Myanmar

We only crossed the border to Myanmar after spending one month mentally preparing for the experience. And it is a good thing that we did. The last country on our route that had felt as remote and challenging was Mongolia. There we had escaped most of these challenges by being driven through the country on a guided tour. In Myanmar we were on our own with the crumbling infrastructure, the smells of the cities and the odor of the countryside, the monks in their dresses and the men in their skirts and the constant waving back at little children.

They call Myanmar the golden country. And when we focussed on the temples, stupas and pagodas, this was indeed an accurate description. However, when looking beyond these religious buildings, we found ourselves visiting one of the poorest countries we had ever traveled. The villages looked liked slums with low quality and often temporary bamboo houses built on stilts on sticky clay grounds covered in garbage. Most of the places where so remote that they lacked, well, basically everything, from sanitary facilities to running water and electricity to proper roads and rails.

The people didn't seem like they were feeling disadvantaged though; they were proud and well-dressed, open and tremendously friendly. They had their very own and very distinct style consisting of velvet flip flops, Longi skirts, depending on the occasion either worn out western T-Shirts or fancy blouses with colorful patterns, yellow Tanaka paste smeared all over their faces and, for the teenage boys, undercuts and carrot-dyed top hair. And they were all vampires. When they opened their mouths to smile at us they showed two rows of red and rotten teeth in various states of decay from chewing betel nuts. It was a truly creepy sight that took some time to look past and at the people behind.

But the grace with which these people lived and worked and interacted with each other was nothing short of inspirational. They did their field work manually, riding on plows pulled by two oxen and carrying hay for kilometers on their heads or with their bare hands. They spent endless hours under the scolding sun hitting the water with paddles to move swarms of fish into their nets. They wrote everything by hand in neatly kept books as not even the offices of the national train company had computers. They showered in the streets, they fetched water from far-away fountains, they lit candles when the power went out. But they always seemed happy and at peace. We had never been to a country where the locals treated each other in such a humorous and utterly kind manner. Strangers carried each others loads; passengers shared jokes on the bus; customers called the waiters by making kissing noises that in Europe we would use to get the attention of a cat.

Lucky for us this general friendliness extended to their encounters with foreign travelers. As their country hadn't been ruined by the mass tourism industry (yet), the people were still genuinely excited to meet and interact with foreigners. This guy picked us up off a street in Mandalay (which hadn't happened since we had left Iran) and invited us to his son's 15th birthday - a semi-public event in a local community center where all the residents of the area came together to share the food donated and prepared by the celebrating family. The people took uncountable photos and selfies with the blue-eyed guests and stroked the white fur on my arms with actual admiration. And they took amazing care of me when I puked my guts out on my life's worst 14-hour trip on a bumpy overnight bus.

Yes, it finally happened. And it hit us hard. Seven months we had been on the road, eating and drinking anything in the most questionable street stalls. And while many travelers around us fell ill and were forced to take a break, we kept going strong. By the time we came to Myanmar we thought that we were at least close to invincible. We went nuts on their cuisine which was a mix of Indian fatty readymade curry dishes and South East Asian flavors. And on their salads of course. Avocado and tomato, banana flower or tea leaf with fried chilies and nuts and hot and sour sauce.

We were in Mandalay when we caught the bug. Ironically this happened at a proper hotel, the kind that would have been way out of our price range if we hadn't benefited from a promotion on Booking.com. They place was air-conditioned and spotlessly clean. Still Lea spent three nights in bed after eating at their breakfast buffet. My lucky streak seemed to be over, too. But then I got away with briefly hugging a toilet bowl in the mountains of Kalaw and a good night's sleep.

Unfortunately this incident forced us to cancel a three-day-hike to Lake Inle, an experience overall described as the alleged highlight of visiting Myanmar. Instead we both kept feeling noxious over the next few weeks which led to every meal being consumed with a general fear of a relapse. Lucky for her, Lea was out of the woods after those three days. I, on the other hand, was just getting started. After the bus ride described above I spent an additional two days lying in a hostel bed in Yangon. Again the timing couldn't have been much worse: Originally we had planned to work at Thabarwa Center (see below) for a solid seven days. Looking back on it we were probably lucky that we made it there at all, even if we had to cut our visit short. But the worst thing about being sick in Yangon was that I was sick in one of Myanmar's noisy and overall unpleasant cities.

Although we didn't really need proof that large amounts of people penned up in a small space were disgusting, Myanmar's cities presented us with more than enough unwanted evidence on the subject. They kept most of the smells and the decay inside molding stone buildings, a concept far worse in dealing with the country's current state of non-development than Mongolia's open nature was for the Mongolians' nomadic culture. There the smells and human excrements disappeared into the open space, either through vanishing into thin air or through being soaked up by the mostly untouched grounds in a mostly untouched eco-system. The cities in Myanmar, on the other hand, were sticky, dusty, runny, stinky, overcrowded and way too loud.

We started our journey in Mawlamyine, a smaller city that mostly felt unpleasant, even though we couldn't really say why. We were walking the streets in search for some food when we realized that the city didn't have street lights. We had never been to a city that after 6 pm was only lit by the lights in the windows of houses and shops, the lights of cars and motorbikes and a huge advertising screen overlooking the local street food market on Thanlwin River. It was spooky! And the fact that my wallet disappeared in the lobby of our Guesthouse, two meters next to the receptionist's desk and within nothing more than a few short minutes that I left it there unattended, didn't really help (the wallet was very old and only contained a few bugs in change, so no worries).

Further down the road Yangon, the former capital, and Mandalay, that place from that Robbie Williams song with the nice guitar picking, did little to re-establish our faith in Myanmar's cities. There was nothing there to see (although we did visit a temple that presumably hosted one of The Buddha's real hairs) and even the many markets and plentiful street food options couldn't diminish our urge to leave for the countryside. Maybe it would have been different if we had been able to discover Mawlamyine, Yangon and Mandalay with a local (Couchsurfing) host. After all these homestays had provided us with lasting friendships and unique insights into many cities we had visited before. Unfortunately Couchsurfing was illegal in Myanmar and the law was being enforced. We put the whole thing on our list of tremendously interesting travel experiences we were deprived of by some notoriously scared and distrusting government.

Needless to say: our personal Myanmar highlights were located outside the cities. Take our three-day stay at Lake Inle, a very touristic but nevertheless tremendously beautiful piece of nature that dazzled us with its floating markets and gardens, its wooden houses built on stilts and its fishermen doing acrobatic stunts to wheel in the catch of the day.

Or take Old Bagan, a collection of more than 400 temples, stupas and pagodas distributed over a remote area of 40 square kilometers. We rented an electronic scooter and spent our days cruising the sandy dirt roads through golden fields of barley. The place was especially photogenic during sunsets and sunrises - a fact that provided us with our most memorable Myanmar experience.

We got up at five to see the sunrise from what was marked as an elevated viewpoint on Maps Me. When we got there the spot turned out to be a hill that was barely high enough to even be called a hill. We decided to try a different spot but got terribly lost along the way. We were ready to give up on the sunrise altogether when an old grumpy man let us into a temple that was closed for construction. We climbed up and had the platform all to ourselves when the sun started pouring it's brand new light on the pagodas and the trees and the hot air balloons floating over the area. It was an unforgettable, majestic sight.

Bagan was for our eyes what Thabarwa was for our mind. We spent four days there learning about Buddhism and Vipassana Meditation while working in a group of over 40 volunteers from all over the world. The place was started by a businessman who found himself through Buddhism about a decade ago. It soon grew to be what its founder called a refugee center: a socialist utopia where everybody who wanted to could live and simply be as long as they respected the first five of the eight precepts of Buddhism (simplified: refrain from killing, refrain from taking things not given, refrain from sensual misconduct, refrain from false speech, refrain from taking substances that cause intoxication). No additional strings attached. Everybody was given a place to sleep and two meals a day, regardless of age, gender, social status, physical and mental condition and their contribution to the overall project. Being founded as a Buddhist monastery Thabarwa had attracted a lot of social projects over the years. The center contained an orphanage, a home for the elderly and various medical institutions, including a hospital and facilities for treating all kinds of disabilities and diseases.

Due to the maximum amount of personal freedom granted to every volunteer there was a high fluctuation of young Westerners. People stayed for a few days or for several weeks and months. This was hardly an issue when organizing most of the daily activities (cleaning various areas, helping out in the kitchens, washing patients and getting them to their doctors, driving old people around in rusty wheelchairs so they could wave at their friends in the local village, etc.). Long term projects, on the other hand, suffered greatly from the sudden departure of their initiators and key "personnel". Walking into the daily volunteer meetings felt like walking into a bee hive; there was an incredible amount of buzz and energy which the long-term volunteers tried to organize and somehow channel into an effective task division.

Next to attending three one-hour-meditation-sessions per day Lea and I spent our days cleaning the place, planting gardens and wheel chairing two old ladies. The most peculiar activity we went on was going on alms rounds with the Buddhist monks. We walked the streets of the local village, barefoot and in silence, to collected the food and money donations prepared by the locals lining up on the side of the roads. Seeing how much time and love many people spent on giving to the center to keep it going was amazing, especially when considering the overall living conditions in that village.

My personal highlight was meeting Santana. He was a sixty-year-old Burmese who, despite having a crippled right hand, loved to play guitar. He lived in the Dhama Hall, an enormous tent roof that sheltered hundreds of improvised parcels separated by bamboo and plastic sheets. Every parcel contained a wooden platform where the (mostly old) people kept a single box with all of their belongings and slept without a mattress. Next to his second set of cloths Santana kept one of the oldest guitars I had seen in my life. It was so out of tune that it almost hurt. Nevertheless he played it vigorously. And he always had an audience: Buddhist monasteries normally don't allow the playing and listening to music. Therefore it didn't come as a surprise to me that Santana playing his guitar every night had apparently raised a lot of discussions with (but not only) the monks at Thabarwa. Order was restored only when the founder declared music as acceptable if it were played mindfully and with a therapeutic purpose. This verdict led to Santana and his music being tolerated at the center. And since he was the only one in a radius of I don't know how many hundred meters, people always came to listen.

I visited him every day with my Martin Backpacker guitar. I picked him up at his place and he jumped down from his platform, grabbed his three-legged-crutch and jumped towards the little kiosk with the plastic chairs on his one good leg. He picked up my guitar and played and smiled like a little boy. We listened to each other's songs and we jammed, mostly playing the blues scales that he loved. And we were both sad when I had to leave Thabarwa to catch our flight to Vietnam. But when Buddha closes a door he opens a window: when I was on my way out there was an American guy coming in carrying his Baby Taylor Travel Guitar.