David at Sea: Circumnavigating the Planet : Slow Ride to Hpa An

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I went down to the river bank and purchased a ticket for Hpa An. Luckily for me, very few people still used this ferry anymore because roads had improved so much, and the trip to Hpa An by bus could be made in a fraction of the time it took to get there by boat. The only people who did use this ferry still were generally from fishing villages without road access along the way.

The ferry itself was very old and rickety. It had been captured from the Japanese about 50 years ago. There were decks on two levels and I went to the top one, where I was greeted by a gentleman with “how are you today!” He was clearly drunk, or coming off a long night of boozing, and I initially tried to ignore him as he blabbed away. But I let my guard down after a while, and he ended up being a fascinating character. He was a free spirit, who as an orphan had seen everything there is to see in Myanmar. He had briefly fled to a refugee camp in Thailand when things had been rough, and with only a dollar or two in his pocket, had found his way to Bangkok where he managed to survive for a few years. He was 65 he said, and was in good shape. He was an alcoholic, and said he drank two bottles of rice whiskey every morning and every evening: “to forget my troubles.” He was the only one aboard the ferry that spoke a word of English, and so he acted as my interpreter for the rest of the 6-hour trip.

There were a bunch of lawn chairs upstairs looking out over the water and I settled into one while the character in front of me, along the railing, kept talking (he would not stop). To my left, half a dozen women sat on their provision bags and chatted. They were of the Mon people, one of many minority groups in Myanmar, and spoke a language my interpreter did not understand (he spoke Burmese, the national language). This is one of the things that blew me away in Myanmar: that you can literally walk out of a village where there speak one language, and walk to another village where they speak another. In contrast to the US where people are “Americans first” before being of Indian, Polish, British (etc…) descent, people here are Mon, Kayin…before being Burmese.

The women switched into Burmese and expressed their amazement at seeing a foreigner traveling alone on this ferry with them. They said I looked like a movie star, like Brad Pitt, probably because they hadn’t seen many white people in their lives. They gave me a big bag of oranges to snack on as the ferry started its slow journey up the river.

I think the one thing I like the most when traveling is the actual traveling part. This is when you meet the most people and see the most things. Being on a slow-moving ferry, I had all the time in the world to see things go by…fishing villages where people relied on driftwood from the river to cook, limestone mountains literally rising up from nowhere, small islands in the river, midget cows helping farmers toil the earth, small delicious watermelons, and pagodas everywhere. I lazily witnessed one of the most beautiful sunsets I’d ever seen while drowsing in my lawn chair, my feet resting on the railing…

By the time we arrived in Hpa An, there were only a handful of passengers left. We got off the ship on a very fragile and wobbly board, and my companion took me to one of the two hostels in the town.