The Bittersweet Symphony of Myanmar

PREFACE: This article has nothing to do with surfing, but it does concern a place that has a pretty unexplored coastline that does get swell. However the hedonistic desire for uncrowded waves in far flung places shouldn't blind one to the wider world, a fact not lost on the vast majority of traveling rat bag surfers who tend to be quite interested in obscure places far from the salty brine of our oceanic habitat.

Just as I broke the yolk on a solitary and exceptionally greasy fried egg, the adolescent pig, which had been dry-humping his younger sibling for some time, let out a euphoric squeal and promptly ejaculated on to the dusty ground no more than three feet away from my most important meal of the day.

Shaking post-orgasmic quivers from its rump the pig seemed un-concerned it had just ruined my most important meal of the day.

To get to this part of Kachin state had been a three-day extravaganza of decrepit, wheezing public transport, polite yet intrusive bureaucracy, culminating in a bone-shattering ordeal with nineteen equally miserable passengers on the back of a battered Toyota truck along what can only be very loosely described as a dirt road.

This is as far north and as off the beaten track as we managed to venture on this, our first trip to Myanmar (or Burma if you prefer).

My girlfriend and I hadn’t seen another tourist in days, and our presence hadn’t gone unnoticed.

The authorities were becoming increasingly ill-at-ease with our holiday itinerary. Our passports and visas were now getting fingered, duplicated, read, re-read (and even on one occasion read upside-down) more and more often.

It was a dull tropic morning and I was draining sickly instant coffee from my bladder into a bush, a sudden urgency in my better half’s voice signalled that I really should turn around and take stock of the unfolding situation. We were about to disappear for the day on a hardwood long boat with one of the lake fishermen, a shrewd, trustworthy chap who we’d managed to track down after an hour playing an impromptu game of charades in a dimly lit ‘eatery’ the night before.

Out of the grey, a stout, agitated and charmless Burmese army official of middle rank had appeared and was demanding passports. Quickly doing up my fly, taking care not start an international incident, I fumbled for our documents and did my best to look submissive.

The official was clearly looking for a bribe; not from us, but the fisherman. He wanted to know how much we’d paid. I quoted a figure considerably less than the actual, hoping that the official worked on a percentage. The boatman quoted the real price. This confused everyone. More perplexed than irritated now, the official looked hard at us, snarled at the boatman and studied our passports again. Finally he let us go. The fisherman punted us from the shore and violently coerced his battered Chinese engine into action. As we chugged away into an oblivion of tropic mist, the bemused official, hands on hips, stood at the end of the pontoon eyeballing us. I duly noted the boatman was smirking to himself…

The lake itself was stunning, as the ruffled grey smudge of morning lifted into a bright blue blade of glass peppered with pagodas, ringed with steep pointed hills and a vast flat wetland teeming with birds. Capillaries of vegetation floated by, the occasional fisherman checked his nets. Out in the middle of the lake a large golden pagoda sat on stilts, shimmering in the sun.

This is the idyllic Myanmar, the one you have in your mind: a place lost in a another age, majestic, forgotten, secretive. It really does exist, and at least for the time being you can really go there.

Meanwhile the Myanmar of the towns and cities feels like a country with ‘that Friday feeling’; after a very long 60-year working week of repression, exploitation and neglect, a nation awaits the weekend of democracy.

In quiet tea shops, on motorbikes and secluded rice paddies, the people I met with spoke in hushed, hopeful tones of ‘the’ election, about empowerment, about hopes and opportunity.

Later this year there will be the first 'serious' election in Myanmar for over fifty years and if, despite it all, democracy does materialise, if those deserved and desperately needed freedoms do indeed arrive, then there will come the daunting Monday morning when Aung San Suu Kyi (Myanmar's Nelson Mandela) and her National League for Democracy party will have to sit down at a new desk in the shadow of what will be a mountainous in-box and start to rebuild a nation.

Two decades of house arrest was the easy bit (relatively speaking). They will have to reform and drive forward a vast, ethnically diverse and mind-bogglingly complex nation. Decades of repression, paranoia, corruption, subterfuge and fear have damaged the national psyche. Years of plunder by Myanmar’s leaders and close neighbours combined with sanctions from the West and economic mismanagement have crippled infrastructure and left a once comparatively prosperous country with an ailing economy desperate for reform and foreign investment. Frequent political and ethnic uprisings, countered by tit-for-tat reprisals, repression and outright persecution by the Burmese army, have left deep divides between Myanmar’s ethnic groups, united across the board only by a deep distrust for centralised governance.

The list of Myanmar’s woes is endless, but they are not beyond repair.

Aung San will have a mammoth task ahead, but it is a burden she wont bear alone, she is beloved by her people.

If you had to pick a people to rebuild a nation with, you’d be hard pushed to beat the people of Myanmar (to whom in the name of easier reading I will refer as the Burmese, a gross over-simplification of a very ethnically diverse nation). They are the cliché. Gracious, welcoming, honest, friendly, laid-back and polite. They are by far the most hard-working (probably more out of necessity than aspiration), resourceful, adaptable, innovative, tough and determined people you will ever meet. The other thing that the Burmese are is incredibly funny; they have a wicked sense of humour. An entire bus full of people will chuckle and guffaw for 150km of pot-holed roads at a low- budget sitcom, heckling a fuzzy TV screen like a 52-strong family on a grand day out.

Whether at teashops, muddy paddies or bus stops, humour is the Burman’s great leveller, provider of light in dark times and a way to fight back, to keep your dignity. Traveling north in one of Myanmar’s notorious trains, we were in ‘ordinary class’ – unusual for foreigners. I watched a policeman repeatedly harass, intimidate and embarrass a young group of poor rice harvesters. We were powerless to intervene. However, one of the girls muttered something under her breath in the middle of yet another tirade from this creep, quiet enough not to interrupt him yet audible to those in the vicinity.

Whatever it was it sent shockwaves of chuckles through the packed carriage. He visibly shrank in stature...

The young of Myanmar are full of ambition, but right now their chances are slim. Many have only a light garnish of education. Hard, full-time jobs are paid a pittance, there are eight-year-olds stripping engines and seasoned chain smoking road workers earning two US dollars a day ,who have yet to start puberty.

But the possibility of opportunity in the future seems enough to keep the fires of optimism burning.

We spoke, in broken English, to many who wanted to be doctors, engineers, boat captains. There were those who wanted travel, to have their own teashops or restaurants. They were all upbeat and positive, some would say naïve, but I got the impression that these youngsters had seen too much to be naïve. They simply seemed determined to steer a different course to the one their parents were forced to follow. It was as heart-warming as it was heart- breaking.

As a rule I’m not big on religious sites of ‘interest’; they sound fascinating in the brochure, but I always feel slightly uncomfortable and fraudulent. So visiting Myanmar, I realised that I was probably going to be an uncomfortable fraud for most of the time.

Luckily I wasn’t the only one. In 2012 Tourism in Myanmar exploded; the place was awash with Scandinavian baby boomers, an entire generation systematically corralled in grey-ish-blonde herds into every pagoda in sight. I caught one’s eye and he actually mouthed the words ‘ Help Me ‘.

We managed to swerve as many of the pagodas as we could (and we still saw plenty), but it was Myanmar’s rural areas I’d come to see. And they didn’t disappoint.

In a country where 65% of the population is employed in agriculture, an industry that accounts for 60 % of national GDP, in an age where entire landscapes in very far flung destinations are managed with a handful of people and machines, I was amazed to see such low levels of mechanisation.

Oxen and buffalo pull ploughs weathered by a hundred harvests, landless poor bend double in the fields hacking at narrow paddies, grain is dried in the sun on handmade mats, livestock and family live together in thatched barns, entire families migrate out into the fields for harvest, collecting acres of beans and rice. Nearly everything is processed by nimble, calloused hands. What few machines are around seem tired, dangerous, wholly inadequate and pulled by a knackered buffalo.

Agricultural development is high on the national ‘to do’ list and there is no shortage of investors. Companies from Thailand and China are already buying up as much land as they can, forcing up prices and consequently the rent for tenant farmers. Many farmers, poorly educated (and probably sick of the sight of rice) simply sell up or can’t afford the rent and leave it all behind. In the more accessible agricultural towns, brand new Chinese tractor shops proudly display their wares while entire swathes of the Burmese countryside are being sold to foreign investors. Forcible evictions with poor compensation are common.

A sudden move toward industrialised agriculture will decimate a way of life, integral to this complex society. As more machines and chemicals arrive the paddies will get bigger and the rural population will shrink as the need for labour is reduced. The move to the cities (probably to work in foreign-owned factories) could be biblical in scale. Yet how can you develop your agriculture sector and bring in the necessary foreign investment without adhering to the modern techniques deemed necessary to compete on the global market?

It’s tricky.

This is just one of the many headaches that Aung San Suu Kyi faces.

The heat was stifling, the pan-flat paddy is a hard place to toil. I waded out to a group of paddy labourers planting rice. Slightly taken aback by my bribe of a bag of oranges and my eagerness to work with them, they eventually let me help plant a new crop of rice.

I’m a horticulturist by trade and no stranger to toil, but within minutes beads of sweat trickled into my eyes and the heat reflecting back up into my hunched body was cooking my innards.

The pace was relentless. We worked in silence, un-peeling each young plant from the bunch, holding it between fingers and thumb and driving through the brown sickly water into the ancient squidgy clay below. Plant after plant, bunch after bunch. I quickly fell behind, my feet turned to lead in the mud and tiny wiggly things nestled round my ankles...I lasted about thirty-five minutes.

Obama was in Rangoon that day. He was offering friendship with one hand while trying to loosen China’s grip with the other. For a long time the generals of the junta have been a thorn in the side of the international community, their well-documented disregard for human rights and flagrant disdain for democracy brought about two decades of economic sanctions and global isolation….. almost.

It is hard to overstate Chinese influence in Myanmar. In nearly two decades of free rein, billions of dollars have flowed by various murky means across the border to the regime in exchange for the voluptuous bounty of Myanmar's fabled natural resources. Yet very little of this cash has trickled down to paddy field level, and what few fiscal vapours do remain are normally sucked up by local corruption and mismanagement. At the same time China has been a major driving force in dousing the flames of the dictatorship, persuading Myanmar’s powers that be that democracy could be a great earner for all involved.

The Chinese have a lot riding on their quirky, well-endowed neighbour, with many infrastructure projects in the pipeline (including an actual pipeline, enabling Chinese access to the Indian ocean where sacred oil supplies can be delivered more directly from the Middle East). The more stable and ‘user-friendly’ Myanmar can become, the safer their investments.

Whatever the driving forces and outcomes of the hyper-speed reforms occurring in Myanmar right now, I met no-one who didn’t want us to be there. They asked me tell you what I saw, and I have. After so long out in the cold, the people of Myanmar are excited about their new role in the world. If they can make it over the next few hurdles without getting tripped up by their government, their neighbours or some other form of foul play then there is so much for them to gain and so much for them to give.

I worry about the various rapacious powers circling above, waiting, poised to take their share. I hope they can give as much they will take, I hope that Aung San Suu Kyi can win (despite a sneaky purpose built constitutional quirk called 59f, a clause that effectively bans her from running for president) and that her party can lead a difficult place toward an easier future, one that brings this bittersweet nation the good fortune, good governance and good times it's people so richly deserve.

Dan Kerins is photographer, writer, surfer and horticulturalist specialising in ill-planned and under-funded excursions into the lesser known.

To see more of his work please visit: dankerinsphotography.com or keep up to date on Facebook