The bus to Mawlamyine left at 7 pm and was supposed to arrive at one point early the following morning.
I took a pickup truck to the bus station (a 45 minute drive from the center of Yangon) and began preparing for the long trip. I bought water and chips.
Generally, I prefer to avoid sketchy meals before a long bus ride, but I was very hungry. I saw an old lady selling stew and noodles out of a big pot on the ground, so I joined the two or three people sitting and eating on small plastic chairs and ordered a bowl. For 15 cents, you really can’t do better for a meal.
I met an army vet there. A man sitting next to him quickly pointed out that his friend had been decorated three times. The military guy didn’t really say anything; he just smiled. I couldn’t help but wonder what years of military service in the Burmese army had done to shape his opinion of the US. There’s a strict embargo on Myanmar, similar to the one that was in place in Iraq between 1991 and this last war. I wondered what language officials used when speaking of the US. Were we the enemy?
[I expected the military officials to be complete assholes, but most of the ones I met turned out to be nicer than in any country I’d ever been to. One official checking my passport actually said to me, in English, “Please enjoy your stay in Myanmar.” So much for preconceived ideas…. Oh yeah, I forgot to say this: Myanmar is a military dictatorship, with so many human rights abuses that people have stopped counting and just sealed off the country (hence my surprise at meeting very friendly soldiers). The casual traveler will quickly be reminded of this soon after boarding a bus. In the twelve hours that it took to get to my destination, my passport was verified at military checkpoint 4 times!]
With my belly full of noodles and stew, I took my seat on the bus and we headed to Mawlamyine, a trip that was supposed to take 9 hours but in the end took more than 12.
I quickly befriended a passenger right behind me, a 25 year old woman who spoke English fairly well. She acted as my translator throughout the journey and at every stop would let me know whether we were at a military checkpoint (“show you passport”) or simply having a tea & pee stop (“we stop, get out”).
At one point we stopped for about 30 minutes and had the chance to sit down and chat a bit.
A kid was selling these huge deep-fried grasshoppers and she encouraged me to try one. I was a bit hesitant. I’d had fried grasshoppers in Mexico, but those had been tiny. These things were the size of shrimp! Plus, looking at them reminded me of those giant cockroaches that occasionally fly in through the window in my apartment in Brooklyn in the summer. “You’ll see, they good,” my translator said. How could I chicken out now?
The boy selling mounds of this stuff cracked one of these bad boys open, ripped off its shell (just like shrimp!), and handed me the plump, glistening creature…
I stuck it in my mouth and bit. And you know what? It was g-… not bad. Ok, it left a strong aftertaste, but that could have been the cooking oil.
We sat down and I ordered tea, she coffee. She explained that she’d recently returned to Myanmar from Thailand, where she’d worked for the past four years in Bangkok, “oh, selling things, doing jobs…”
She had a real bad cough and you could tell she had a light fever. I asked her how long she’d had this cold and she answered, Two weeks. Did she feel better? No.
Her Aunt had freaked her out by saying it might be Tuberculosis, but a doctor had confirmed that it was only a cold. With everything that we’d seen and the people we’d talked to during CURRENTS, I couldn’t help but imagine a big red neon sign with “AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!” flashing on and off.
There’s an exploding AIDS problem in Myanmar, and a quarter of sex workers are infected. Of course, it’s all kept strictly under wraps by the government (remember, we weren’t able to get the required authorizations to work here).
I hope it turned out to be nothing but a cold.
We hopped back on the bus and I tried to get some sleep. My companion got off an hour or two later.
Shortly before arriving at our destination, we stopped at another checkpoint and all unloaded from the bus. An official told me to wait outside while he went inside with my passport. I thought: “Great, they’ve probably just made this region off-limits to foreigners and I’m going to have to take another bus back to Yangon. I’ve just spent the last 12 hours in a bus with water dripping on my head from the ceiling and no sleep. Please don’t make me go back or I’ll cry!” But just as soon as I was ready to scratch this part of my plan, the man came back outside and handed me my passport.
Hurray!
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