Boat journeys back in time - Mrauk U, Myanmar
Mrauk U, Myanmar
Where I stayed
Prince Guest House
From the delights of Bagan I moved on to the west of Burma to Rakhaing which borders the Bay of Bengal and is separated from the rest of Burma by a 600 mile mountain range. This area is usually badly affected by monsoons/typhoons but as this is the shoulder season I'm hoping it will be ok. This area also sees very few tourists, not because of any lack of attractions but more because the government has imposed huge restrictions on travel for foreigners in the region. This is also the only place I’ve seen the UN and the UNHCR (refugees’ body) and this adds to the tension. Because of Rakhaing State’s proximity to India and Bangladesh there is a sizeable Muslim population in this state and they are most definitely not integrated into the rest of the population; Amnesty International has detailed forced labour, forced relocation, murder and arbitrary taxes on the 1.5m Muslims in this area). There is widespread mistrust, hatred and occasionally murders (In my hostel in Mrauk-U when the manager was outlining the sights in the town, he put huge X’s on the edge of town saying "No go out here, lots of Muslims, very bad, very dangerous"!).The political situation is very fluid here and anyone travelling in this region needs to keep an eye on the local news to see which areas are closed to foreigners at the moment. The various NGOs and UN groups are not wanted in the area by most locals as they are perceived as having a Muslim bias. There is an outright hostility to Westerns because of this as we are all believed to be working for various NGOs. On my flight out of Sittwe a week later it was the only place where they asked what NGO I worked for when I was going through 'immigration’; had to disappoint them by saying I was a tourist. Mrauk-U was also the only place where I had to fill out several forms with all my details at the hotel for the local police. The flight though was 80% NGOs/UN, 15% locals and 5% tourists. I also heard that most locals won’t rent houses to the various aid agencies so this makes it almost impossible to get accommodation as a tourist without reserving well in advance. The state capital, Sittwe, is also home to many oil and gas companies which further exacerbates the accommodation situation.
I flew from Nyaung-U airport in Bagan to Thande airport near Ngapali Beach. There I was met by a ‘bus’ from my hotel (basically a small flatbed truck with a canvas cover and seats attached to a motorbike) and taken the 5 miles or so to the resort I’d booked, Thande Beach Hotel. This was the most expensive place I’d organised at €70 a night. The rooms were individual chalets set in a huge garden along the beach. All the furniture was bamboo and teak with the traditional hard beds (Burmese people must have very strong bones!), swimming pool, spa and beach side bars and loungers. I’d booked 2 nights here as a stopover on my way further north to Sittwe as there was no direct flight there from Bagan and thought it might be a good opportunity to get a nice tan. It was a bit boring though; I found it too hot to take any boat trips and I didn’t have the time to organise snorkling or diving trips. There was some nice village scenes of locals drying fishing and selling tropical fruit on the beach but the nearest village is a long walk from the resort area. The beach is beautiful though, a tropical paradise, pristine sand and clear blue water, with the prices to match (still very cheap by Western standards but expensive for Burma – you know you’re in trouble when they quote you everything in $!). The resorts are full of couples and honeymooners and there’s no nightlife or beach shopping strip like in other SE Asian countries. Two nights was plenty for me – read 2 books, did a lot of studying and lounged around in the clear very warm sea.
On arrival in Sittwe, with no accommodation booked, I spent a frustrating hour on the back of a motorbike rickshaw looking for a hotel with no luck. Eventually I had 2 options – sleep on the beach or pay $80 to stay in the miserable, dark, old-fashioned Sittwe Beach Resort. I went for the latter but kind of regret in a way I didn’t just stay on the beach. The accommodation is a very frustrating situation here as though there are plenty of hotels they are not licensed for foreigners and it is illegal for Burmese people to stay in private homes so that rules out couchsurfing etc. Rule for future travel – prebook hotels in Sittwe! I didn’t like Sittwe very much; not only is it infernally hot but it’s a real frontier town (only 30 miles south of Bangladesh border) with the attitude to match and the previously mentioned dislike of NGOs which tars all Westerners with the one brush. It does have some beautiful colonial buildings but also a lot of damage from WWII.
The only reason I was in Sittwe was to get the ferry to Mrauk-U the next morning. 7am saw me down at the dock where I was in for a rude shock. I knew I was getting the local boat and knew it wouldn’t be luxurious but it was fairly basic. For $10 I got a seat (plastic garden chair- locals pay $2 to sit on the floor for the 5 hour journey) on the upper deck which at least wasn’t too busy. First though I had to negotiate getting on the actual boat. The gangplank was about half a foot wide, just a length of timber which stretched from the jetty to the boat over 3m of open water with no rails or any other means of balancing. Usually in a situation like this, locals would be happy to take your bags and help you across but no help was forthcoming, so very gingerly with my 11kg rucksack on my back, my daybag in one hand and a souvenir picture (about 80cm x 30cm I’d bought in Bagan) in the other I made my way over the gangplank. I think it’s probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done. I found a seat in the front of the boat underdeck where I could stack my luggage in the corner. I was just settling in when I realised the plastic chairs, arranged haphazardly, had numbers on them and I was sitting in someone’s seat. I then had to haul all my luggage and pick my way through the human sea to the side of the boat where I was half lifted, half climbed up onto the roof over the side of the boat where my seat actually was. It’s hard to describe the boat underdeck; there were people everywhere, all sitting on the floor with luggage and children in their laps, there wasn’t a single bit of floor space to stand on to make my way across, God knows how many people I stood on. It looked like those refugee ships we see on the news in Asia and Africa – if it sank (and boats do here in the monsoon storms) then hundreds would have died. My $10 seat on the upper deck was a bit more luxurious; at least I could stretch my legs out a bit but it was equally as busy. There were 2 other foreigners on the boat out of about 300 locals. The boats winds its way upriver through a maze of deltas and channels, some quite wide to Mrauk-U. There are very few roads here and most travel is in motorised canoes from small villages. It seems to be a very fertile area with lots of evidence for farming along the banks of the river. Again with the early start and the sun beating down I managed to sleep through most of the journey!
The main reason for this costly and time-consuming detour through Rakhaing State was to visit Mrauk-U which was the capital of Burma from the 15th to 18th century and has plenty of temples and historic buildings to match. European visitors compared it to London and Venice in the 17th Century and as a free port it traded with Europe, Asia and the Middle East. For a time it was the richest city in Asia and had its peak it had a 10,000 fleet of war boats that dominated the Bay of Bengal. When the British took over Burma they moved the state capital to Sittwe turning Mrauk-U into a backwater overnight.
Arrival now at Mrauk-U consists of a dusty, busy town on unpaved roads with rickshaws as transport surrounded by watery villages in every direction. I’d prebooked my accommodation and it was very, very basic, definitely the worst place I’ve ever stayed in out here. The beds were very hard, the electricity intermittent and the bathroom not somewhere you’d want to spend time in. My mosquito net over the bed was more holes than fabric and there was a huge red/green beetle in my room. We co-existed quite happily until the last night when he got into a plastic bag I’d stupidly left on the floor with some rubbish in it and for 3 hours in the pitch dark I had to listen to him scuttling around and making an incredible amount of noise. I actually feared at one stage that it might be a rat but with no electricity I was too afraid to get out of the bed to try and scare him away or move the rubbish bag. That was the longest night of my life and that hotel, along with the heat, really affected how I viewed Mrauk-U. I wouldn’t have minded being all hot and sweaty during the day if I could have come back to a half decent hotel room and had a shower and somewhere clean to sit down.
The temples themselves are very interesting with lots of sculptures and are much more ornate than the ones in Bagan (they are a later period too). I only met 2 other tourists when I was there and we’d both had the misfortune to stay in the same hotel in Sittwe and shared our stories of how expensive and terrible it was. This area only gets about 3500 foreigner tourists a year and is not promoted as a destination by the government so this is unlikely to change. I hired a bike and cycled around, the whole area is very much part of the local farming community; there was corn drying in the sun, water buffalo lounging in muddy pools and a myriad of other vegetables being farmed that I didn’t recognise, all farms were being ploughed with oxen and a wooden plough with whole families helping out – the whole area seemed caught in a 12th century time warp.
The highlight of the whole trip was a visit to the Chin villages further upriver. I went with 2 Swiss girls who were staying in my hotel. First was a jeep drive for 45 mins to the dock, then a 2.5 hour boat journey further upriver towards Bangladesh. The ‘boat’ was a long canoe with plastic chairs arranged in a row one behind the other and a canvas cover with an outboard motor. All along the river banks we could see various industries – fishing, mending nets, farming, quarrying. There are no roads around here, no cars or motorbikes or even bicycles; all travel is via boat. It was very peaceful and serene, though undoubtly a very hard life. The purpose of the trip is to see the Chin women who have tribal tattoos all over their faces. This is done when they are small girls and was to deter other tribes from kidnapping them. The practice has now died out and the women left are in their 70s. These trips are not exploitative though: the women actually organise them with the tour guides from Mrauk-U and use the donations to better their whole villages. (It’s a nice contrast to the plight of the Padaung women in the Inle Lake region who have rings on their neck pushing their shoulders away from their necks; they are still doing this to young girls for tourism – definitely one to be avoided if in eastern Burma or Thailand)
We stopped at 3 separate villages, the first 2 were Chin villages and had about 200 people living in each of them. They made a living through farming and fishing and selling the produce in Mrauk-U and Sittwe. The houses were made of bamboo and raised on stilts to protect against flooding. They had small schools, usually built with tourist and aid agency donations consisting of one large room with subdivisions for the various classes. At one school the small children were copying the alphabet off the blackboard on their own small blackboards and showing them to the teacher for her approval. Electricity is provided to the villages with solar panels but is usually only routed to one or two huts where the communal tv is kept. All around are pigs and chickens and lots of small cute dogs which we were surprised at until the guide told us that they are raised for food which was a bit offputting! Instead of the earthen pots that are typical in the rest of Burma here the metal pots imported from Bangladesh are ubiquitous. The children were very cute and upon seeing us would say ‘Hello¸Bye Bye’ all in the same breath – the only English they know! There are a lot of different villages but they seem to get an average of maybe 2 or 3 tourists each every few days. The Chin women were happy to pose for photos and had some small trinkets and weavings that they sell to benefit their village- I bought a small necklace, not to wear as it’s quite crude, but more to donate something.
The last village was actually the home of the aunt of our guide and wasn’t a Chin village though it looked exactly the same to me in its appearance (BTW no-one spoke English in any of these villages so all translation was done through the guide). We were brought to one of the largest huts and told to make ourselves comfortable on the veranda – most of the huts have an open area at the front and one room behind in which the family sleeps, all on stilts of course. The 3 of us and the guide hauled ourselves up and when we’d got comfortable and turned around about 50 villagers, men, women and children were sitting on the ground in front of us starring up at us! I left like we were on a stage with an audience. There was general shock and amusement at our ages (all mid 30s) and the fact none of us were married – the women found this hilarious! Then the food started appearing; deliciously sweet small bananas which I’d had before and are much nicer than our ones at home, some weird small green fruit, almost looked like a lime but had the consistency of a dry apple with seeds inside (we were told not to eat the seeds as they make foreigners sick) and of course rice! Our guide asked us if we wanted some coconut juice; next thing we know a teenager was despatched to climb up the tree shading our small gathering. It must have been at least 25m high and he shimmed up it throwing down two large coconuts which hit the ground with a sickening thud and bounced quite close to a shocked toddler who immediately burst into tears! The fall had broken the fibre where the coconut attached to the tree and ‘straws’ of long reed grass were produced for us to drink the juice then the flesh was passed out among the group. It was very disconcerting eating all these food with 50 eyes staring at your every movement! Fantastic experience though.
On the way back to Mrauk-U from the dock we passed a local festival in full swing. Groups of boys were competing to climb to the top of a greasy pole! The festival continued until 9pm every night with music blaring across the whole town and started at 4am every morning.