they would resume in the morning. In another shed nearby a woman was beginning to rake away the ashes, exposing the fired pottery and coughing from all the ash as she did so. I walked to the riverfront before dark, and then back to the hotel.
The next morning I walked to the kiln shed which I had visited the afternoon before. The two women seemed happy to see me again. They had finished stacking the pottery and were now covering the big stack with rice straw. A man brought them two big baskets of straw, carried on either end of a pole over his shoulders. An English speaking guy showed up on a motorcycle and told me the two women were mother and daughter and that the firing would take three days. The mischievous little girl showed up again and again was very friendly. The motorcycle guy told me her mother and father were dead.
After the mother and daughter had finished covering the stack of pottery with rice straw, they covered that with basket fulls of rice husks. Finally, the daughter covered everything with a layer of ashes from a pile in a corner of the shed, a very ashy affair. The mother went outside to smoke a thick brown cheroot. In a couple of other sheds women were either raking the ashes or pulling out the fired pots from the ash heaps. There was a lot of ash in the air. In another shed three or four cows had bedded down on the ashes next to the walls, perhaps for the warmth during the night.
The daughter having finished covering the pile with ashes, the two women placed straw all along the edges of the pile and then lit it in several places. At first it was very smoky, but eventually settled down. They closed the doors and I watched the smoke seep out of the roof and walls. A man showed me the area under a nearby house where wet clay was stored and where there were several potters' wheels. He also should me a wooden pounder used to break chunks of dirt into a sort of powder to be added to water to make clay. I again walked through the wooden house district until lunch at a Burmese restaurant about 11, with several dishes of often oily, but tasty food, including lots of vegetables and some chicken.
After lunch I walked for more than an hour upriver along the riverbank past wooden houses and friendly people. I watched the river activity and saw boats full of logs coming down river. I passed a very loud wedding celebration, with music blasting from giant speakers. At one point from the high riverbank I watched a young woman apparently panning for gold, using a shallow wooden pan perhaps a foot or more in diameter. She used a hoe to scrape soil and water from the river into her pan and then very expertly swirled the pan to remove the stones and dirt, leaving just a black silt, which she poured into a small container. I watched her do it again and again. Nearby, another woman was washing clothes in the river.
Eventually, I reached the ferry crossing to a mid river island. I crossed in the small, canoe-like boat and then crossed the wide sand bank now exposed to an almost deserted temple called Shwe Baw Kyaung. ("Shwe," by the way, means "golden.") I explored the temple, filled with hundreds of little stupas, and then walked through the very nice village under trees next to the temple. The village had electricity and hand operated water pumps. Most of the children were at the two story, wooden school house and the village seemed quiet, except for the noise from the school.
After about two hours on the island I took the ferry back and walked back to town the way I had come. On the way back I watched some men making and cooking rice noodles, first pouring the wet flour mixture through a sort of sieve bag into a pot of boiling water for a few minutes, and then scooping out the cooked noodles and cooling them in a pot of cold water.
I relaxed most of the next morning in my hotel before a Burmese lunch at about 11. About 12 I walked down to the express boat landing and caught the boat coming from Katha and headed upriver about 1. Again, it wasn't too crowded and I enjoyed the trip to Bhamo. From Shwegu the river route took us first southeast past the island with the temple and eventually into a very scenic defile with forested hills and rocky cliffs on either side. Leaving the narrows of the defile, we headed east, passing under a big bridge, and then northeast. The river widened, with lots of sandbanks. The boat cut back and forth across the river to avoid them. We made a few stops on the way and eventually could see the high mountains, rising to about 7000 feet, to the east. China lies just beyond the mountains.
We arrived in Bhamo, a town of about 25,000 people only about 20 miles from the Chinese border over the mountains, about 4:45. I checked my altimeter and it was a 36 foot climb from the boat up to the top of the riverbank. I found the hotel I was looking for, but its $10 rooms were all taken, so I took a $25 one. It was very nice, with a flat screen tv and hot water.
The next morning I checked into a $10 room. I had hoped to take the two day boat trip from Bhamo to Myitkyina, with an overnight stop in Sinbo, but foreigners are no longer allowed on that trip. I have heard several explanations why. One is that because of Kachin rebel activity. (Shwegu, Bhamo, and Myitkyina are all in Kachin State, Burma's northernmost.) Another is that there was a boat sinking recently that killed 23 people. A third is that the river is too low. Foreigners are also prohibited from taking the bus north to Myitkyina. The only alternative is to fly, unless you want to backtrack downriver to Katha. There was a flight to Myitkyina the next morning and after several hours I was able to secure a seat, at a cost of $54. (My ticket had a price of 38,500 Kyat, crossed out, with $54 written above it, so it seems foreigners pay about 50% extra.)
I walked to the waterfront in the morning and again in the afternoon. The people selling chicks, which I had first seen in Katha and later in Shwegu, were now offering their diminished flock of chicks in Bhamo. They were very interesting to watch, especially when they tumbled all over each other to get water from a container. The high waterfront riverbank is lined with huge rain trees, affording lots of shade. I watched the express boat arrive from Katha and Shwegu about 4:30 and watched the sunset over the river just after 5. For dinner that evening I found an Indian restaurant and had a delicious chicken biryani. The bearded Muslim proprietor told me his grandfather had arrived from Hyderabad during World War II, and that both his father and he had been born in Bhamo. He said he spoke Urdu, but didn't seem to know where in India Hyderabad is located.
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