Dispatch is a series of first-person stories from the road. Readers can share their experiences, from the sublime to the strange.
In Yangon, everyone is a restaurateur. Come evening, scores of plastic chairs and tables, cute and tiny as a child’s tea set, are planted curbside up and down Maha Bandoola Road. Woks and pans, noodles and spice materialize. The steam, scent and sizzle set the tummy begging and still I was dubious, for those shrunken stools looked like fragile things and it was a relief to find the perch sturdy when I gingerly took a seat.
After Bangkok, with those Thai monikers for streets and temples that make Greek look monosyllabic – Wat Kalayanamitrworamahavihan took pride of place – it appeared Myanmar’s former capital would be a linguistic breeze. The city is Yangon. The airport is Yangon. The river is the Yangon. It was like that South Park planet where everything was marklar. So be it. I’d stroll down Yangon Road, book into the Yangon Hotel, absorb the Yangon market, then cap the day with a great heaping plate of Yangon.
That first great heaping plate was a great heaping bowl – a tangle of noodles, veggies and fried dough, with spicy hot broth ladled over it. It cost 300 kyat (about 35 cents) and after I’d slurped it halfway, I gave the vendor the thumbs up.
“This is really good,” I said. She beamed, and poured me another ladle gratis.
The soup finished, I wandered into the dusk, along one of the longest street markets in my experience, stopping for noshes of deep fried delights, savoury and sweet. Everyone was cooking. Everyone else was eating. All the rest were shopping: fruit stalls and veggie stalls and spice stalls; jewellery spread out on blankets; clothing and books and egg trays at knee level. The eggs spooked me and I checked my blundering gait, not wanting to scotch the day’s profits in a puddle of yolk.
There was an orderly method to this madness though. Bustle without bluster, people happy for your business but not busting your eardrums for it. A low pressure market. A rare thing.
The market dissipated, more or less, at Sule Paya, one of Yangon’s oldest temples, now a golden beacon bathed in floodlights.
By next morning, the street cafés had vanished, the market was in full vigour and I did a proper survey of Sule Paya, not the most ornate of Yangon’s great pagodas but with a history dating back 2,000 years. This day it was filled with chanting monks and worshipers, kneeling, praying, gathered at water stations to bathe the Buddha, surrounded by golden stuff. There were women and children wearing beige face paint. Like my soup vendor. What did it signify? One of the temple guides filled me in.
“It’s called thanaka,” he explained. “From up north. It’s from a root. It’s for the sun. For complexion.”
Outside the exits of Sule Paya, a woman was minding wooden cages, filled with fluttering sparrows on sale for 1,000 kyat a beak. She placed one in my hand but the bird was having none of it, squirming out immediately and soaring into the bright blue, snubbing my prepared ode to freedom and the open skies.
An hour’s walk north of Sule, Yangon’s great showpiece, Shwedagon pagoda loomed before me, 99 metres to its golden peak. Inevitably, as with all these glistening mounts of Buddha, I was suppressing a touch of jade. How much of this golden brilliance was genuine? How much was Sherwin-Williams?
A couple from Australia had come down by boat from Mandalay. We chatted by the south gate. They’d read the specs. The glitter evidently was the real deal.
“There’s 6,000 kilos of gold in Shwedagon,” they said.
Curious, how much better that made me feel. I checked my shoes as required and started up the grade of tiled steps, ignoring the kiosks but stopping for a periodic pant. At the summit I caught my breath again, this time in wonder. The place was staggering, a massive stupa surrounded by a city of temples. Sixty-four pagodas. Sixty-four different legends, augmented with icons, carvings, mirrored columns. Single Buddhas, families of Buddhas, Buddhas in white, Buddhas in gold, golden stupas, golden latticework; 6,000 kilos of golden things; mini-temples inside maxi-temples; graceful overlapping roofs of green; a magnificent bell of black and red; people kneeling; people at the wash stations; people lighting incense to place in little sandboxes; an attendant lighting a young woman’s cigarette, which she placed upright in the same box, amid the tiny forest of incense and other cigarettes.
There’s a king’s ransom in gemstones, too, capped by the 76-carat diamond atop Shwedagon’s great stupa. This seemed to warrant tight security, but I was struck by the conspicuous lack of it – no guards, no guns, unless the monks were secretly packing. I’m sure they were present, drowned out by the splendour. If not, well then it was quite the honour system they had here in Yangon.
And yet somehow this was appropriate for this temple. For this city. At times stuffed to bursting, Yangon is never aggressive. Beneath the gold leaf and face paint is this marvellous serene chaos of markets and temples and spicy broth. A big heaping plate indeed.
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