Then it was called Burma – the ruling military changed its name in 1989 – and I’d been a hippy travelling around SouthEast Asia on my way back to a farming career.
Don’t think poorly of me because of the hippy admission.
I was in good company. George Harrison, John Lennon, Carly Simon and Jack Nicolson, as well as a bunch that became billionaire businesspeople.
If you want a closer to home example, there’s that bastion of Wairarapa conservatism and success Derek Daniell. I note that he never puts pictures of himself of his halcyon days with his long locks, flowery robes, driving around California in his Cloud Nine V8 wagon airbrushed with blue sky, birds and rainbows, as he sought out his guru when he published his ram newsletter.
To get into Burma in 1983 wasn’t easy. It was just starting to open its borders a crack after 35 years of self-imposed isolation. I was in the first several hundred to visit since WW2. I had to fly in from Bangladesh and then exactly a week later be on a Biman Bangladesh plane heading for Thailand. To overstay was a bad idea. All the land and sea borders were shut tight.
It had been a British colony until the Japanese invaded during the war and was granted independence in 1948 and then in 1962, the military had a coup d’état and ran it as a unique military dictatorship with an underlying socialist Buddhist ethos.
For all its independent life, it has been beset with rampant ethnic strife because of the myriad ethnic groups, leading to an ongoing civil war and gross human right breaches as we have seen recently with the appalling treatment and genocide of the Rohingya Muslims.
Which is such a shame as it is a country rich in resources, a proud history and during my visit, lovely gracious people.
I landed in Rangoon, now called Yangon, and straight away jumped into a train that travelled through the night with all the lights fully lit and loud garish music blasting from the speakers. I spent the day in Mandalay as I’d previously read the likes of Somerset Maugham, some of whose books were set in this area.
I found the ferry to take me down the Irrawaddy River in the dark and was directed to the cabin with the other foreigners, found a spare bunk and, given the sleepless night before, fell into a deep slumber.
When I woke at dawn, the ferry was on its way down river and I listened to three fellows chatting and thought ‘those are Kiwis not Aussies’. I hadn’t bumped into a Kiwi for a couple of months. Then a couple asked them if they were Kiwis and announced so were they. I piped up and the two remaining Americans, along with the six New Zealanders, were dumbfounded at this sudden national reunion of a small country all in the most unlikely place to be.
The ferry got stuck a couple of times until leaving us on the jetty of the ancient city of Pagan, which is why we had all travelled to Burma to see.
It was a remarkable experience wandering around the remains of over 2000 temples and pagodas, which were spread across hundreds of hectares with farmers tilling the fields amongst them.
At this ancient city’s peak in the 9th to 13th century, there had been 10,000 of these structures and many left were still huge and in not bad shape. Still housing their giant buddhas who have gazed solemnly at gawking tourists for 800 years.
But it was the rampant temple building and the reduced tax take that made the Pagan Empire vulnerable and Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai swept down from Mongolia and finished off the kingdom in 1286, and Pagan, having once housed 200,000 people, became a dusty forgotten village.
I swapped a couple of t-shirts with a farmer for two of the 1000-year-old clay opium pipes he had ploughed up. These pipes later caused a very intimate examination from the Australian Border staff on my way home, but remain some of my most prized possessions. Nowadays, you wouldn’t take archaeological artifacts out of a country and wouldn’t be allowed to. In my defence, these villagers had 100s of them.
Over the last few years, Myanmar has been struggling back to democracy as the ruling junta slowly released its grip on power. But at the beginning of February, they conducted a coup, seized power and imprisoned the leaders of the party that had recently won a landslide at last year’s election.
Now people are taking to the streets in demonstrations angry at this turn of events.
The military has responded by putting conflict-ready troops on the streets.
The Burmese military have turned their guns on their own people in the past and the situation building is not good.
One must hope that the internal and international pressure, along with modern technology able to broadcast real time happenings, stays the army’s weapons.
It’s a naïve wish, but I hope this is a country that can find its way back to real democracy and learn to deal with its ethnic problems and then use the natural wealth to benefit all its citizens.
