Mount Popa

Mt. Popa.  Taung Kalat is the volcanic plug left-center and about a third of the way in.

                                                                                                                                                           Waguang

Mt. Popa, showing the caldera, debris breach, and volcanic plug Taung Kalat

The caldera is about 1.6 km wide and 850 m deep.

 Taungkalat Monastery  

 

Nats were human beings who met violent deaths and returned as forest and mountatin guardian spirits.  The Burmese worship of nats predates Buddhism.  Today some urban Burmese dismiss them as superstition.  More generally there is a syncretism between  nat and Buddhist beliefs, actual practice combining the two.  Properly propitiated nats can make life easier.  If one gets on their wrong side, they can make life a living hell.  However viewed, they are a  real part of people's lives.

Mount Popa is considered the abode of Burma's most powerful Nats and as such is the most important nat worship center.  There is a small shrine in the village at the base of Taung Kalat.

The Nat shrine in Taung Kalat  was 50 km or so from our lodgings.  On the way we stopped at a toddy palm plantation to see how the candy treat jaggery was made.The shrine village had macaque monkeys hopping about, on house ledges, in the street, and hillsides. 

Following our visit to the Nat shrine we had a nice lunch at the Popa Mountain Resort Hotel atop a hillside on the slopes overlooking the Bagan plains, after which we drove to the Bagan airport for our hour-and-a-half flight back to Yangon.

Tomorrow I will catch a flight through Bangkok to Siem Riep, Cambodia to see Angkor Wat..

END of  the blog Myanmar, Land of Blue Mists.

Acknowledgments:  

     This trip would not have been possible without the meticulous planning of Betchart Expeditions.

     I thank them for making my time in Myanmar educational, fun, and adventurous.

     Chris Carpenter, our expedition leader lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand.  He is one of a kind.

     Sanda, our local guide while in Myanmar, ferreted out the nooks, crannies, and good food that     

     made Burma special, not just a "sight-see".

Copyright Notice

     All photographs in this blog, except those explicitly attributed to others,
     are  © 2013 Walter Richard Holmquist.  All rights reserved.

Temples and Pagodas of Bagan

                                                                                                                                                 Gerd Eichmann

Wooden Figure in Shwezigon Pagoda

During the Pagan Kingdom's heyday, the Bagan Plains had some 10,000 Buddhist monasteries, temples, and pagodas.  Today around two thousnd remain.  We visited five of these, shown on the map,  that were within a 5 km striking distance of our lodging.  Some contained genuine treasures such as the wooden figure above.  All were interesting.

After lunch we visited a lacquerware shop to see it made on the spot.

Ananda Temple was so large I almost got lost in its maze of halls and chambers.  During World War II the local Burmese sought shelter in the temples from the Japanese armies.  Generally, even in Rangoon, the Japanese did not destroy the Buddhist temples.

Bagan

Bagan is 120 km or so downstream from Mandalay.  There is a ferry that takes 10 hours to make the trip.  tt was quicker to go by bus, which still made for a long, uneventful day over barren landscape.  A stop for lunch at Leptan Village and  street life in a small village we stopped at along the way broke the ride.  Arriving in Old Bagan mid-afternoon, we lazed on the terrace in front of our cottage, had a margarita (or two), and I enjoyed a before-dinner cheroot from the Inle Lake factory we visited four days earlier.

Bagan flourished between the 9th to 13th centuries as the religious, cultural, and political center of the Pagan Empire, overlapping in time the Angkor Watt complex in Cambodia during the 11th and 12th centuries.  The Mongol incursions between 1277 C.E. and 1301 C.E. led to the collapse of the empire, its population falling from around a hundred thousand to that of a small town.  It never recovered, many temples falling into disrepair both through neglect and earthquakes, though it continued as a minor religious pilgrimage site.  In the latter half of the 18th century, and in the 1990's the state undertook restoration projects, but with little attention paid to authenticity or use of quality materials.  As a result UNESCO has not recognized it as a World Heritage Site.

Despite all that, it is still awesome.

Work-a-day Mandalay

This was our last day in Mandalay and we used it to explore, on foot, work-a-day Burmese life in the older part of the city  --jade and precious/semiprecious gem markets; marble factories making statuary;  a bronze factory;  kalaga tapestry and wood carving workshops.  The untrained eye can have trouble distinguishing between a piece of carefully crafted jade-appearing mineral costing a few dollars, and another of real jade costing thousands.  The same holds true for other precious gems such as topaz, ruby, and sapphire.  Both the genuine and the imitations are found in the markets.  An innocent scam, caged birds.  You pay the seller a small amount to release one into the wild, freeing their spirit.  The birds have been trained however, to return to their cage.  The seller repeats the cycle.

The slide show opens with an architecturally modern monastery.  It closes, appropriately, with a two century old wooden teak monastery, reached by a horse-cart ride over dirt roads past fluorescent green rice paddies in the countryside.   Appropriately because tomorrow we would take the bus to the Bagan plains with its long history of Buddhist scholarship dating back to the 9th century.

Mingun

The night had not gone well.  Recognizing I was losing the battle, I began a course of ciproflaxin a few hours after midnight  --reluctantly, because the antibiotic wipes out one's best friends, the commensal bacteria of the gut, with more or less low-risk, but unpredictable, side-effects down the road such as a ruptured Achilles tendon, to, once recovered, the chance recolonization of the gut by some pernicious bacterium such as Clostridium difficile.

I sat out a morning opportunity to visit the U Bein Bridge in Amarapura, once the capital, but now subsumed by the urban sprawl of Mandalay.  This teak bridge, over a kilometer long, spans Lake  Taungthaman, and is as interesting for the activity going on below it as for the human processions on the bridge itself.

After a good lunch, by mid-afternoon I was myself again.  Our upriver destination was the small town of Mingun, by boat.  In 1790 C.E., King Bodapawya decided to build a monumental 150 meters tall stupa for himself.  He got to 50 meters before construction stopped after his death. Pahtodawgyi Stupa, still dominating both river-  and land- scapes, is now the largest pile of bricks in the world.

Bodapawya's  grandson, Prince Bagyidaw, at 18, married Princess Hsinbyume, 14.  After she died in childbirth when the prince was 27, he built Myatheindan, a beautiful white pagoda, in her memory. Different in style from other Burmese pagodas, it was built to represent Mt. Meru, which in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain mythologies, is the center of all physical, metaphysical and spiritual universes.  I did not get a very good picture of the pagoda, and in the slideshow below have used the beautifully composed photo of Myatheinedan by Duncan Davidson.

The Mingun Bell, weighing in at just under 91,000 kilograms, was ordered cast by King Bodapawya for his planned stupa. It was cast on the opposite side of the river, and its transport to Mingun makes an interesting story.  It is still in splendid working condition, and is rung, not by a clapper, but by striking its rim.  Nearby, some fellows were playing a local version of hackey sack.

For me, more than the above, the value was in the fun of crossing from the boat to the river bank over a putative gangplank barely wide enough for two bare feet (if they were put one in front of the other rather than side-by-side!), with a railing nothing more than a rope held by a man standing on the bank, then clambering up the bank, and walking, rather than taking a bullock cart, to the sites. I did take a cart back to the boat dock.  The cart and the deeply rutted paths contrived with each other in an attempt to pulverize my spine, two kidneys, and liver. The boat trip back to Mandalay on the Irrawaddy was a nice end to the afternoon.

Mandalay

From the Heho airport to Mandalay was 152 km.  Mandalay, the up-river town on the Irrawaddy River, was immortalized in Kipling's poem Mandalay which inspired Kurt Weill's Song of Mandalay, from Brecht's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagõnny in which the men in a bar in Alaska reminisce  on the pleasures to be found on the wharves of Mandalay.  The poem was also the inspiration for Oley Speaks' popular song On the Road to Mandalay.

Mandalay is a young city, only 156 years old.  It is approximately the same size as San Francisco with around a third of its population ethnic Chinese.  It was the last capital city of the Burmese Kingdom before the British occupation and  that of the Japanese in WW II . It is still the center of Burmese culture, and the main hub of Upper Myanmar's commerical, educational, and health enterprises.

In the afternoon we visited the Shwenandaw teak monastery, the only wooden monastery to survive the allied bombings of World War II.  Its wooden carvings are wonderful.

We also visited Kuthodaw Pagoda which contains the entire Buddhist tripitaka scriptures inscribed on over 700 marble slabs. These three scriptures make up the canons of Buddhist teachings:  the Sutras, the sermons of Buddha; the Abhidharma, the interpretations of Buddha's teachings; and the Vinaya, the regulations governing monastic life and personal behavior.

The sunset viewed from Mandalay Hill, and a dinner at the Green Elephant concluded the day.

Inle Lake: Rural Myanmar

     This was a grand day.  Awakening to blue mists over Inle Lake, after breakfast we took the canoes exploring the life of the lake, then took a canal six kilometers inland to Indein Village where the minority ethnic groups of the region --Intha Mon, Pa O, Palaung, other tribes of Shan state-- lived.  On the way, we stopped to visit a school, and from the school took a footpath to a cheroot factory on stilts over the water.  We were welcomed almost like family, given free cheroots filled with a mixture of tobacco leaves, tobacco stalk straw, chicory, and sweet jaggery.  A relaxing ride along the canal found us at Mr. Toe Restaurant where we stopped for lunch.

     In Indein Village, after lunch, we saw raw rural life unadorned by conveniences, people going about their day, noticing but unconcerned about our presence. We walked up a hill to an almost mystical complex of pagodas, both ancient and modern. Many of the pagodas in Myanmar are golden gilded marvels, built by kings or queens who could command the wealth and manpower for their construction. Here we saw the decaying ruins of centuries of history, some of the earliest pagodas being build of brick, and not gold leaf covered, and smaller pagodas build by families with lesser wealth but still of account in their community. Back on Inle Lake, we stopped at a silk factory where they made cotton as well as silk scarfs, shirts, and runners. I purchased a couple for my family back in California. We boated back across the lake to our cottages as the sun was setting, and night fell into the blue mists of the lake.

     This was the Burma I'd come to see. I was not disappointed.

Inle Lake

     This morning we explored the Pindaya Market and the temple grounds on the shore of Pone Taloke Lake.  After lunch we bussed to Nyaung Shwe the gateway for catching small skiffs at the canal leading into Inle Lake.  Skiffs with single cylinder diesel engines delivered us to the cottages/cabins on stilts in the middle of the lake where we would stay for two nights.  Leaving my duffel bag at the cabin we again boarded  skiffs to Nam Pan, a village built entirely on stilts.  We continued into the channels of the floating gardens.  The elevation of Inle Lake is 880 m, its length 22 km, its width 6 km.  It is, on the average shallow, only 1.5 m deep.  The gardens are anchored into the lake bed with bamboo poles. The soil, coming from the lake bed, is rich with nutrients, yielding a bounty of tomatoes and other vegetables.  We stopped at a wooden monastery Nga Phe Kyaung.  Looking like a barn about ready to collapse from the outside, inside there are some cultural gems.

Pindaya

Pindaya is about 470 km north of Yangon.  The name itself is interesting.  From Wikipedia,

According to local legend, the term Pindaya is a corruption of the word Pinguya, which translates to Taken the Spider in Burmese. The name arose from the legend that there was once a large spider which resided in the caves and it had captured a local princess. The princess was rescued when the giant spider was slain by a prince using a bow and arrow. When the spider was killed, the prince was said to have exclaimed that he had taken the spider, that is to kill it.

Though we  had come here to see the assemblage of thousands of Buddha images in the Shwe U Min cave, not for their number, but for their variety of construction  ---alabaster, teak, marble, brick, lacquer, and even cement, for me the delight was in being in rural Myanmar.

After leaving the airport in Heho we turned down a side road and were so taken by both the landscape and Burmese going about their everyday work, we stopped, and began walking down the road.  It was rewarding

There weren't many choices for lunch, but we found  the Green Tea restaurant with a lake view and as it turned out also very good food.

After lunch we dropped our stuff at our hotel.  It was only a 1.2 km hike up to the caves, but it was quite a steep walk in the hot sun.  We drove up, but a few in our group walked back down after visiting the caves.

We ended the day with relaxed conversation in the hotel bar.

Before we left the hotel the next morning Chiis showed us a mature loofah cucumber.  When young, they can be eaten.  When mature they become the fibrous "sponge" that is used for bathing.

While walking a road just outside the hotel, I came upon a spirit house nailed to a tree.

On  leaving Pindaya we stopped at a small family-run paper making shop.  The paper was hand made, one sheet at a time, from mashed mulberry leaves.  Sometimes flower petals were pressed into the wet mash. When the mash had dried the flowers would be an integral part of the paper.

Yangon

Pagodas embody the Buddhist soul of Myanmar.  Repositories of physical relics from Buddha himself, they are also places for individual worship and communal socializing.  During the 9th to 13th centuries there were over ten thousand of them.  Today some two thousand remain --time, war, nature and neglect having taken their toll.  They are ideal places to see Burmese art, architecture, sculpture, history, legend, religion, and social life all in one place.  We visited three.

Sule Pagoda, built during Buddhs's lifetime, is smack dead center in downtown Yangon.  It was the central point from which the British laid out the street plan of Rangoon, the former name for Yangon.  It houses a single strand of Buddha's hair.

A large industrial looking metal-roofed shed, Chauktatgyi Pagoda was built in 1899 and moved to its present site in 1966.  Its Reclining Buddha is 66 meters long and 16 meters high.  That's 22 stories long and 5 stories high guys and gals.  And that length is two-thirds the height of the Shwedagon Pagoda that so awed Kipling as he approached Rangoon by boat.

Shwedagon Pagoda has to be experienced to be believed.  It's construction, a reliquary for five of Buddha's hairs, dates to 588 B.C.E, though historians believe it was built by the Mon people sometime between the 6th and 10th centuries.  It is one of the more revered sites within Myanmar.  It's internal design reflects Myanmar astrological beliefs and rituals as well as Buddhist.  The atmosphere inside is one of constrained pandemonium  --citizens on cell phones, monkeys climbing the spires, young people getting to know each other in its more secluded public spaces.

There is another spiritual aspect of Burmese life interwoven with Buddhism:  nats, forest and mountain spirits who can intervene in one's life fortunes and misfortunes.  There are 37 principal nats  --from which the URL of this blog was taken.  But that is for a later post..

The slideshow below also shows some more secular aspects of Burmese life in Yangon.  These are described in the captions to the photos.