showdown of social networking sites

As some of you know, i have been a lurker on myspace with various amounts of enthusiasm for some time now. i wanted to become one with the tech-savvy youth in my postmodernism classes. i wanted to truly experience tech-utopia. I wanted in on all the free gigs. I wanted to broadcast a superfunky avatar of myself in the hope that the profile surfers would be fooled. It was an intoxicating ride, for a while. And then somehow, I found myself joining Facebook. And now I have a Facebook profile. It's here. Otherwise you can find it via my hotmail. The possibilities for timewasting on Facebook seem far greater than those on myspace. I think it is good that my internet access is restricted, being in a small and remote town in Northern Thailand, and all. It's also very lucky, I think, that I didn't discover Twitter until after I left the land of constant internet access...

bluuuuue moon

Strange things happen once in a blue moon. Tonight the second full moon of May will hang from the sky and so mark the beginning of a new lunar cycle. My sight of the first full moon of this auspicious month was obscured by a heavy wad of cloud over Mandalay so i'm humming and hoping to see this one over Pai....

Seeing the light

I will forever remember Pai as a place of revelation. I was warned in advance by several parties that there’s something of the vortex about Pai. You plan to stay for one day, you wind up here for a week. You plan to stay for a week, you wind up here for a month. Something in the air, etc etc. If there’s a pinch of Byron Bay in the Chiang Mai mix, there’s a whopping great spoonful of Nimbin (without the junkies on the street) in Pai. This is the main bridge across town…

Little town, pitched on a slow moving river, surrounded by lush rainforest and rice paddies. As far as accommodation goes, there’s a wide range of cheap bamboo bungalows to choose from and then some slightly ritzier digs near the hot springs up the road. I’m staying in the Sun Huts, where all the huts are named after planets; the Unicorn Huts (‘one big Family’), Rainbow Huts and the Lazy Chair bar and restaurant are located nearby, as are the Pai Treehouses and some centre called the Natural Mystic. There’s plenty of puns on the name of the town too: Cinema Pairadiso, Pairadise, Pai in the Sky… but no Pai-ning for the fjords, in spite of the heat. The fact that Pai rhymes with high hasn't escaped the punsters either. All round, it’s pretty herbal and people from all around the world come to Pai seeking some sort of revelation.
The life is a journey not a destination crowd are particularly well represented here; Japanese and Israeli karma counters constitute some sort of demographic hump. You can get a pair of traditional fringed leather moccasins made here although whose traditions are being followed I know not. Lots of people are working hard to give folk music a very bad name, sighing and yeah-yiiieaah-yeahing their way through some ill-advised covers. I did a yoga workshop with a childless woman who called herself Mama. It’s resolutely off-the-beaten track. One company selling treks into the hilltribe villages offers a 50% refund if you see other tourists. Inexplicably the same operation also advertised mental help as part of the package. I sat in a café called ‘The Witching Well’ (hold your fire, they work some serious voodoo magic with cocoa and cinnamon and call the result Mexican hot chocolate) and flicked through some of the books on the bookshelf. Information on Wicca, shamanism (the Amazonian, rather than the Nordic or Siberio-Mongolian varieties being favoured), and my old favourite, reiki, was available in abundance. If I wanted to, I could read The Celestine Prophecy here and follow it up with The Teachings of Don Juan. It’s extremely beautiful here, I’m quite relaxed and my defences are down but I’m not ready for that level of enlightenment. Noooonono, not just yet.

What is it then that has been revealed to me in Pai? Are you now reading the blog of a healer? Am I going to start extolling the virtues of wormwort which hasn't been turned into absinthe? Has my totem amphibian lead me to a tumultuous understanding of my place in the cosmos? None of the above… Amigos, hold on to your hats for a bold truth is approaching…I’ve learnt to ride a motorbike! Yep, I have discarded some of my former inhibitions about being in charge of motorised wheels and got me a motorbike! Sure, it’s a bit of a girly bike, a 125cc automatic number, and it’s hot pink (photo to come) but I have managed to fang my way through the backroads of Pai, visiting waterfalls and temples, without injury to myself or any others.

How on earth did I swing this, you may well ask. Who in their right mind would rent me a motorbike? After so many capable people were unable to teach me to drive, how on earth did I manage to overcome a language barrier and learn to ride a motorbike? I have never ridden a motorbike on my own, I don’t have a driver’s licence, I have the spatial instincts of a drunken mule…

My friends, the truth is, I lied. I lied and bluffed my way into the rental contract and fluked my way out of the gates. I was given a fifteen second refresher lesson in the operation of the vehicle (admittedly not too complicated), took a deep breath and summonsed up all the Menzies-Pike capacities, willing the ancestral technical prowess which had laid dormant, nay morbid, for my entire life, to spring to the surface, and somehow managed miraculously to start the putterpuss and ride off before they realised their mistake. A little automatic bike isn’t too hard to negotiate but, as much as I enjoy the egotism of the autodidact, I think I possibly could have done with a little more initial advice. Learning to conjugate Russian verbs on my own? No problem. Figuring out how to slow down, look out for traffic and pedestrians moving in fourteen different directions, stay on the bike and turn around a corner… not entirely unproblematic. I have in the past been a notoriously reluctant recipient of mechanical advice but I confess that a little more help, especially on the turning of corners and the turning of motorbikes right around when one has been travelling in the wrong direction, would have gone a long way. I was pretty bumpy on the old start-stop business for a while there too but now, even though I’m not going to break any land speed records, I think I’ve got the basics licked. The roads are in pretty good shape here and there is very very little traffic. It’s low season, there aren’t many tourists around, and life is pretty slow moving anyway. I wouldn’t say the small children of Pai are necessarily safe, nor would it be entirely true to say that there haven’t been some close shaves with the local bantam population (unpredictable little blighters, chickens).

Watch out! I’m going to get my motorbike licence once I return to the more settled life. I’ve got the Easyrider soundtrack on high rotation in my head (and the last twenty minutes of the film in the denials box). I’m convinced that people will take me very seriously if I ride a motorbike. I’m all ready to tell the sceptics that my great uncle raced motorbikes at Penrith in his teens, so there, it’s in my blood. I have even had the odd delusional thought that I could get a motorbike licence in the UK and then make my travel around Europe a little easier and more exotic but this sounds like too scatterbrained a scheme, even for me, even in Pai.

Reasons you want to stay on my dinner party list

It may not look like much, but mango sticky rice is a divine dessert.
The laudatory descriptions delivered prior to my departure by la belle Hoffmann-Ekstein put my palate in an anticipatory state. The reality here in Thailandia has been all too splendid. I’ve eaten banana sticky rice in Sydney and think of it fondly because it is the complementary dessert which accompanies home deliveries from Eat Thai, a stalwart of sedentary evenings in the inner-east. Banana sticky rice, as good as it is, isn’t a patch on mango sticky rice and it’s all in the texture. Sticky rice is steamed which makes it, at its best, chewy and sticky. The mango, should, ideally, be a firm and juicy counterpoint to the rice. One could make a case that a good banana should be firm but not too firm but a juicy banana is either overripe or squashed and hence the antithesis of firm. Ergo, mango is the superior accompaniment to sticky rice. A drizzle of fresh coconut cream seals the deal. And now, finally, I know how to make sticky rice. Hurrah!

PS: note P.G. Wodehouse casually placed in the background, what ho.

rain man

This is the best campaign poster I have ever seen. Strategists, take note.
The Chiang Mai elections are being held in the not too distant future and this man is one of the candidates. There have been some serious floods in CM over the last few years and this chap is clearly keen to demonstrate his credentials as a man on the front line of community aid. What strikes me firstly is that he looks ever so slightly ineffectual in this photo and secondly that the bright whiteness of the polo shirt is quite startling compared with the brown water engulfing the rest of him. The babykissing stakes have been raised!

Things about Chiang Mai bookshops

Chiang Mai is a small city – around 200,000 people – and it was voted the fifth best city of its size in the world. I am a little dubious about city rankings but thought the figure worth recording. It seems that Chiang Mai does not fear running second as there is a pizza place in town which happily advertises the second best pizza in town. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of that one yet. Even though I haven’t undertaken comprehensive research on the matter, without hesitation, I award Chiang Mai first place as far as Availability of Second-Hand Books in English in a Non-English Speaking City (small-medium size).

Some things I have noticed:

* There are more second-hand copies of Thus Spake Zarathustra for sale in this town than there would be in O-Week at the Co-op at Sydney Uni if this were set as a first year philosophy text (and had been ordered on time).

* Many so-called off-the-beaten track travellers pass through Chiang Mai. This accounts for the Ethiopian and Kazakh phrase books. Excellent.

* Lots of Dickens for sale in Chiang Mai. In fact, I estimate that total Dickens outweighs Gaskell, Austen, Trollope, Thackeray and Eliot. OUTRAGEOUS!

* There are more copies of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man than The Da Vinci Code for sale at Gecko Books. There are two ways of looking at this. The way I’d like to think it goes is that the travellers who come to Chiang Mai are a discerning bunch and bring with them Modernist Classics rather than Bilge to read. What I fear is the case is that second hand copies of The DVC just walk out the door whilst Joyce stays on the shelf.

* Philosophy and self help books are shelved together in some establishments.

* Marion Keyes made it into Modern Literature section of Gecko Books whilst Gore Vidal was shelved with General Fiction. On the other hand, Gore Vidal occupies a whole shelf in the Contemporary Literature section of the altogether excellent Backstreet Books.

* Inexplicably, the many, many copies of Anna Karenina and War and Peace on offer are not matched by Dostoyevksy’s Greatest Hits.

* Bertrand Russell occupies one fifth of the philosophy section in one establishment shop.

In spite of these oddities, Chiang Mai is a glorious pleasure-dome of book browsing. The books are super-cheap and a very odd variety of titles are available. If this were Glebe Point Road, the shelves would be picked through in a day, the Beats memorial displays would have been pillaged long ago, and the stores of highly collectible orange-cover Penguins and classic British crime ravaged.

What is particularly interesting to me, not to mention dangerous, is that all books in the same condition are roughly the same price. No distinction is made according to publisher, date of publication, or rarity. This dazzles my bibliographical sensibility. Wordsworth and Penguin classics are the same price and so are New Directions and Olympia Press and Bantam. A Black Sparrow Bukowski is equivalent to a Picador Tom Robbins. Long out of print and really hard to find Ursula LeGuin novels equal David Eddings or Brian Aldiss or someone lame like that. It’s crazy. The very simple lesson, that Books are Heavy, is one that I have almost internalised. When I moved house, this knowledge came closer to being wisdom, even though I didn’t move the boxes. Travelling with books in a bag that I, shock horror, have to carry, is really bringing the message home. Books are Heavy. For this reason, I’m not going to buy up big on stupidly priced second hand books in Chiang Mai and make my fortune by selling them off in London. No really, I am not going to buy a copy of Kenner’s Joyce’s Voices in perfect condition for two dollars and resell it for forty… I could, however, easily persuade myself to spend a week here, buy loads of underpriced books, post them on eBay and thus fund an even more decadent excursion through Indochina. Even though this is probably the best money making scheme i have ever concocted in my life, I'm going to let it pass me by. Instead of making my fortune by exploiting the benevolent pricing policies of the CM bookshops, I'm catching a bus to a town called Pai. By all accounts, my destination will provoke a state of terminal riverside relaxation and I may never leave.

Anyway, I’m still drowning in Gravity’s Rainbow and have The Magic Mountain on the side to reread and thereby elevate my being in time. Most of the bookshops here will buy books back without too hefty a markdown so I have shuffled through a number which have lightened my senses somewhat. Thus far, inter alia:

Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses – to assuage my uneasiness at not having read it years ago, an egregiousness, I understand, for one interested in the American Novel in the Twentieth Century and the Western;

John Updike, The Witches of Eastwick – in the hope that this one will convince me about Updike’s standing in Contemporary Letters;

P.D. James, The Children of Men – as counterpoint to the film, as follow-up to the Dagliesh mysteries. Now that I’ve read it, I want someone who has seen the film to read the book so that we can have a long earnest conversation comparing the two. Anyone?;

Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven – in the hope that this might touch some of the heights of The Dispossessed;

P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves – What ho! ‘I began to realise that my ideal wife was something quite different, something a lot more clinging and drooping and prattling, and what not.’ Enough said;

Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground – Hypothesis: The more Ripley, the better. Results: Confirmed.

I’m going to sally around the north of Thailand for the next week and will return to CM to exchange some ballast on the way to Laos. As I have mentally designated Laos a zone of minimum activity, I will need many books. Notwithstanding a mood change, my current intention is to plough through the last four volumes of Trollope’s Barsetshire Chronicles (and thus notch a reading feat that no-one of my acquaintance under fifty has on their belt, and leaving only twenty-odd doorstops by the nineteenth century’s grumpiest novelist to go, not to mention the collected works of Balzac) and finally to acquaint myself with the works of Richard Ford. Riveting stuff, I know.

First train journey in S.E. Asia a roaring success!

I arrived in Chiang Mai by train, a very auspicious entry. I wasn’t able to catch any trains in Cambodia because the passenger train system was apparently shut down a few years ago. To my great disappointment, train travel in Burma was also no kind of option, firstly because it was onerously expensive and secondly because of the talk of forced labour gangs building and maintaining the lines. Of course, I then saw the road labour gangs and realised that the bus was only the cheaper, rather than the more ethical route.

Anyway, the sleeper train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai reminded me of why I like train travel. You’re rocked in a cradle rather than lurching over pot-holed roads and the beds on this train were actually extremely comfortable. The train is patrolled by people selling good things to eat and drink; there are enough Scenes from Human Life to inject colour and movement into vacant gazing into the carriage and once that’s done with, you can pull a set of blue curtains and retreat into a cocoon of doze. Excellent.

The centre of Chiang Mai looks rather like North Thailand’s answer to Glebe Point Road. Perhaps that should be the other way around: GPR is clearly Sydney’s answer to the North of Thailand. Second hand bookshops and yoga studios everywhere, massages offered on every street corner, vego-vegan-organic-macro food in abundance, a big market, and plenty of opportunities for self-improvement in the form of massage, yoga teaching, cooking, kickboxing courses and so on. Once I’d found a place to stay, I ambled down the road and stumbled into a bookshop-cum vego eatery. Suddenly, I’m eating a salad special, drinking organic coffee, man, reading a back issue of the New York Review of Books (with a long article by Joan Didion) and wondering which yoga class I’ll go to that afternoon. Time and place warped somewhat.

One has to be careful in hippy towns and there are some signs which are keeping me on flake-out alert. As seduced as I am by the rancho-relaxo-dom of GPR, Byron and surrounds, and now Chiang Mai, I fear losing my tough cynical edge. You know, I’m happy to wear fisherman’s pants and long strings of beads and abandon grooming in order to get closer to my animal self; I’ll get as excited about tempeh on a menu and centres devoted to biodiversity as the next earth-lovin’ peacenik but I fear being sucked into the irony free vortex of peace and love. There are no Kahuna massages on offer but there are some dubious signs.

1. A reggae bar called Freedom with a ganga leaf stencilled over the front door. Skinny white dreadlocked boys in service to Jah all around.

2. The reading needs of the followers of Osho (creepy creepy tantric sex cult) are so well addressed in the local bookshops that I suspect that there is an Osho centre (an oshram?) nearby.

3. Past life therapy. There is little that I am more cynical about than past life therapy. I’m sometimes tempted to go along just to enjoy the claim that I was once one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies in waiting or a Tibetan shamaness or a lieutenant who fought in the Boer War in drag or actually Djuna Barnes (who died after I was born, I think, but had lost it, by common consensus, well before 1977) but my ego holds me back. What if the past life therapist, using not clairvoyance but common sense to pick up on my scepticism, decided to teach me a lesson and told me that my past lives were all lived mucking out stables and emptying chamberpots and supervising latrines, that centuries of dung preceded this life? Then where would I be?

4. Meet a shaman! From a tourist brochure: ‘Interested in a Soul Experience? Diana Manilova, a Russian expatriate has lived in Thailand for the past 5 years. Working with individuals and groups, leaders, business people and scientists, her psychic gifts are globally recognised. She is a classically trained musician, published author and talented, Russian certified healer.

Regardless of your spiritual beliefs, meeting Diana can be an unexpected discovery. You may even find yourself taking part in a healing meditation and walking on broken glass.’

I swear I didn’t make that up. All I wanted to do was interrupt via square brackets. I’m far from ready for soul experiences.

5. New Age capitalism. You can buy into holistic investment schemes and make money from macrobiotic capital. Yay.

6. Dolphin paraphernalia. Lots of it. Enough said.

7. T-shirt slogan; ‘Slow down and enjoy the present moment.’

I was told by a man in a bar that I had a long way to go before I had fully abandoned my farang (foreigner) ways. I think this was an oblique was of suggesting I was a little uptight (avec raison, mes amis). I will, however, keep holding on very tightly to my farang ways if they protect me from a potentially fatal over-immersion in the present moment, if they act as a talisman against the siren song of the dolphin.

Co-opted at last!

Bangkok is bright and noisy and slightly disorienting. I found myself a place to stay far from the festy sink of backpacker inquity that is Khao San Road, a cheap room with hot water and functional electricity and a bookshelf and a coffee percolator but it took more than clean hair and a caffeine injection to adjust to Bangkok. I thought it might be possible to eat myself into a state of post-Myanmar re-adjustment. This tactic wasn’t entirely successful for some reason. Too much choice, that ol’ thing. I read a couple of Agatha Christie and P.D. James novels to steady my nerves and reassure myself that the world always makes sense, that the killer is always found, that order is always restored.

Still, Bangkok was confusing me. I needed a context for the bright pink taxis, a bridge from the 50c street noodles to the Nike-iPod collaborations in the malls, from the monks and wats to the neon and concrete and these could not be provided by genteel British crime novelists. What I needed, obviously, was a mainline dose of pop culture. I watched some Z-Grade movies on cable to see if this would help. Alas, American Pie 2 (true) and The Perfect Catch did not bring back my mojo. The BBC World theme music was beginning to feel like a drill in my skull. I needed to do more than merely listen and look. No, my friends, what I needed to come to terms with Bangkok was a fully embodied radical pop-culture experience: the multiplex!! I voluntarily underwent complete sensory distortion therapy and saw 28 Weeks Later at the top of a shopping centre: aircon so intense that you’re provided with blankets in the cinema (OK, I went for the supercheap VIP seats), amazing surround sound from all directions, lights, lights, lights, simulated odours of delight wafting everywhere: and it worked! The best photo sticker machines ever, a lurid disco bowling alley, a hugely serious, seriously huge gaming arcade, comic shops, crazy camp hostesesses at pizza shops, gadgetry ahoy, don and ramen bars in fluorescent boxes, weird Olde Americana themed pretzel bars,previews for a Thai language martial arts screwball comedy (Jackie Chan meets the Farrelly brothers in a ladyboy bar), standing up to pay respects to the king before a film about a rage virus, familial disloyalty and the end of civilisation… It might have been a hallucination as there were no photos allowed but suddenly, Bangkok is happening!, the Asian megalopolis makes sense, and I want to go to Tokyo!

i can feel the devil walking next to me

Yangon Airport looks like an early James Bond set, one that has been gathering dust and getting gradually more dilapidated for decades. Boarding passes get hand-written and the aircon conked out when I was there, changing the terminal climate from glacial to stifling in minutes. I wasn’t convinced that I would make it out of Myanmar until the plane to Bangkok actually left the ground. The sense that something could go wrong was omnipresent throughout my stay in Myanmar. Not only is every piece of infrastructure in a state of disrepair, the many authority figures administer a set of shifting incomprehensible rules and are not particularly open to negotation. Foreigners need to pay a US$10 departure tax. My twenty dollar note had an infinitesimal tear (we’re talking a one millimetre tear here…) on one side and hence was rejected as payment, a problem as I had absolutely no more cash and no means of getting any. It took twenty reasonably tense minutes and a few extra airport officials, including one with a gun, before my note was accepted. Keeer-razy.

Anyway, one hour on the plane and boom! Bangkok! Bright lights! Hyperstimulus! Consumer Culture! Fast moving traffic. I wandered through the ritzy Siam Paragon Mall near my hotel making conversation with myself about the products like some sort of demented DeLillo character. Oooh, look, I didn’t know that Philosophy made a Margarita bodywash, aren’t they clever. M.a.c girls, all around the world, they all look like beautiful space freaks. Mental note, Apple shop. I’m not even going to look at the marked-down Cacharel shirts and Camper shoes. Gee whiz, walk-in Balenciaga! I’m far too grotty to cross that threshold. Hello Haribo! Haribo GOLD! And so it went on. Nothing like a re-immersion in global consumer culture to make you feel right at home…

deserted ancient city blah blah blah

Cycling around Bagan in the low season is a lark! The reason mid-May is the low season for tourists in Burma is because it’s smack in between the hot season and the rainy season. The weather is supposed to be either very hot or very wet and possibly both. I managed to miss the rain and was lucky enough to have a fair amount of overcast weather to take the edge off the heat. There were about twenty foreign tourists in the area when I was there – half of whom were in a single tour group – which meant that most of the pagodas and temples are entirely deserted. Bagan covers about 42 square kilometres and comprises 2500 temples, pagodas and stupas. That means about sixty buildings per square kilometre. It’s AMAZING. Riding down dirt tracks, avoiding flocks of goats and pot-holes, there are pagodas to go. You can climb to the top terraces through dark passageways and stare out over plains and palm trees trying to count the lotus tips on the near horizon.

Yes, that's me looking slightly windswept and overheated on top of a temple. Note many more in the background. This photo was taken by the keymaster of the temple whose lunch I interrupted. In spite of the bright light outside, you need to take a torch firstly because there are exciting hidden passages and stairways to clamber through and secondly because there are so many paintings inside dark corners of the buildings to see. Although there has been a little reconstruction work done – smoothing out of terraces and repainting of Buddhas – Bagan hasn’t had the full UNESCO treatment. This is undoubtedly a bad thing in terms of cultural preservation (and possibly injury avoidance) but it does mean that you can indulge in nineteenth century explorer fantasies (if you happen to harbour them) and explore and speculate the terrain with very little explanatory infrastructure and few prohibitions. The whole experience - temples, heat, isolation, goats - was a little hallucinatory. Hence, perhaps, the post-colonial nostalgia for nineteenth century nostalgia for ancient civilisations.
This is the tallest temple in Bagan, That Bin Nyu. As far as I know, the Bagan temples have not provided the locations for any adventure films.

Beers of Myanmar

I may be way out of line in making this claim and if so, I will happily be corrected. Nonetheless, I venture forth. I do declare that I have sampled no less than THREE beers which have not sullied the palate of my good friend Fil of the Czechlands, a man who has tasted more beers than anyone else I know, a man who has traversed continents in pursuit of an elusive new drop, a man who has diligently recorded the attributes of many thousands of beers. To the fund of common knowledge, I humbly present the following, available, I believe, only in Myanmar.

a) Myanmar Lager.

This is the standard Myanmar beer, available everywhere and bottled by the good ol’ Myanmar government. Hoppity hoppy lager. It’s the top-shelf beer in this country, being twice the price of the Mandalay Strong Ale and Lager. Much better cool than warm.

b) Mandalay Strong Ale.
This ale is reasonably punchy, I must say. 7% alcohol content, a little bitter, very pubby. It’s a little bit rough around the edges: a big gulp makes me wince and can bring tears to my eyes. Myanmar is a country in which you can legitimately lay claim to a hard-earned thirst after about thirty seconds. You can get it spotting a stupa, you can get it in a sun struck stupor, you can get it dodging a cow, matter of fact…etc etc. In such situations, I prescribe Mandalay Strong Ale!

c) Spirulina Beer.

The ads for Spirulina Beer show a glass full of dark green liquid. Fortunately this is not the case when it is poured out of the bottle. The beer is not undrinkable nor is it very good. The label declares that it is an anti-ageing drink which will help the drinker stay young forever, presumably due to the spirulina. I’ve given pretty short shrift to the health-giving claims made about spirulina. I think with Spirulina Beer, we have another snake oil situation and it’s all revealed in the fine print. This beer has 0.5% spirulina content and 5% alcohol content. That means there is TEN TIMES more alcohol in this beer than spirulina. If Myanmar had a Trade Practices Act with provisions about misleading claims, this would surely violate it. Hang on, there’s more fine print to be read. Spirulina Beer is brewed by the Myanmar Ministry of Industries and hence could probably claim to take you to the moon and back without getting into strife.

There are plenty of draught beers available as well – Dagon, ABC (‘An Easy Beer’), and my personal favourite, SKOL (‘It means Cheers.’). These are served in beer stations, sites of homosocial exchange if ever there were. Blokes, sitting around, drinking beer, smoking cheroots, chewing betel leaf, and apparently singing karaoke late at night. There’s definitely a ‘No Sheilas’ vibe to beer station culture. I didn’t see any women in the beer stations after about seven at night, and certainly no foreign women ALONE. This particular anti-patriarchal battle was one that I could not fight on my own. I did, however, spend a fairly boozy final night in Yangon in a beer station with a transient who I met on the bus. I was the only woman in the joint and nowhere was there a facility resembling a ladies’ loo or a loo that could be used by a lady. Had I the words ‘woman of extremely loose morals’ tattooed across my forehead in Burmese (don’t worry, Poppy, I don’t), I don’t think the looks and leers directed my way when we left would have been very different.

Coffee?

This is the best coffee Myanmar can offer and it’s pretty bloody awful.

Coffeemix three-in-one sachets. That’s instant coffee, instant milk, and instant sugar all in the one convenient sachet. The only alternative to Coffeemix that I’ve encountered is pretty dire and tastes like coffee grounds recycled fifteen times and wrung through an old sock with a bit of dishwater added to balance the flavours. A shop in Nyaung U advertised espresso in the window but their machine was broken. It’s almost, at a long and desperate stretch, a relief to find a sachet of Coffeemix at breakfast.

You just open the sachet, tip it into a cup, pour over hot water and hey presto! Coffee! Or something like that.
I don’t think I have ever been so under-caffeinated in my entire life. I drink gallons of Chinese tea with meals. When you order black tea here, it is actually black, so strong and tannin-tart that it is pretty hard to drink. Tea with milk is usually the same with a bit of powdered milk stirred in. If you’re really unlucky, you score a three-in-one tea sachet which is very bad news. I think if I drank a decent cup of coffee, I wouldn’t stop jiggling for days. I also think I would be very happy. A strong cappuccino from a café would be ideal but I’d cope with stovetop espresso, I’d cope with a cup of plunger coffee, I’d even cope with a cup of Blend 43, for crying out loud. If the traveller must (yawn) face the challenge of breaking habits and redefining her comfort zone, the caffeine situation is certainly amplifying the challenges for me.

Perhaps of limited interest outside the family circle…

Pyin U Lwin is famous for gardens, fruit, flowers, and plants. I went there to check out the Botanical Gardens on my birthday. All said, they were pretty great, even though the 270 varieties of orchid in the orchid garden weren’t in bloom. A bamboo garden with 70 stands of bamboo. Lots of big trees. My first encounter with the takin, a beast which is like a cross between a moose and a buffalo. And how strange, petunias advertised as exotic foreign drawcards.

The temperature in Pyin U Lwin is much lower than in Mandalay which means that you can grow strawberries there. In fact, Pyin U Lwin is Myanmar’s capital of gourmet jam production. And one of the leaders of the field? Might I present…

Pop pop strawberry jam! Hoo-rah!

Incidentally, the area is also renowned for its fruit wines. I sampled grape, strawberry, and pineapple wines and decided to take home a leetle bottle of sweet damson wine. To be honest, it tasted like booze made in a bucket, a cheap and rocky port, but I still found myself able to quaff a few drams in the interests of research. Damson wine is, however, definitely a safer option than the super cheap Myanmar rum and whiskey that I saw convert adults into blithering messes of hangover in double-quick time. If vipassana is one kind of purification process, drinking Myanmar palm rum is quite another, one tantamount to running paint stripper through the intestinal tubes.

Hard Boiled Egg Mystery Cracked!

I struggled making small talk with an Englishman called Derek during a break on the long bumpy bus trip to Bagan from Mandalay. I have no idea how this awkward, clerkish man had survived his tracksuited two weeks in Myanmar hating the food, the people, the landscape, the weather… As I tried to make conversational progress, these women walked past balancing baskets full of roasted, splayed small birds on their heads. I asked Derek what kinds of bird he thought they were and he replied with unexpected vigour, ‘Definitely NOT quails, their legs are too big.’ It turned out that Dezza was a quail fancier and had kept them as pets for many years. The tasty little hard-boiled eggs sold in the markets are, according to my man, definitely and without a doubt, quail’s eggs, and probably the eggs of the Chinese Painted Quail. So now I know.

That's Shan, not Sham

The Shan province of Myanmar lies in the east of the country and borders Laos and China. I’ve only just crossed the western border of Shan province to visit Pyin U Lwin but have been getting very, very excited about Shan noodles. Their local name is hkauq sweh - I have no idea how this is pronounced. Shan cuisine is closer to Chinese food than the meals I have been eating from other parts of Myanmar which could be roughly approximated as stodgy underspiced Indian. That’s a tough and not particularly precise generalisation but I’ll let it stand in order to gild the hkauq sweh lily.
Each bowl of Shan noodles I’ve eaten has been a happy variation on a theme. A cold few dollops of chicken or pork in an intense thick garlic, tomato and chilli sauce are plonked on top of a bowl of hot fresh rice noodles. Next up, spoonfuls of coriander, roasted peanuts, sesame seeds, spices (szechuan pepper and five spice…maybe), little bit of sugar, little bit of salt. On the side, loads of Chinese tea, lime, a little bowl of sour pickles – cabbage or some random greenery in vinegar – and a bowl of soup to slurp or to drizzle over the noodles. The soup is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. The first time I ate this dish, I thought the crockery was dirty due to the swirl of black gritty stuff at the bottom of the bowl. Not so. What I thought was just a plain ol’ onion and chicken stock with a bit of floating shallot and coriander is that, but it is ladled over a big spoonful of ground pepper (white and szechuan, I think…) which turns it into something worthy of rhapsody. The soup stretches out the sauce, lubricates the noodles, turns the spices and nuts into a paste. It is not out of the question that one of the white powders sprinkled on top is MSG. That, or cocaine because this is a pretty delectable and moreish dish. I’ve resolved to keep eating Shan noodles, to keep asking questions about ingredients, and to discover the secret. Oh yeah, RRP $0.50AU.

free fall

I’ve returned to Gravity’s Rainbow after a bit of a pause and am now immersed, infuriated, confused and completely SOLD. It’s a strange and masochistic satisfaction, being halfway through a very difficult book and knowing that you’ll have to return to the beginning and read it through again a couple of times before the pieces start to fall into place. It’s hilarious, perverse, paranoid, encyclopediac, schizoid and dazzlingly labyrinthine in terms of plot. I have no idea what the hell is going on. I desperately want to have a long ranty boozy conversation about this book with someone so I’ve been sitting in public places reading with the cover on full public view. Thus far, no one has walked up to me and started to enthuse. Now if I see people who are reading books that are particularly excellent and they don’t look like they will bite, I usually go and earbash them. Why will no-one come and talk Pynchon to me? Pynchon readers are freakazoid cultists, for crying out loud! I have questions… If I had full-time net access, I’d probably be plugged into Spermatikos Logikos or whatever it is called (actually quite good Pynchon fansite accessible through the really quite good The Modern Word) trawling through all the allusions that space cadets mourning the passage of modernism have gathered in their spare time. Doesn’t anybody study Postmodernism anymore? It can’t have gone out of fashion that quickly. I mean, I was teaching a course on Postmodernism last year and Pynchon was on the syllabus.

The closest I have come to a Pynchon chat was with a nice young feller sitting next to me on the bus who read the back cover when I went off for a wander. ‘Your book sounds a bit interesting,’ he said on my return. I think the blurb about the coincidence of Slothrop’s sexual conquests and the flight of the V-2 bombers is what got his attention because when I started rabbiting on about Pynchon, his eyes glazed over reasonably quickly and he started fidgeting in a purposeful manner with the controls of his iPod. Honestly. If some big dumb square-jawed American college jock walked up and said, ‘Pynchon, dude, aaaawesome,’ I’d be happy.

Anyway, if I could have a conversation about GR, I’d first of all get really excited about the sequence ‘You never did the Kenosha kid’ and Slothrop’s confectionary torture at Darlene’s… And what about the journey into the Central Nervous System? And what the hell is the relationship between Leni and Peter Sascha and Pointsman? And I want more Pirate Prentice! Brigadier Ernest Pudding – Ha! Entropy, entropy, is it the nature of the beast that I feel overloaded every time I try to consolidate my thoughts about entropy? Paranoid? Moi? What’s with maximum disorder within a poised, highly ordered formal structure? I know there’s zillions of Joyce-Pynchon trainspotters, what’s the official D&G line on Pynchon? What? You never read that book? Wow, I can’t believe you never did. The Kenosha kid sure did her research.

Hopefully by this stage, I’d be at the whiskey blurry phase of the conversation and then I’d really start to speculate about the great faceless polyvalent complexity that is the War, the possible putative mysterious controlling force of the narrative and History and then try to find some contemporary analogies…the event an always deferred eventuality, a delayed reverberation of its own consequence. And then I’d confess my recurring daydream that I sit next to TP on a plane and recognise him from that early Navy photo and the James Bone expose and play it cool about the whole secret identity thing and he knows that I know and we get on like a house on fire and it’s all really knowing and we have a long convoluted cryptic conversation which turns into a mutual admiration session and then we become friends and hang out from time to time and exchange slightly obscure but vital emails and I have to somehow keep it under my hat that Thomas Pynchon and I are Great Mates, Chums in spite of Chance…

could be a song

This is what the road to Mandalay looks like.

really still alive

I'm having an unprecedented level of success with this computer so I'm going to post a dodgy hotel room photobooth number of myself to prove to all that I really am alive and well! Classy, I know but martinis aren't available for love or money in this town.

Vast numbers of photos to come. If my Cambodia slide night will be called Wat Rocks Which Rubbles, my Myanmar night might be called Super Stupa Stupor... Enough! I'm off to have dinner with my new Burmese mates...

Two wheels good

Cycling in Mandalay

Hazards
- Hiring a bike with no brakes.
- There are more pot-holes than roads.
- Forgetting that the traffic moves on the right hand side of the road.
- Cows.
- Exhaust pipes from trucks and pick-up trucks which exude foul black smoke at about head height. No regulation of exhaust fumes, it would seem. Hey, I’ve stopped smoking. There’s plenty of room in my lungs for exhaust fumes.
- People carrying building and plumbing supplies on bicycles – ie long planks and pipes. Nearly lost my head a couple of times.
- Lurching buses whose movements follow a logic set down in an alternate universe.

Perks
- Time to say hello to everyone.
- Most of the cars and motorbikes are pretty antiquated and don’t go very fast.
- No hills.
- Being offered rubies and jade for sale when you hire the bike.
- Lots of old ladies to tailgate and hence stay alive. Same principle as crossing the road behind a nun in Rome.
- Opportunity to mentally note the bars which sell that little-known Mandalay speciality, Spirulina Beer. It’s dark green.
- The approach of the buses and indeed all motorised vehicles is heralded by lots of beeping.

After sitting down for eleven days and meditating, some strenuous activity was in order. I hired a bike from my friend Mr Htoo and rode to Amarapura, the nineteenth century capital of Burma, about an hour’s ride away from Mandalay. Many pagodas around a lake and an incredibly beautiful old bridge, U Bein’s Bridge, about 1km long and leading to small fishing villages.

Ridiculous sunset scenes of water, fisherfolk, stupas and pagodas, mountain range backdrop, small boats. Riding to one of the pagodas, a woman approached me and started to chat. She lead me around the pagoda and before I knew it, she had invited me to her house down the road, grabbed her husband and got him to give her a lift on his bike to show me more palaces and pagodas and then ride back to Mandalay with me. Ko Kyu and Jujeh took me out to dinner, bought me traditional Burmese sweets, introduced me to their friends and escorted me back to my guesthouse. I don’t think there are too many lessons in Burmese schools about stranger danger. I think being a woman travelling alone attracts particularly sympathetic attention (‘ah, so you’re a spinster…’) but I’m nonetheless still a bit startled by all of this friendliness.

Post-hermitage

Ten days silent meditation did do me the world of good but if someone had opened a portal to anywhere in the world at almost any point on the way through, I would have leapt through it. There were mango and banana and tamarind trees everywhere, all sorts of interesting geckos and lizards and tropical flowers, a mountain range topped by stupas in the background… and yet I was sending loud mental messages to my sisters, the only people who had any chance of contacting me, to call and somehow bail me out. My notebook is full of loud complaints and what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here musings, but now that they are in the past, the process doesn’t seem quite so onerous. Let’s say that I felt extremely deprived of many things precious to me (eating after noon, talking, caffeine, protein, dairy, reading, sugar, alcohol, gluten, hot water, mattress, music, eye contact with other people, shared cultural inhibitions about burping, farting and spitting) although not unaware that I had voluntarily submitted to these deprivations and would have to endure them only temporarily. I also felt more conspicuous than I ever have in my entire life, being the only foreigner amongst 150 meditators, the only non-Burmese speaker and hence the only person who benefited from the English language teachings, the only person not wearing a skirt or baring ankles (everyone else was properly attired in a floor-length longhyi), the only one to get an extra banana at meals (the staff were adamant that I needed the extra calories), and, for the first time in my life, much taller than everyone else in the room. Anyway, after all this, when the talking stared, people were extraordinarily kind and curious and welcoming and very excited by the fact of a westerner practising Buddhist meditation. A few of the younger women spoke a little bit of English and helped me interact with other people. I met people from little villages who had never met a foreigner and old ladies and school students and all sorts in between. People were touching my hair and skin and passing around the few family photos I’ve carried with me. I reckon the Pike sisters could make it big in this country. It was pretty overwhelming. Under other circumstances, I’d be a little unnerved by lots of people I’d never met before taking my hand and telling me to be happy but it seemed less strange in this environment.

And what else? I did discover that I have a grot threshold, news which my family and perhaps those who have been fortunate enough to share dwellings with me will no doubt rejoice in. After thirty years, I have reached a point where I ardently wished to return from filth. My clothes were filthy and rank washing water left the body wearing them even filthier. The fans and aircon in the meditation hall in which I spent 12 hours daily conked out pretty regularly making for a pretty stinky environment. Previously, I’ve maintained a homeopathic attitude to grot – good for the immune system – and argued that too much attention to cleaning can stimulate OCD and other pathological behaviours. Domesticity is anti-feminist, cleaning agents are environmentally unsound, hygiene obsessiveness speaks of an alienation from the body… After all this, I actually had visions of a super-clean bathroom with a big bath in the middle of it, thick fluffy towels and endless hot water. This has never happened to me in my entire life. I’m confident I’ll get over it.

Although vipassana meditation is supposed to liberate you from cravings, I found myself dreaming lurid dreams about food. My food cravings are generally pretty consistent, pretty weighted towards the salty and acidic: olives, pickled sardines and anchovies, feety blue cheese with a gritty ammoniac bite, tom yam, taramasalata, lemon juice, salsa verde, poached eggs… the regulars. To my surprise, I was hurled into an entirely new galaxy of culinary desire. I would have exchanged a kidney for a good baguette with some salty French butter and fig jam and a large bowl of sweet milky coffee. Scrambled eggs. Ginger beer. Bread and butter pudding. Gelato. Bratwurst and sauerkraut and mustard. Cold-weather European comfort food, I suppose. The people at the meditation centre were lovely. The people cooking the food were also lovely and I almost cried when a yummy eggplant curry was served for lunch. That said, I’ll be avoiding lentil stodge for some time. I never want to know what is in Burmese cordial. This was all I consumed after midday each day (until I realised on Day 6 that I was also eligible for a lump of palm sugar) and tasted like a supersweet medicinal mouthwash. I’ve really been enjoying the Myanmar Lager since I left. It’s a nice drop and I believe it’s brewed here in Mandalay.

Nice country, shame about the government.

I have met so many friendly Burmese people that I am coming damn close to that sweeping paternalistic generalisation: the people are all just lovely. Expressions like this usually make my blood run backward because of their generality, because the loveliness of the people is sometimes offered as a redemption for bad living conditions, because they are so often used by wealthy Westerners about very poor people from developing countries and tend to fetishise sweet little others. So let me say that I have had the privilege to meet many kind and hospitable Burmese people and have not encountered any nasty, aggressive, hostile or rude people. There’s a fair amount of haggling over prices but all is conducted in good humour. Wherever I have been, I have met people who are keen to chat, to practice their English, to see if I am OK, to help me out. Hot topics: the weather in Australia, religion, family, will I return to Myanmar, Burmese food. Random acts of charity abound and I have been completely overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. People have invited me into their homes, led me around pagodas, given me lifts and gifts (I had to say no to a caramel coloured four week old kitten, alas), helped me order food and generally made my days very merry.

Obviously though, not all Burmese people are friendly and compassionate because the government stinks. Almost twenty years after Aung San Suu Kyi was elected to government, she is still under arrest. The military government is completely corrupt and inefficient and seems utterly disinterested in the welfare of the people. Electricity supply is sporadic at best and hence there are plenty of generator shops and fix-it supplies for sale on every corner. The out of sight (and smell), out of mind principle does not govern sewage or garbage disposal. There’s reasonable but not drinkable water supplied in the cities but not in the countryside. Most of the bottled water is sold by government run businesses. Health care is non existent. Education is difficult to access, especially for people in the villages. A kind of freedom of religion exists on the condition that there is no intervention in political matters by religious leaders. There is no freedom whatsoever of political communication. Ten thousand politicians are in jail. There are a million troops in a nation of 56 million people. Mail can be confiscated randomly. The government controls the banks and can and do requisition people’s money whenever. You see forced labour gangs supervised by military police fixing up the roads. Everybody I have met works very very hard to maintain a low standard of living. It’s horrific. Some people will come right out and condemn the government straight away but having heard stories of people being reported to the police for talking politics to foreigners, I’m reluctant to bring the topic up. There are very faint visible echoes of big bad global culture, but very few. Some knock off clothing, 80s rock styling (a band call Iron Cross are the big Myanmar rockers, a guy called Jojo told me), weird ads, but not much else. Myanmar has restricted trade relationships with ASEAN nations and a wide open door to China. Diplomatic relationships have just been re-established with North Korea too. Belching trucks from China roll down the highways to the ports in the south of Myanmar and there are, people tell me, more and more Chinese businesses popping up, legitimate and illegitimate.

Anyway, there is a school of thought which says that travel to Myanmar entails tacit support of this regime. I don’t entirely agree but I do think that it is important not to be a completely passive voyager through the country. It would be hard to do so as people are very chatty and it’s pretty hard to ignore the signs of a completely dysfunctional system of governance. Indeed, outside government buildings and businesses there are all sorts of very sinister signs which could have been scripted by Orwell. I’m definitely not game to take any photos in these places as there are generally armed military cops nearby and I stick out like a sore thumb. Outside Mandalay Palace is a big one which reads ‘The Tattadaw (army) will never betray the interests of the Nation.’ Outside the Defence Training Academy in Pyin U Lwin, 'The Triumphant Elite of the Future.' On the way to Amanapura, on a billboard outside a government owned cigarette factory is a very chilly list of ‘The People’s Desires’, written in Burmese and English. ‘Destroy internal and external influences which jeopardise the stability of the nation.’ The stability of the nation, of course, means the stability of the inherited military regime – the current leader is the son of the man who led the coup in the 1960s. Even though the US and other parties in the Coalition of the Willing don’t trade with Myanmar and issue stern injunctions about regime from time to time, it’s not hard to concoct some cynical responses to the pro-democratic rhetoric impelling regime change elsewhere. Idle conspiracy theorists could start by considering Myanmar’s significance to US military-industrial interests and relationship to China and go from there.

Delicacies of Mandalay

I’ve been very worried about getting sick in Myanmar and so my eating has been a little less adventurous. I am more worried about getting sick here than anywhere else. I’ve got very little money with which to bribe officials and the absence of any Western NGOs and aid organizations, not to mention aid-trade partnerships means that Western medicine is a long way away. By a long way away, I mean Bangkok. I’ve seen the hospital, I’ve seen the derelict Mandalay medical school, I’ve seen a clinic with a sign outside reading ‘Creative Health Care’ and believe me, I do not want to have my stomach pumped in this country nor do I want any needles inserted into any part of my body. Given that everything which is vaguely related to the modern world – technology, machinery, cars – seems to be at least ten years old and delivered via an overheated truck from China, I think I am also pretty keen to give the pharmaceuticals a pretty wide berth. Somewhat cautious eating, then, to avoid creative health care. What does this mean? It means a set of non-binding limits: I’m a little reluctant to get stuck into too much meat; after meeting some med students who told horror stories about the bugs which live on the feet of flies, anything which has been a home to flies for a fair amount of time is off the menu; unwashed fruit and veges are verboten; ice from street-stalls to be avoided. I’ve been a bit shy about taking photos about street food and couldn’t upload them anyway… but will do so when I reach the tech-metropolis of Bangkok next week.

* Boiled eggs get sold everywhere on the street. Unlike in Cambodia and Thailand, these do not appear to be the eggs of hens but of some far smaller squawker. The eggs are the size of quail’s eggs and are speckled to boot but somehow, I don’t think that is what they are. Boiled at least to buggery and hence probably beyond salmonella, they could be pigeon’s eggs for all I know. Excellent, sold with a little bag of salt, and at 4 for less than 10c, a very reasonable snack.

* How can anything that has been deep-fried in a wok on the side of the street harbour any bacteria? Women sit by the street cooking little veggie patties which are like pakoras: corn, spinachy lentils, peas, chickpeas all held together with chickpea flour, served with chilli sauce. Also extremely cheap (10c each) and yummy with deep-fried bananas for dessert as a bonus. The deep-fried bananas are not for the faint of heart. Fortunately, I am extremely sturdy of heart. The bananas in Myanmar are excellent.

* I was invited for lunch with the family of my lovely friend Daw Ton, a woman who I met on vipassana. Daw Ton and her family presented the epitome of Burmese hospitality. I was served a dry tomato fish curry crunchy with little bones and fins, okra in sour soup, mixed veges, pickled beansprouts, sweet pumpkin curry… and the piece de resistance? A curry made of congealed chicken’s blood. Congealed chicken’s blood resembles dark red tofu in appearance and texture. Oh, these people were so kind and hospitable! There was no way I could refuse the main course of the meal so I thought that I would just deal with the chook matter and eat it first off with a big smile and then move on to the rest. Of course, this was understood as a sign of great enjoyment and more and more was piled onto my plate. This was endurance eating. What can I say about congealed chook’s blood? It’s not as bad as it sounds, but the bad sound of it blurred my capacity to objectively taste it. Quite bland and very rich. I could never get excited about black pudding, one of my father’s favourite things and I can think of about fourteen million other things I’d rather have in a curry than congealed chicken’s blood.

* Street sweets. These definitely break the no flies rule but are so yummy that a little flexibility is in order. Rice noodles – flat sheets or vermicelli – wrap up little portions of supersweetness like nut paste, pounded beans, soaked coconut which are then drizzled with sugar syrup and fresh coconut.

* Toddy juice. I’m still not actually sure what this is. I think toddy fruit is the fruit of some sort of palm tree and toddy juice is the sappy liquid inside the fruit, like the juice of a coconut. I have a feeling that palm sugar and jaggery come from the toddy palm but am not 100% sure. The juice was like very thick slimy coconut juice, much sweeter and with a heavy fruity aroma. Cold and with a hefty tot of alcohol, I’m sure it would be delightful. This drink was served to me by my friend Mr Le Min who told me that the thick heavy juice ferments through the day and turns into a beery alcoholic liquid by the afternoon. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea but Mr Le Min is a model dhammist with no reason to lie.

* Condiments ahoy! Pickled tea leaves are big news in Myanmar and I personally feel that their fame should spread. Fresh green mango pickles, the salsas of Burmese cuisine, are also pretty ubiquitous and mighty darn good. Finely sliced green mangoes in vinegar (I think) with sliced onion, green chilli, oil and miscellaneous spices. Balachaung is the standard chilli condiment to be sprinkled on everything. It consists of chilli, shrimp and tamarind, all deep fried until crispy together. The veggie version of this gave some crunch and oomph to many many stodgy vipassana curries but even balachaung could not reconcile me to the congealed chicken’s blood.
* Really excellent Chinese food. Food from the Shan state of Myanmar has lots in common with southern Chinese food and seems pretty popular. I was taken to eat excellent Szechuan steamed buns and dim sum with iridescent chilli sauce and coffee made with carnation milk.

definitely wiser

Yes, today is my thirtieth birthday. I was a bit worried that I hadn't made it to the cusp of my third decade without really experiencing the marrow of life. Today, all that changed. I took myself off to a mountain town called Pyin U Lwin to visit the National Botanical Gardens of Myanmar. Very nice, very nice. Anyway, I walked through the walk-in aviary and admired the peacock chicks underfoot and the hornbills overhead. When I got to the signs explaining what birds were in this huge aviary, I was ecstatic to discover that I had been flapping around in the same cage as... wait for it... a GREATER ROCKET-TAILED DRONGO. It's all downhill from here.

Thanks to everyone for lovely birthday emails. Systems are a bit dicey this end so I won't be in full response mode until I reach the buzzing technopolis of Bangkok on the 19th. I leave Mandalay tomorrow for Bagan (ancient capital sacked by Kublai Khan...) having spent a really fantastic time here and made lots of friends. When I arrived in Myanmar, I wanted to leave immediately. I am now extremely keen to return. Will post more if possible...

possibly the longest ten days of my life

Weeee-eeell, after a challenging start to my trip to Myanmar, I made it all the way to the Dhamma Mandala Meditation Centre in the foothills of the mountains outside Mandalay. Somehow, and at this stage, I actually have no idea how, I made it through eleven days of silent meditation. Now that I've returned to the dust and noise of Mandalay, I feel pretty darn good, perhaps even calm and (you will so rarely hear me say this...) peaceful.

But who wants to hear about being uplifted by a wander along the path of dhamma? No-one! You want to hear about the trials of eating fourteen million variations of lentil stodge (but only before noon). You want to know that I had a complete meltdown on the first day and begged to leave and was somehow convinced to stay. Or perhaps you are interested in the fact that I now know for certain that it is impossible to chew the tip of your elbow? Those transgressive types might ooh and aah over the fact that I broke many rules. I wrote in my notebook in the bathroom. I took anti-malarial tablets all the way through and started taking painkillers on the last few days when sitting crosslegged on the floor for twelve hours a day and sleeping on a plank started to take toll.... So much whining I could do. I don't think I am entirely cut out for the ascetic life. Probably one of the reasons that Noble Silence is instituted is to keep people like me quiet. Had I posted this blog on Day 6, it would have been one long moan.

Anyway anyway, I struggled mightily with the meditation for most of the way through but the people I met when the talking started were extraordinarily kind and I was overwhelmed by the friendliness and goodwill of everyone there. I've made some friends in Mandalay and am going to sally about town with them. Will no doubt have vast amounts more to say about the retreat, the lovely people, the dictatorship... but right at the moment, my brain is slightly addled and my readiness to ramble inanity might just get the better of me. Furthermore, my belly is empty, and I need to eat something. It's afternoon, and this will be the first time I've eaten solids after midday for eleven days. Woo-hoo! And if I can somehow avoid a lentil stodge surprise, all the better.