Category Archives: Southeast Asia

Yangon – Shwedagon Pagoda

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It was (still) our first day in Myanmar, but at the Shwedagon Pagoda we could no longer pretend we were in any kind of a familiar place. Whatever hallucinogen permeates our air, there’s a different one here.

The Shwedagon Pagoda is the most holy Buddhist site in Myanmar. And certainly the most golden. The central stupa is covered in gold plates. We’re talking heavy things here, not the molecule-thin gold leaf that covers so many pagodas, stupas, and buddhas throughout the land. We’re talking substantial pounds, if not tons, of pure gold here. Oh yes, and plenty of gold leaf all about, too. And when there wasn’t enough of that, gold paint.

A word about Buddhist religious sites in Myanmar. They come in two varieties:

  • Pagodas are buildings that you can enter, like churches. Often they have images of Buddha inside. People can enter them, and often do.
  • Stupas are solid objects, generally bell-shaped, and often with an airy decoration on the top called an “umbrella.” They generally contain holy relics or else perhaps the ashes of important people. There is no way in.

The central stupa of Shwedagon Pagoda is said to contain eight hairs of the actual Buddha, and so it is a very holy site indeed, hence all the gold.

The Pagoda sits atop a marble-paved platform about 12 acres in size high on a hill overlooking the city. Its central stupa is surrounded by a large number (fifty? sixty? more?) of other stupas, pagodas, and spots for particular kinds of worship or meditation. Below are pictures of just a few.

The entrance to the pagoda from the stairway (or elevator) foreshadows the surreal environment to come.

It gets more intense as you enter the main area where the central stupa stands.

Here is a good view of the entire central stupa.

At the top of the stupa (hard to see here) is the obligatory umbrella. This one is encrusted with thousands (I think the number is five thousand) of diamonds and other gems. But you can get a sense of just how huge this gold-plated stupa is.

Among the places of worship surrounding the central stupa are eight stations related to the days of the week. (For reasons that I forget, Wednesday is divided into two.) People worship or pray or meditate at these different stations for different reasons. They may have been born on that day of the week, for example. In Myanmar, the day (of the week) of one’s birth is much more important than the date of one’s birthday, which I learned (by virtue of celebrating a birthday there) is nothing special. Or it might be a special day for any personal reason. Or it just might be the day one happens to be there.

In any event, the picture below shows the station for Tuesday. People are pouring and pouring the water from the fountain over all the images at the station. Encouraged by both guide and husband–and feeling consummately foolish–I did it too. But I didn’t feel nearly as foolish as I would have, had I been moved like the man at the bottom right of the picture to use the water for brushing the guardian lion’s teeth.

Here are a couple of close-ups of shrines immediately surrounding the central stupa.

 

 

At pagodas all around the platform like these…

…people and Buddhas intermingle freely.

  

It was at the Shwedagon Pagoda that I first encountered the phenomenon of the Electric Halo, the perfect finishing touch for a revered Buddha statue. I only wish these photos could show how they flash like fireworks.

 

Yangon – the working waterfront

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Seeing the life of the workers was, for Dan and me, one of the highlights of our trip to Myanmar. This is the first of a number of posts showing people at work. The waterfront in question served the crossing of the wide Yangon River for river traffic traveling between Yangon and the southern regions of the country. The river was not deep enough here for large seagoing vessels but instead served the local fleets.

And working on the waterfront were also vendors of goods and food to serve the stevedores and the travelers.

One of these flower vendors gave me a rose. No questions, no money expected. Just a rose. This is when I first began to understand that the people of Myanmar are friendly, kind, generous, and open. As a stranger, I felt good to be among them.

 

Here we are looking at an outdoor restaurant for the workers. The lady in the turquoise top is the cook and the waitress. (She’ll probably wash the dishes, too.) The gentleman standing on the left is not a customer; he is our estimable guide Zaw.

We also saw some workers–stevedores, perhaps–taking a break from the grind to play a soccer-like game with a woven (cane? bamboo?) ball.

There were small boats for the short trip just across the river and larger boats for the longer trips downriver. Some of the latter even had staterooms; others carried merchandise and goods on the lower level, where a ferry in the U.S. would carry cars.

   

Vendors were packaging the bulk goods on site.

Some of these packages are so heavy that it takes three men to lift one of them onto the shoulders of one man. And once loaded up, the stevedores literally run from the vendors to the ships. They are paid piece work, so the more packages they can load, the more they make that day. It’s grueling work, not for the faint-of-heart.

 

Just by the boats, other vendors sell a last-minute meal or snack for the journey. The boat below is about to depart, and so the lady in the flowered shirt with the green stools has gathered her tray of unsold pastries from the stool in front of her so that she can head over to where the next boat will soon be leaving.

The young couple below impressed me as unhappy. They seemed to need customers very much, but had none.

Each boat, in its turn, departs at last.

 

 

 

 

Yangon – The Reclining Buddha (Chaukhtatgyi Pagoda)

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Just as we entered Chaukhtatgyi Pagoda and removed our shoes, we were assailed by a violent noise like a jackhammer. But louder. It seemed so… irreverent. Not at all right for a pagoda containing a huge image of the Buddha.

“What’s that noise?” I asked our guide Zaw, who knows everything.

He looked at me with a funny, squinty look for just a moment, a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look. But he saw that I really didn’t know, and so he answered simply, “Rain.”

And indeed it was rain. The most heavens-let-loose downpour of our entire visit to Southeast Asia (and this was the monsoon season) had begun just as we entered the one pagoda on our tour with a metal roof. We had to shout to be heard. It was truly spectacular.

So is the Buddha, of course. Maybe it isn’t the largest reclining Buddha in Southeast Asia, but at over two hundred feet long, it’s large enough to be quite impressive. And certainly it isn’t the oldest Buddha image in Southeast Asia, having been completed originally in 1907 and extensively (entirely???) reconstructed in 1973. But the Buddha’s face is sweet and serene.

And he has the neatest footprints ever. (They indicate all of the [insert large number here–150???] previous lives of Buddha before he was Buddha, only ten of which were as humans. The rest were animals–no dogs or cats, though.)

We weren’t the only ones hanging out in the temple while it rained.

But not to worry: the rain stopped just before we left.

 

Yangon — Scott’s Market

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Bogyoke Aun San Market was built in 1926 by the British and called “Scott’s Market” after James George Scott, a colonial administrator of the period. I don’t know why. Did he commission the building of the market? Or did he like to shop for bargains there at the time? No matter…we tourists can come and shop for bargains there now. It is a huge shed building occupied mostly by vendors of jewelry and handicrafts of all sorts.

And (reputedly) the best moneychangers in Myanmar.

In fact, Scott’s Market is so popular with tourists and locals alike that ancillary markets have sprung up on either side of it, selling more tourist goods as well as household supplies of all kinds. And–always, even in the alleys in between–food.

Yangon–the Fabric of the City

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If Yangon (or, as we were wont to call it, Rangoon) were a fabric, it would be a fine quality one, satin with gold embroidery, a beautiful piece, but old, frayed and torn. But it would be repaired in a haphazard manner, perhaps by a person who didn’t know how to do it, or who didn’t have the needed matching threads and pieces to work with. And who, despite the fabric’s sad condition, is still using it, an old favorite.

Piranesi meets William Gibson in the ruins of the British Raj.

The main traffic circle downtown displays some of this quality: a pagoda tightly surrounded by shops in what, in Europe, would be a medieval manner. Surrounded in turn by several (four?) lanes of traffic.

Sule Pagoda

 

But the thing that struck Dan and me the most in the downtown area of Yangon was the unusually fine heritage of British Raj-era buildings that were in an unusual–perhaps even dangerous–state of decay. And occupied anyway. This decay may have been exacerbated by the government’s removal of the capital and its accompanying administrative functions to Naypyidaw in 2005. According to at least one source, Yangon has (or had) the largest number of colonial-period buildings in southeast Asia.

Here’s one, one side of which has completely crumbled away, been overgrown by vegetation, and is still used for…something…

 

Here’s another.

Other buildings, whether Raj-era or not, display a similar surreal quality.

Out in the neighborhoods, the lack of infrastructure becomes apparent, but so does the vibrancy of community life.

Every apartment or condo has its own unique electric wire from the pole (rather than one larger wire to bring electricity into the building, then separating it there). This makes for interesting electrical vistas.

Not all the streets are paved. (The sidewalks are worse.)

But there are cafes…

…where friends enjoy getting together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Southeast Asia

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In the near future, I am going to begin posting a (long) series of blog entries about Dan’s and my recent trip to Singapore, Myanmar, and Cambodia. I’ve been through a first-pass edit of literally thousands of photographs, and I’m culling the best few that will give you a flavor of what the places, the people, and the activities were like, without putting you into visual overload.

So that you can get a sense of the big picture, here’s a table of contents, of sorts. I’ll start with Myanmar (Burma), move on to Cambodia, and then show Singapore. This is not the order in which we traveled. We traveled to Singapore first, then Myanmar, Cambodia, and (briefly, no pictures) Thailand. However, the order I’m using makes sense as we will move from the most removed from what we consider the “modern” world to the most modern.

Inside Myanmar, I’ll show some highlights of Yangon (Rangoon, until recently the capital) first, then Bagan (a UNESCO World Heritage site), bustling Mandalay, and the enchanting and surreal Inle Lake. Each of these may require more than one entry, so it’s going to be a longer Web journey than the actual trip. But I hope you’ll stay with me on this visual adventure!