In Thazi on the 25th, I walked to the train station about 8:30 on a sunny Christmas morning. I bought an upper class ticket to Naypyitaw, the new capital, for about two dollars and the train from Mandalay arrived right on time, at 8:52. I enjoyed the train ride south. There were both cropland and scrub land to be seen, with hills in the hazy distance to the east. I saw bullock carts and people threshing rice. I ate some quail eggs and then ordered lunch about 11 from a white coated attendant from the dining car, which was in front of mine. It arrived on an actual plate, rather than in a styrofoam box, and was very good.
The train arrived at the huge new Naypyitaw station at noon, only ten minutes late. Few others got off, and the lack of people made the cavernous station seem even bigger than it is. The station appears to be out in the middle of nowhere and is in fact miles from the city center.
In 2005 Burma's military government relocated the capital from Yangon to this barren expanse about half way between Yangon and Mandalay. The name translates into "Royal City of the Sun." While government offices have relocated here, foreign embassies are still in Yangon. Naypyitaw is built in a ridiculous grandiose style, which is the reason I wanted to see it.
At the train station I hired a somewhat English speaking motorcycle taxi driver to take me to a hotel. From the station we drove west over a small range of hills on a deserted multi-lane divided street and cruised through what is known as Hotel Zone 2, full of widely spaced big hotels in a hilly area. Eventually, the motorcycle driver and I agreed to take a tour of the city before checking into a hotel. With my backpack wedged into the slot between the driver and the handlebars he drove me around to see some of the sights of the capital.
We first headed south several miles on a divided eight lane road through hilly, mostly deserted countryside to Uppatasanti Paya, a huge pagoda built by General Than Shwe, the venial former military dictator, and his wife. Along the way we passed walled compounds with gates and military insignia at the entrances. I couldn't see anything but trees beyond the walls. Most of the land on the way was farm land or scrub.
The pagoda is 321 feet high, one foot lower than Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon. An elevator took me and some Burmese up to the platform on which it rests. Apparently shoddily constructed, the exterior was covered with scaffolding and undergoing repairs. The cavernous interior, however, was impressive, with a huge central altar and carved stone walls illustrating Buddha's life. I think there were a hundred or so people praying or milling around inside, with no other foreigners but me.
I eventually walked out into the bright sunshine and down the long flight of stairs on the east to the elephant pens opposite the stairs. In the pens were five white elephants, held sacred by the Burmese. They are albinos and actually look more pink than white, though their sparse hair is clearly white. Elephants are expensive to maintain, and white elephants, being sacred, were never put to work. Hence the British came to use the term "white elephant" for something extremely costly and without much use.
I had seen elephants with some patches of white before, but these were the first completely white elephants I had ever seen. I spent quite a while watching them. There seemed to be two white males in a pen by themselves, a white female and a white calf in another pen, and a white female and a normal colored calf in another pen. Another normal colored calf was chained next to one of the pens. The contrast between the normal gray colored elephants and the white elephants was quite startling. I watched them eat and move around, and enjoyed it.
Back on the motorcycle we headed to the grandiose Parliament building. Our eight lane divided road became a twelve lane divided road, and then a sixteen lane divided road. The dividers are wide, maybe 20 feet in width, and grassy, with palms and other trees planted on them. In places dirt from the adjacent fields had blown onto some of the lanes, and young women with brooms were sweeping the dirt off. The streets were almost barren of other vehicles. Some intersections were roundabouts with huge concrete lotuses in the center.
Nearing the Parliament the sixteen lane divided road became an undivided twenty lane road. We passed a reviewing stand for the annual January 4th independence day parade, stopped at a check point, and then reached the huge gated Parliament building. A high fence stands in front, with two bridges leading to the building. The building faces east and so was back lit by the afternoon sun. It also looked deserted. Christmas is a national holiday in Burma. My driver told me tourists can enter, but you have to apply three days in advance.
I took a couple of photos of the distant, back lit building. A guard came out from the gate, but had no objections. We spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes there. One or two cars came by. I took the opportunity to walk across twenty lanes of road without worrying about traffic. The road, from well before the reviewing stand, was lined with all sorts of flags, some from countries, but others seemed to be from businesses.
We headed back the way we had come and stopped at the reviewing stand, being spruced up by workers who seemed amused that I was there. The Independence Day parade was only ten days later. We headed next to a waterpark, which was uninteresting and very poorly built.
On our way back to Hotel Zone 2 we took a different route, passing a subdivision of big two story houses that the driver said were for generals. We passed about eight or ten commercial buildings of the same design in a row, banks and construction companies among them. We passed some more apparently well built homes and I saw a sign for a mall. But I saw nothing that looked like part of a busy capital city.
My driver took me to the Jade City Hotel, where I got a very nice room, probably the nicest I've had in Burma, for $20. The main hotel building was nine stories high (with $30 rooms), while my four story block was next door. Next to my building another nine story building was being constructed. However, I think I was the only customer.
From my hotel I took about an hour walk before dark along the wide divided street in front of my hotel, passing several other widely spaced big hotels and others under construction. The area was hilly, with only hotels and scrub. Few cars came by. In front of the Great Wall Hotel, with a crenelated roof, the manager was taking an evening stroll and I talked with him for a while. He told me he had no guests that night, one reservation for the next night, and four for New Year's Eve. He told me he did have 42 guests for three days in November during the ASEAN conference. He told me Hotel Zones 1 and 3, further south, get most of the customers because Hotel Zone 2 is too far north.
I was the only one eating in the big dining room in my hotel that night. The big lobby was empty. Four or five young women sat behind the reception desk, most of them looking at their phones. Smartphones are not quite as ubiquitous in Burma as elsewhere, but they are not rare.
The next morning after 7 I took a motorcycle taxi through the hills to the train station, about ten minutes away. The early morning air was chilly. According to my altimeter, my hotel was 800 or so feet in elevation. The train station was lower, 400 or 500 feet. I bought my upper class ticket for Taungoo, for about $1.65, and then checked out the old locomotive on display in the vast entry hall of the station.
My train, starting from Naypyitaw and heading to Yangon, left promptly at 8. It wasn't very full, though a lot of people got on at the Pyinmana station about 25 minutes later. Heading south, we passed harvested rice and other crops, and villages and towns. The land was flat, with hills to the east.
The train reached Taungoo about 11, at about 19 degrees north latitude, which should be as far south as I get in Burma this year. From the old, run down station, quite a contrast to Naypyitaw's, I took a motorcycle taxi about a mile and a half south to a guest house on the southern edge of town, with harvested rice fields just to its east. I checked in and ate a big lunch before setting out about 1 on a path through the rice fields to a nearby village.
I strolled through the narrow, dirt, tree shaded lanes of the village. I watched some young men constructing house walls from strips of bamboo and some young and older women making cheroots. The women brought out a little bench for me to sit on while I watched them at work. From big flat baskets full of tobacco and other ingredients unknown to me, they quickly stuffed some of the material, along with a filter made of rolled up newspaper, into a tobacco leaf, which they rolled up. They trimmed the filters and parts of the cheroot with big scissors, working very fast, making a cheroot in well less than a minute, perhaps in about thirty seconds.
From that village I walked on a path further east, passing through farmland and other, much smaller, villages. To my right a slow stream maybe a hundred feet wide flowed. Not only vegetables but also patches of flowers grew along the way. In the furthest village I reached I saw a huge sleeping sow, which must have weighed hundreds of pounds, with nine piglets. Eight were about two feet in length, but one, the runt of the litter, was only half as long. Apparently already having eaten, the piglets all slept huddled together. A villager led me to another huge sow in a pen, with eight much younger piglets, perhaps newborn. They were maybe a foot in length and all struggling against each other to feed from their mother.
The next morning I had the big breakfast provided by the guest house, with more than twenty dishes, including samosas, pancakes with honey, lots of fruit (papaya, watermelon, apples, oranges, and bananas), and all sorts of local starchy dishes, some sweet and some savory.
After breakfast and sitting around until almost noon I strolled into town with a very tall German tourist, who was well over six and a half feet tall, named Felix. On the way we passed several little girls, perhaps about six or eight years old, all dressed up like Burmese princesses in preparation for a week or two in a nunnery, where they get their heads shaved. I have been told that this is a Buddhist rite of passage here in Burma for both boys and girls. They looked a little scared. At times they were carried by their fathers. Their mothers and other relatives, all dressed up, were sitting in the back of a pick up. The adults were all very friendly and invited us into a compound where two persons in an brightly colored elephant suit danced. Eventually, they all headed off in their vehicles, to the monastery I presume, while we continued on our way to the town center.
We walked through the train station and a couple of monasteries before reaching a lake where we had lunch. Taungoo was the capital of a Burmese kingdom founded in the early 16th century, but it seems nothing remains. What remained of the palace was destroyed in World War II. We did see many colonial era buildings, now falling apart. An old mosque, quite impressive, was all boarded up, with a high wall around it and trees growing on the building. I noticed that one wooden shutter in a window was covered with termite residue.
Another impressive two story mansion was roofless. We could walk into the former rooms, overgrown now with bushes. Trees grew on the tops and sides of the walls. I wonder how the trees managed to root on the vertical walls. Inside, you could see where the second story wooden floor beams were once inserted into the brick walls. The building had very high ceilings. Along the wall between the mansion and the street, three elephant statues stood guard, their front feet outside the wall and their back feet inside. Later on, we came across another abandoned large mosque. Much of Burma's Indian population, along with many Chinese, were forced out in the 1960's. The people were very friendly to us, and astounded by Felix' height.
At nightfall I headed back to the hotel on a motorcycle while Felix continued to walk around. On the way back I found a hotel I had been unsuccessfully looking for, with information on a bus to Loikaw, where I wanted to go next. A German guy was headed there the next day. He had been in Loikaw twice before and I had dinner with him. It turned out that this was his 24th trip to Burma and he has been all over.
I had the splendid breakfast the next morning over the course of about two hours. Felix was heading towards Bagan that day and I moved to the hotel where the manager could get me a ticket on the next day's bus to Loikaw. After lunch, about 2:30, I started off on another walk along the rural route I had taken two days before. Women were picking big bunches of flowers from the flower patches. I also watched some of the folks working in the vegetable patches along the river. The kids and adults were very friendly along the way.
I didn't walk as far as on the first day. I turned back after watching a man and his wife working on a big pile of red, dry flowers. The man, thin, muscular and bare chested, wearing a longyi and a conical hat, was sifting the flowers with an almost flat straw basket about a foot wide. His wife, fat and ugly, with a big wad of betel nut in her mouth, was meticulously sifting with a similar basket what appeared to be very small seeds from the flowers.
On my way back, while talking with some friendly kids, a young guy came running through the fields up to me and said, "Come see my vegetables. Very beautiful." It was getting late and I politely declined and continued back towards my hotel. I did stop to watch a guy watering his vegetables right next to the path, using water cans which he filled from a pump. I got back after dark, a little after 6.
The train arrived at the huge new Naypyitaw station at noon, only ten minutes late. Few others got off, and the lack of people made the cavernous station seem even bigger than it is. The station appears to be out in the middle of nowhere and is in fact miles from the city center.
In 2005 Burma's military government relocated the capital from Yangon to this barren expanse about half way between Yangon and Mandalay. The name translates into "Royal City of the Sun." While government offices have relocated here, foreign embassies are still in Yangon. Naypyitaw is built in a ridiculous grandiose style, which is the reason I wanted to see it.
At the train station I hired a somewhat English speaking motorcycle taxi driver to take me to a hotel. From the station we drove west over a small range of hills on a deserted multi-lane divided street and cruised through what is known as Hotel Zone 2, full of widely spaced big hotels in a hilly area. Eventually, the motorcycle driver and I agreed to take a tour of the city before checking into a hotel. With my backpack wedged into the slot between the driver and the handlebars he drove me around to see some of the sights of the capital.
We first headed south several miles on a divided eight lane road through hilly, mostly deserted countryside to Uppatasanti Paya, a huge pagoda built by General Than Shwe, the venial former military dictator, and his wife. Along the way we passed walled compounds with gates and military insignia at the entrances. I couldn't see anything but trees beyond the walls. Most of the land on the way was farm land or scrub.
The pagoda is 321 feet high, one foot lower than Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon. An elevator took me and some Burmese up to the platform on which it rests. Apparently shoddily constructed, the exterior was covered with scaffolding and undergoing repairs. The cavernous interior, however, was impressive, with a huge central altar and carved stone walls illustrating Buddha's life. I think there were a hundred or so people praying or milling around inside, with no other foreigners but me.
I eventually walked out into the bright sunshine and down the long flight of stairs on the east to the elephant pens opposite the stairs. In the pens were five white elephants, held sacred by the Burmese. They are albinos and actually look more pink than white, though their sparse hair is clearly white. Elephants are expensive to maintain, and white elephants, being sacred, were never put to work. Hence the British came to use the term "white elephant" for something extremely costly and without much use.
I had seen elephants with some patches of white before, but these were the first completely white elephants I had ever seen. I spent quite a while watching them. There seemed to be two white males in a pen by themselves, a white female and a white calf in another pen, and a white female and a normal colored calf in another pen. Another normal colored calf was chained next to one of the pens. The contrast between the normal gray colored elephants and the white elephants was quite startling. I watched them eat and move around, and enjoyed it.
Back on the motorcycle we headed to the grandiose Parliament building. Our eight lane divided road became a twelve lane divided road, and then a sixteen lane divided road. The dividers are wide, maybe 20 feet in width, and grassy, with palms and other trees planted on them. In places dirt from the adjacent fields had blown onto some of the lanes, and young women with brooms were sweeping the dirt off. The streets were almost barren of other vehicles. Some intersections were roundabouts with huge concrete lotuses in the center.
Nearing the Parliament the sixteen lane divided road became an undivided twenty lane road. We passed a reviewing stand for the annual January 4th independence day parade, stopped at a check point, and then reached the huge gated Parliament building. A high fence stands in front, with two bridges leading to the building. The building faces east and so was back lit by the afternoon sun. It also looked deserted. Christmas is a national holiday in Burma. My driver told me tourists can enter, but you have to apply three days in advance.
I took a couple of photos of the distant, back lit building. A guard came out from the gate, but had no objections. We spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes there. One or two cars came by. I took the opportunity to walk across twenty lanes of road without worrying about traffic. The road, from well before the reviewing stand, was lined with all sorts of flags, some from countries, but others seemed to be from businesses.
We headed back the way we had come and stopped at the reviewing stand, being spruced up by workers who seemed amused that I was there. The Independence Day parade was only ten days later. We headed next to a waterpark, which was uninteresting and very poorly built.
On our way back to Hotel Zone 2 we took a different route, passing a subdivision of big two story houses that the driver said were for generals. We passed about eight or ten commercial buildings of the same design in a row, banks and construction companies among them. We passed some more apparently well built homes and I saw a sign for a mall. But I saw nothing that looked like part of a busy capital city.
My driver took me to the Jade City Hotel, where I got a very nice room, probably the nicest I've had in Burma, for $20. The main hotel building was nine stories high (with $30 rooms), while my four story block was next door. Next to my building another nine story building was being constructed. However, I think I was the only customer.
From my hotel I took about an hour walk before dark along the wide divided street in front of my hotel, passing several other widely spaced big hotels and others under construction. The area was hilly, with only hotels and scrub. Few cars came by. In front of the Great Wall Hotel, with a crenelated roof, the manager was taking an evening stroll and I talked with him for a while. He told me he had no guests that night, one reservation for the next night, and four for New Year's Eve. He told me he did have 42 guests for three days in November during the ASEAN conference. He told me Hotel Zones 1 and 3, further south, get most of the customers because Hotel Zone 2 is too far north.
I was the only one eating in the big dining room in my hotel that night. The big lobby was empty. Four or five young women sat behind the reception desk, most of them looking at their phones. Smartphones are not quite as ubiquitous in Burma as elsewhere, but they are not rare.
The next morning after 7 I took a motorcycle taxi through the hills to the train station, about ten minutes away. The early morning air was chilly. According to my altimeter, my hotel was 800 or so feet in elevation. The train station was lower, 400 or 500 feet. I bought my upper class ticket for Taungoo, for about $1.65, and then checked out the old locomotive on display in the vast entry hall of the station.
My train, starting from Naypyitaw and heading to Yangon, left promptly at 8. It wasn't very full, though a lot of people got on at the Pyinmana station about 25 minutes later. Heading south, we passed harvested rice and other crops, and villages and towns. The land was flat, with hills to the east.
The train reached Taungoo about 11, at about 19 degrees north latitude, which should be as far south as I get in Burma this year. From the old, run down station, quite a contrast to Naypyitaw's, I took a motorcycle taxi about a mile and a half south to a guest house on the southern edge of town, with harvested rice fields just to its east. I checked in and ate a big lunch before setting out about 1 on a path through the rice fields to a nearby village.
I strolled through the narrow, dirt, tree shaded lanes of the village. I watched some young men constructing house walls from strips of bamboo and some young and older women making cheroots. The women brought out a little bench for me to sit on while I watched them at work. From big flat baskets full of tobacco and other ingredients unknown to me, they quickly stuffed some of the material, along with a filter made of rolled up newspaper, into a tobacco leaf, which they rolled up. They trimmed the filters and parts of the cheroot with big scissors, working very fast, making a cheroot in well less than a minute, perhaps in about thirty seconds.
From that village I walked on a path further east, passing through farmland and other, much smaller, villages. To my right a slow stream maybe a hundred feet wide flowed. Not only vegetables but also patches of flowers grew along the way. In the furthest village I reached I saw a huge sleeping sow, which must have weighed hundreds of pounds, with nine piglets. Eight were about two feet in length, but one, the runt of the litter, was only half as long. Apparently already having eaten, the piglets all slept huddled together. A villager led me to another huge sow in a pen, with eight much younger piglets, perhaps newborn. They were maybe a foot in length and all struggling against each other to feed from their mother.
The next morning I had the big breakfast provided by the guest house, with more than twenty dishes, including samosas, pancakes with honey, lots of fruit (papaya, watermelon, apples, oranges, and bananas), and all sorts of local starchy dishes, some sweet and some savory.
After breakfast and sitting around until almost noon I strolled into town with a very tall German tourist, who was well over six and a half feet tall, named Felix. On the way we passed several little girls, perhaps about six or eight years old, all dressed up like Burmese princesses in preparation for a week or two in a nunnery, where they get their heads shaved. I have been told that this is a Buddhist rite of passage here in Burma for both boys and girls. They looked a little scared. At times they were carried by their fathers. Their mothers and other relatives, all dressed up, were sitting in the back of a pick up. The adults were all very friendly and invited us into a compound where two persons in an brightly colored elephant suit danced. Eventually, they all headed off in their vehicles, to the monastery I presume, while we continued on our way to the town center.
We walked through the train station and a couple of monasteries before reaching a lake where we had lunch. Taungoo was the capital of a Burmese kingdom founded in the early 16th century, but it seems nothing remains. What remained of the palace was destroyed in World War II. We did see many colonial era buildings, now falling apart. An old mosque, quite impressive, was all boarded up, with a high wall around it and trees growing on the building. I noticed that one wooden shutter in a window was covered with termite residue.
Another impressive two story mansion was roofless. We could walk into the former rooms, overgrown now with bushes. Trees grew on the tops and sides of the walls. I wonder how the trees managed to root on the vertical walls. Inside, you could see where the second story wooden floor beams were once inserted into the brick walls. The building had very high ceilings. Along the wall between the mansion and the street, three elephant statues stood guard, their front feet outside the wall and their back feet inside. Later on, we came across another abandoned large mosque. Much of Burma's Indian population, along with many Chinese, were forced out in the 1960's. The people were very friendly to us, and astounded by Felix' height.
At nightfall I headed back to the hotel on a motorcycle while Felix continued to walk around. On the way back I found a hotel I had been unsuccessfully looking for, with information on a bus to Loikaw, where I wanted to go next. A German guy was headed there the next day. He had been in Loikaw twice before and I had dinner with him. It turned out that this was his 24th trip to Burma and he has been all over.
I had the splendid breakfast the next morning over the course of about two hours. Felix was heading towards Bagan that day and I moved to the hotel where the manager could get me a ticket on the next day's bus to Loikaw. After lunch, about 2:30, I started off on another walk along the rural route I had taken two days before. Women were picking big bunches of flowers from the flower patches. I also watched some of the folks working in the vegetable patches along the river. The kids and adults were very friendly along the way.
I didn't walk as far as on the first day. I turned back after watching a man and his wife working on a big pile of red, dry flowers. The man, thin, muscular and bare chested, wearing a longyi and a conical hat, was sifting the flowers with an almost flat straw basket about a foot wide. His wife, fat and ugly, with a big wad of betel nut in her mouth, was meticulously sifting with a similar basket what appeared to be very small seeds from the flowers.
On my way back, while talking with some friendly kids, a young guy came running through the fields up to me and said, "Come see my vegetables. Very beautiful." It was getting late and I politely declined and continued back towards my hotel. I did stop to watch a guy watering his vegetables right next to the path, using water cans which he filled from a pump. I got back after dark, a little after 6.
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