Katha by Boat To Mandalay
We got up early and paid with kyat and boarded at 515 a.m. The ‘Fast Boat’ was sparsely loaded as we began our journey down river and we got a whole two person wood bench each as we left the silt beach at 530 a.m. and still in the dark.
It may be a fast boat but within an hour we had grounded with speed on a sand bar. We sat for 2 hours waiting for a tugboat to pull us this way and that up river while many locals showed up and jumped in the water. It was about a foot deep the length of the boat. There was a patch of grass holding to the river floor 10 meters off the bow. Could have been a signal. All other boats went far to port where went once we were freed.
I got up and took a look around the boat. There was a man sleeping over the engine in the blistering sun and behind him sat a two-pronged propeller with rock bent blades and one entirely missing. It didn’t bode well. The toilet emptied into the river. As we traveled down river the locals would grab a cup, rinse it out and drink out of the river, something that if you and I did we would go straight to the hospital and suffer severe weight loss and probably amebic dysentery.
Once we were free from the sand and heading down river the captain honked at the banks for more passengers. On shore someone would waive a t-shirt and the captain would pull over. Sometimes the locals would sell goods along the boat side or come on board if there was time and sell water, soft drinks, platters of dried fish, rice and chicken in Styrofoam boxes. Beer was very expensive so BYOB and save hotel fare. The boat filled up with people, furniture, and bags of rice in the isle. Many times people could be seen washing their teeth and doing laundry.
There were hundreds logging boats and barges carrying tropical hardwoods heading down stream for extraction by bigger ships and shipped to foreign powers. I don’t know how much is legal or illegal but at the rate they are decimating the forest one should wonder. The 40’ x 3’ in diameter are being loaded along the shoreline with heavy equipment including cranes with hundreds of trees on each barge. I didn’t see any tops or bottoms of the trees just the prime cut. Dump trucks are being loaded by hand baskets usually by women, children and the elderly. They get paid about $2/day off of a barge load of sand and put on trucks to head into the interior most likely for road construction.
After numerous stops for passengers we realized we were not going to arrive at 7pm, more like midnight. I had a quick look in the wheelhouse and saw no instruments, not even a depth finder. Driving at night for the boat captain was going to be complicated with no running lights due to generator inconsistent failure. We traveled down river in the dark and the captain did a great job of dropping people off and avoiding further delays, all in all a great trip.
When we arrived it was midnight and we grabbed a tuk-tuk to the Golden Dream Hotel for one night and off to Bagan by boat the next day. A different kind of boat.
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