Koh Tao to the North

Koh Tao to the North

I flew into Bangkok under a little stress due to my time with the Burmese military secret police thinking they may take my stuff, ‘computer’, before I boarded the plane but at that point and I had my stuff and concluded I was no big fish. Bangkok is under siege of different groups all trying to get out from under what they perceive as a dictatorship of corruption, it very well may be. Corruption in my opinion is the wave that actually works most efficiently and always has, that and some form of celestial combination such as the big ‘T’; Saturn, Uranus, and I want to say Pluto but I may be wrong on that one. Idealism is the concept that there is such a thing as democracy and that there is such a thing as FAIR and EQUAL. From what I’ve seen, I say Bollocks. I’m off my point, always have been.

So there I was in Bangkok and I decided to give diving another try because the last time I had Bacterial Pneumonia in my left lung and couldn’t dive. I took a bus from BKK down south and hopped a boat to Koh Tao Island and low and behold developed some new ailment shelving the idea of entering the water. I spent a week in a hotel room, a nice one, Asia Divers Resort, and did nothing but write in a manuscript not worth mentioning yet. When I left Koh Tao I vowed, if I came back this way to get to Nepal via ‘Malaysia Airlines’ again via KL, I’d give it another try – yet to be seen.

I decided to go north to Chiang Mai and do a little tourist stuff up there then make a decision on what next. I stayed at the Top North Hotel again because of it's location and a pool. I hired a driver for the next day and went to the 'Tiger Kingdom' to see some big cats.

The Insect Zoo

The Snake Farm

I took a  bus to Mae Hong Son, far north on the Burma border that I thought was going to take six hours and again found myself still on the bus after 10 hours. In the middle of the night I grabbed motorcycle taxi girl and she drove me to a guesthouse not worth mentioning but would sort it out my living arrangements in the morning. Down the street was a place called ‘Like View Guest House’. 200 baht/night if you want your own room with a bathroom. 80 baht/night if you can handle a dorm with no one else in it.

Once I checked in I went for a badly needed walk. All I could focus on was the pagoda at the top of the hill and what I thought was a road. It turned out after talking to the owners of Like View guest House that it was just a walking trail and I could be at the top in 30 minutes. Some signs say, ‘If you haven’t been to the top of the hill, you haven’t been to Mae Hong Son.’ After eight months of ‘planes, trains, and autobuses’ I realized I had done no physical activity. Sweat poured out of my body in the afternoon 100-degree blue-sky weather with smoke. I got to the top gasping for air with a limited success. I didn’t know if it was me or just no air.

The sunset was pretty though. I sat with a couple monks who were meditating and I was still gasping and my heart rate was off the charts. As the drops of sweat fell off my eyelids like a shower I realized it was a combination of all above and I’d have to do this everyday I could at least once if not twice a day. My regiment was beginning. I thought I’d reconnect to the physical side that I’ve ignored for the last eight months or so. At my age, 53, I can watch my body change from a rock to a ball of putty in weeks of activity loss. Bed bugs in the trains, hard benches on boats, no legroom on buses, do I care, no but it makes it difficult to be physical when you sit on buses, boats, and planes for hours on end and then go have fun. I’ not a sit down kind of person, I never have been. Growing up on Stinson beach I was never one to lay on a towel and bar-b-que in the sun. Skim-board, body surf, swim with the Great Whites in the triangle and watch seal pups erupt out of the water in the jaws of a shark was my childhood as I swam desperately to Bo-bo shores. Now I’m older and experience says wiser but I can’t be sure.

            I stayed at the Like View guest House; ph # 083-5684752 or 082-1877785. The phone is best versus a site. No one looks, not even the owners. Make a phone call and you have a place to stay for cheap. The qwner/wife speaks proper English and the husband, god bless him, is a non-English speaking gentleman that will do anything to make you happy and content in the shadow of the pagoda. Highly recommended for many reasons. Oh yes, and these people have an ‘IN’ on guides for trekking in Northern Thailand. This brings me to my point in a round about fashion. I wanted to walk to Pai, 120-130 kilometers away through the jungle. Next blog.

www.davidcdagley.com

Burmese Secret Police

Burmese Secret Police

I took a bus from Bagan to Pyay that takes about 10 hours. It was on a single lane public road and drove through some of the most beautiful countryside I’ve seen since entering Myanmar.  Bagan is on east bank of the Irrawaddy River that has its own contour to the ocean. The road on the other hand climbs along the foothills with confluence flash flood beds and living creeks running from east to west. We dropped into a low valley for a bus break just at sunset. The bus needed attention both with water for the cooling and some not so delicate hammering on the linkage. We hung out about an hour. The restaurant owner asked me who I was, where from, where to, how long, etc. etc. I didn’t eat anything just paced around and moved my legs for the second half of the journey and the sun set as I stood in the middle of the road. The road was engulfed in gigantic Tamarind trees and I became surrounded by little old ladies selling their food trays of stuff that had out lived its shelf life.

As I clambered out at the bus station in Pyay there were only two or three hard-sell tuk-tuk drivers about and one spoke fair English. His face and throat were full of beetle-nut, his teeth stumps were half sawn and heavily stained red. Yoshi from Japan, the only other tourist on the bus, and I teamed up for the ride into town, about 5 kms away. Yoshi knew he was staying at the Lucky Dragon and I asked for the cheapest place in the neighborhood. Our driver mentioned the Sri Ksetra Tour that I agreed to if there was more than one person.

The Sri Ksetra tour of the museum and city and palace grounds were well worth it as I wrote in the last blog. The next day after the tour I ventured up and down the quaint little crossroads town, north-south meets east-west. Bagan is to the north, Yangon to the south south-east, Arakine (Rakine) State to the west and the Irrawaddy delta to the east. The tuk-tuk driver drove me by a beer station for a take away and on to Pann Gabar Guest House. 342 Merchant Street, Pyay. Tel. (053) 26543. $7/night with bathroom down the hall and breakfast included. The guesthouse boasts WiFi but not Internet. It does have it but it’s weak. Guests are better off crossing the street to and Internet restaurant with good food but not at midnight.

I had lunch at a sports bar/restaurant and then wandered around for another couple hours before returning for a shower and some writing. I stopped in and watched a board game on a corner for half an hour. I will recreate this game in the future. The game was played on a roughly 3’ by 3’ square raised framed polished wood surface. It can be played by two or four.

Around 8 pm I decided to go back to the Sports Bar/Restaurant to disconnect from my day, to disengage from the manuscript I’m writing, and just to detach, have a beer and watch football (soccer) in a language I have only touched the surface. At the time I had a few days left in Myanmar, a country I have only scratched the surface of and find more intriguing everyday. So I sat there for about an hour enjoying the sport and cold beer when an Indian-Burmese man moved in and sat at my table without invite. My skin crawled. I knew who he was before he and his sulky companion sat down and grilled me. My night was shot. One man watched with narrow eyes as the other pounded questions who, what, where, when, why and wanted passport number, email address, and I watched as the staff coward away from my table and kept their heads lower than his as they passed. I handed him my book card that has two websites and an email address on it. He looked it over then asked me for another email address, a gmail.com address. I told him that my email address is on the card. He wanted it anyway and I denied him. He followed up with wanting a meeting tomorrow and where was I staying? I of course followed up with the Lucky Dragon and why would a secret police officer want to hang out with a tourist. I had plans and he wasn’t part of it. I said sure, meet at 10 tomorrow. The two officers got up and went back to their old table and broke out their smart phones with out paying.

I paid my bill and left in the direction of the Lucky Dragon. Soon into the shadows I sprinted down a couple crooked streets grabbed my stuff, hopped a tuk-tuk and boarded a night bus for Yangon. Before the bus arrived at the Yangon bus station I got out at a small town with a short string of roadside cafes just after day break and had Roti and Sweet tea. This was all just in case there was a welcoming committee at the other end. I began suspecting the tuk-tuk driver in Pyay of being a go between, a plausible conclusion considering how many doors he could open compared to maybe some others.

This same thing happened to me in Moulmein where I was hit up by two secret police with the same standard questions and their answer for asking the questions was the same in both cases, ‘for your protection’, I wondered and still wonder, ‘from whom?’

I believe I was more or less targeted because I’ve been to Burma before and I’ve written a book about the repression I observed first hand. I buried a non-fiction part two, in a fiction sandwich in my book, ‘Cale Dixon and the Moguk Murders’ so I could get back in the country. Somebody told me recently, ‘Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean your not being followed.’ In Burma the old saying of the locals was, 'The walls have eyes and ears' and they wouldn't talk to foreigners in fear of their families and prison or forced labor. Today, watch the locals as they move around. They will duck and bow at all costs to a mean secret police officer who abuses his power. The secret police have assimilated into the fabric of society and they're still taking notes and prisoners.

I only have one Burmese Blog left to put up and it’s meant to be a compilation of observations, helpful criticisms and awareness.

Hardback, softback, and E-books are available at:

www.davidcdagley.com