Bagan to Mandalay by Way of Mt Poppa, the Home of the Nats
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| Myanmar |
Next morning we set out with Tin to drive to Mandalay. Mandalay is less than 200km northeast of Bagan, but it would take all day as we included a lengthy detour to Mt Popa
We travelled through lush green countryside on
well-maintained roads which may not have been wide, but were more than ample for the minimal traffic. We passed people working in the fields, some ploughing with oxen, grazing cattle, each cow attended by its own
personal egret, and overtook bullock carts.
A Roadside Village Enterprise
Hoping to snare passing tourists, several villages have set up small enterprises beside the road. We stopped at one and watched a man making peanut oil.
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| Grinding peanuts near Bagan |
The ox plodded round and round with a resigned tread, the pestle ground and creaked in the mortar, and the oil dripped out, slowly but steadily.
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| Grinding peanuts near Bagan |
As we watched man and ox, we were in turn watched by a small boy, his face smeared with thanakha as protection against the sun.
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| We were, in turn, watched by a small boy, his face smeared with thanakha... |
Peanuts grew all around, we had seen the crop before but never realised what it was. Uprooted and ready for processing it is clear why the
peanut is not a nut at all despite its name.
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| Recently uprooted peanuts |
At this point a tour bus arrived. A large man with an even larger camera started distributing balloons to the assembled small children, hoping they would smile happily for his camera. This sort of behaviour is unwise and destructive, leading children to expect, and then demand gifts from passing foreigners, but at Myanmar’s current state of tourist development the children looked at the floppy brightly-coloured rubber with bemusement. The man did not get his picture.
The peanut grinder abandoned his ox and shinned up the nearest palm tree. Slicing the bottom from the flowers he hung earthenware
containers beneath them to collect the sap and returned to earth with full
containers from his previous climb.
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| Collecting palm sap |
He delivered them to his fellow villagers who had set up a small factory and shop under a palm-leaf roof a few paces away.
Two things can be done with palm sap. Giving it a vigorous boil while stirring with equal vigour drives off the liquid leaving a brownish mush.
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| Boiling and stirring |
This unrefined sugar is balled up by hand and made into sweets either on its own or mixed with coconut or tamarind. We tasted them, and they were lovely, the palm sugar giving a depth of flavour not just sweetness. We bought several bags, some went home as presents, others did not get so far.
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| Balling the residue into sweets |
The other possibility is to pour it into large jars and let it ferment.
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| Fermenting toddy |
The result, toddy, can be drunk as it is or distilled into a spirit which they were selling at 30% alcohol. I have previous with home distilled spirits
(most recently rice ‘wine’ in Vietnam) and consider myself a connoisseur. This
one was clean, gently flavoured and just a little too bland; perhaps better at
40%, I thought.
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| Distilling toddy |
Snacks had been laid out in lacquerware bowls, and we helped ourselves to peanuts, beans, shredded ginger, and pounded sesame. In the centre
was a tangle of leq-p’eq, fermented green tea leaves. It sounds unlikely, looks
a mess, but is basic Burmese comfort food.
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| Snack with fermented tea leaves |
Some local favourites remain local and you have to be a local to enjoy them; foods like Tibetan tsampa (a staple of pounded, roasted
barley enhanced with yak butter to give it the flavour of rancid sawdust),
Mongolian sun-dried cheese (the consistency of a potsherd and the taste of a
herdsman’s socks) and good old Marmite. Others, like Egyptian kushari (a
mixture of noodles, rice, lentils and caramelised onions with a spicy tomato
sauce) and Vietnamese pho (noodle soup with chicken or beef) are immediately
attractive.
Fermented tea sounds and looks like it should come in the first category, and we tasted it apprehensively. It was, though, delicious, a
richly savoury accompaniment to the nuts and fried chick peas.
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| Leq-p’eq - fermented tea leaves centre stage |
The bus party had now reached the handicraft and sweetie stall. There was a mild commotion as the stallholder declined to accept a proffered
banknote. The French tourists, their guide and several Burmese villagers stared
at the note in turn but seemed unable to work out what it was. I joined in and being
able to read Cyrillic (as fluently as a primary school child) I was able to tell them
that it was a 500 som note, worth about 15p in Uzbekistan and diddley squat
anywhere else.
It had been given to a French tourist in change elsewhere, though how it came to be in Myanmar is a mystery. I had been unimpressed with the scam attempted on me in the restaurant the previous night, but here someone had passed a note that was the wrong shape (it was obviously squarer than kyat notes), the wrong colour (clearly different dyes had been used), on the wrong paper (it felt different) and written in the wrong alphabet. I was impressed by their cheek – and worried about the stupidity of the person who had accepted it.
We let the bus depart, inspected the crops and photographed each other among some impressive gourds. Then it was back to the road.
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| Among the impressive gourds |
A New Water Station
We rolled on through lush green countryside that looked strangely English, if you ignore the tropical vegetation.
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| The road to Mandalay - looking strangely like rural England? |
We passed a water station where a deep well had been fitted with diesel pumps to provide a plentiful supply of clean water. We are so used
to water appearing at the turn of a tap that we forget how lucky we are. For
the locals this is a big step forward, even if the water is ox-carted to their
door rather than piped.
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| Filling up at the water station |
Robe Giving Ceremony
A little further along, rounding a low bluff, we heard the sound of an amplified voice above us. ‘Robe giving ceremony,’ said Tin, telling the driver to stop.
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| The temple on a low bluff |
We made our way up to the small temple from which the voice was coming. Inside a shed, albeit a shed with rich interior decorations,
villager leaders were presenting a group of senior monks with new robes. November heralds the onset
of winter – though not a ‘winter’ we would recognise – and monks are traditionally
presented with new thicker robes to keep them warm.
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| Monks being presented with their winter robes |
We poked our heads into the middle of their ceremony and instead of scowling at the intruders everybody smiled in welcome. Buddhists do this.
Outside, volunteers were preparing to feed the whole village, building fires and
filling vast pots with chopped vegetables and dismembered chickens. Everything
looked fresh and wholesome and we would probably have been asked to lunch if we
had lingered, but it was only ten o’clock and we had places to go.
Popa Village
The road rose into more hilly country. We paused at the large village of Popa to look round,....
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| The centre of Popa Village |
....and photograph a butterfly.
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| A common sailor, neptis hyalis, (I think) Popa |
Taung Kalat, a Sacred Volcanic Plug and Pilgrimage Centre
We descended into a valley, stopping on the way down to take a short walk for a panoramic view of Taung Kalat, a volcanic plug topped with a Buddhist temple. Mount Popa is an extinct volcano, the 1,518 m (4,980 ft)summit with its large broken caldera is a couple of kilomtres beyond the plug. Sometimes known as the home of the Nats (though traditionally only two of them live there) the frequently encountered description of Mt Popa as Myanmar’s Mt Olympus is strictly for tourists.
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| The home of the Nats, Mt Popa |
Continuing into the valley we reached the settlement at the base of the volcanic plug. From here stairs set off up Taung Kalat. Opposite them is a room containing statues of all 37 Great Nats, remnants from pre-Buddhist Myanmar. When King Anawrahta introduced Buddhism in the
11th century there were only 36 Nats. Destroying their temples and banning animal sacrifices created fierce opposition so he
added a 37th. Thagyamin was a Hindu deity cognate with Indra, who had paid
homage to the Buddha. By declaring Thagyamin ‘King of the Nats’ he effectively subordinated
the Nats to Buddha. Some senior Buddhists would like to see Nat worship
downgraded if not abandoned, and Tin was distinctly sniffy ('good luck mascots for the uneducated') but they remain
important in the lives of many ordinary people.
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| The Great Nats, Popa |
After paying our respects to the Nats we set off up Taung Kalat - a climb of 225m and (allegedly) 777 steps. Passing between the plaster elephants guarding the entrance, we removed our shoes and began the ascent.
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| The entrance to the steps |
At the lower level there were shrines, stalls and lots of monkeys. When it dawned on Tin that we intended to go right to the top, he found a bench and said he would wait.
It was not an arduous climb. We were shielded from the sun by a corrugated iron roof and the higher we got the stronger the refreshing breeze
became. The steps were smooth – important when walking in bare feet – and we encountered many young men busy polishing them who seemed happy to take a small tip for their troubles. Generally the steps were shallow as they wound round
the volcanic plug, but in a couple of more awkward sections there were metal companionways.
At the top was a standard Burmese temple with many gold painted stupas and statues. A week ago it would have amazed us, but we
were now somewhat blasé.
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| Lynne at the temple on the top, Taung Kalat |
Better than the temple should have been the views, back to the plain we had crossed,....
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| Looking back at the plain we had crossed, Mt Taung Kalat |
.... down to the settlement and over the wooded hillsides, the site of every village being marked by a cluster of gold painted stupas. Unfortunately it was not a day of great visibility.
Surprisingly few had made the effort to walk to the top, and very few of those were foreigners, though this is, supposedly a popular half day trip from Bagan.
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| Looking down on the village from Taung Kalat |
We counted the steps on the descent, 777 is the traditional number but every guide book gives a different precise figure. We got to 673 but I have little confidence in that, partly because we had a debate about which steps to include (all of them when you go down and then up on the split level at the top? What about the steps through the stalls by the entrance?) and partly because we were distracted.
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| Lynne descends one of the companionways |
One section had been heavily colonised by monkeys. Clapping your hands and marching determindly forward seemed to be the approved technique, and it was
largely successful except that one monkey leapt onto the head of an woman some
way below us. My stereotyped expectation was that a tourist would scream,
whereas a local would brush it off and aim a kick at its backside. Not so, the
unfortunate local woman who was the victim did indeed scream and indulge in
some mild panic. Fortunately there were a couple of nearby step polishers who
came to her assistance. Apart from shock - and some loss of dignity – no harm
was done.
We had come 60 km and has another 190 to go so it was time to be back on the road.
We
skirted the hills for an hour so before stopping for lunch at a roadside restaurant. Despite being called ‘The Crown’, it had few similarities with a British pub. A wooden construction, it had a roof but only one wall which
separated the diners from the kitchen, and provided somewhere to pin the
inevitable poster of An Sang Suu Kyi.
It was packed with locals when we arrived but we found a table for four (the two of us, Tin and the driver) on the balcony. Outside half
a dozen women stood with metal trays on their heads packed with chickens,
plucked, trussed and ready for the oven. It seemed a strange place to hawk
chickens but Tin said the village was famous for them though we saw no sales.
We had arrived a little late, by local standards, so the restaurant was emptying by the time our food arrived. As usual they brought the whole menu
including pork, chicken, lentils, shredded cabbage, bean sprouts, tomatoes,
chillies, caramelised onions, pickled lime, fried watercress and chicken soup.
We also ordered two bottle of beer to share between the three of us who were
not driving, but it was the driver who pointed out that tokens inside the crown
corks offered prizes. Our first bottle won a free bottle, and our second 1000
Kyat off the meal. The third - the free bottle - was a loser, but we had to leave something
for the other punters.
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| Lunch at 'The Crown', Me, Lynne and our helpful (if sadly nameless) driver |
Shortly after lunch we reached the main road through the central plain from Yangon to Mandalay via Naypyidaw. Naypyidaw (pronounced nappy-door) was purpose built to be the new capital replacing Yangon in 2005. As we would soon discover,
almost every city in Myanmar has been the capital at some stage.
We had the well-built four-lane duel-carriageway to ourselves and quickly finished the last and longest section of our journey.
With or without Kipling’s intervention, the very name 'Mandalay' conjures up
images of the romantic and exotic. It is in fact a large sprawling city with
dusty streets, tatty low rise buildings and sweaty people (maybe I am just
speaking for myself, but it is a hot and humid place). We arrived at rush hour,
which created some difficulties, but again we noticed how orderly Myanmar’s
traffic is – at least by East Asian standards.
Zegyo street market takes up a huge chunk of central Mandalay. There is also a covered section and our hotel was above that, the
entrance seemingly just a lift door in the middle of the market. The staff,
though, were welcoming, the room clean, the bed comfortable and the shower
functioning - what more could we want? We opened the curtains and found our room
looked straight out on Mandalay’s central mosque. Clearly we would have no
difficulty hearing the dawn call to prayer. Mandalay has a sizeable Muslim
community, mainly Bengalis who were either brought here by the British raj or came
here to exploit opportunities created by the raj. If we were woken early we
only had ourselves to blame.
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| Mandalay Central Mosque from our bedroom window |
We said goodbye to Tin and the driver who were heading straight back to Bagan, went for a stroll to orientate ourselves, took a shower
and then it was time for dinner.
Having spotted nothing particularly attractive during our stroll, we consulted the Lonely Planet and decided to head for Nay a
restaurant promising curry snacks and fresh chapattis. It had no sign - or even
premises - setting out its roadside tables as darkness falls. Close to the
address given in the guide book we came across a double row of tables on the
pavement and at the end of it a large bearded man frying chapattis on a mobile
cooker.
He seemed delighted to see us and showed us the contents of his huge pots. We chose mutton curry, a piece of chicken and, inevitably, some chapattis. His
co-owner (smaller, no beard, some English) conducted us to the only free table
and shortly a boy brought a pot of green tea. We turned over the cups on the
table and sat drinking tea until the lad returned with the food. He was then joined
by a younger child and the two of them stood and stared at us as we ate.
After a while the smaller man (their father?) shooed them away, apologised and
asked if we liked the food. We said that we did and he could not have been more
pleased – and it was good, too.
When we had finished the bill came to almost nothing and the genuine pleasure of the owners at having entertained some foreign diners made
it feel strangely special. As we left the younger boy took away our plates while
the older one wiped the table with a greasy rag. Then he tipped out our
unfinished tea and replaced the cups upside-down on the table.
As we walked back through the dark, warm, night we wondered if we had been wise. There were, however, no repercussions and I would recommend Nay to anyone – just take some water and wash your teacups before putting them to your lips.
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