Back to civilization
Time warp! I am back to present tense after being shifted back about 100 years in time for the past 3 weeks! Yeah, that’s what Myanmar was like! I figured myself in Asia as it used to be years and years ago and nothing seemed to have changed! Among the most common public transport are still the numerous horse carts and trishaws (three-wheeled bikes). And if you use the ‘modern, air-coned’ overland buses, there’s bound to happen something on the way! Once, half of the bus had to get off to push the bus because we got stuck. A few times we had to stop for about 2 hours because of a flat tire or some other things that needed to be fixed! But the best was the story of Marcos (a fellow traveler from Spain I met in Yangon). His bus driver managed to have two accidents in 15 minutes. After the second one, the whole bus got up, grabbed their money back from the driver, dumped him there and took off in pick-ups to make the rest of the trip! So traveling in Myanmar can be quite adventurous ;-) Time is not really an issue here. My plane back to Bangkok had 4 hours delay !!! It actually arrived 4 hours late at the airport in Yangon and was ready for boarding again 15 minutes after !!! Security check??!?!? You also don’t have to be too fixed in your mind on where you want to go. We wanted to go to Kalaw (which was on the way to Inle lake) but the bus driver forgot to let us out in Kalaw, so we only realized an hour and a half after (at 3:30 in the morning) that we are way past. All right then, let’s go to Inle Lake! ‘No problem’ according to the bus driver ‘you can get a pick up back to Kalaw in just about 3 hours’ :-) Well, we still ended up in Inle Lake and in the end it turned out to be more than worth it. I think this picture here I took at dawn during our boat trip says it all:
Myanmar people are the most lovely and beautiful people I have ever met. Everybody greets you with a warm and hearty smile and asks you where you are from and where you are going to. And they help you out wherever and whenever they can without asking anything in return! If only all the people in the world could be like this. There are also the most bizarre and unusual people. Check out this old women in a temple in Bagan smoking the biggest cigar I have ever seen. I don’t want to see an X-Ray of her lungs ;-)
Myanmar people are truly happy people, they are laughing a lot and almost never complain! And that all despite the suppressing military regime. It doesn’t make life easy for the Myanmar people. They try to control the flow of money as much as possible. I had to hand over the five US$ to the taxi driver under the seat!! Locals are only supposed to have local currency. It was also interesting that the official exchange offices would give you 450 Kyats for 1 US$ whereas the normal black market rate is at about 950 Kyats per Dollar. I didn’t quite understand this tourism policy! As a tourist you also get registered anywhere you have to pay fees to the government (like entrance fees to Bagan or using government transports like the ferry boat from Bagan to Mandalay). They write down your passport number and names so they always know where you are. Private businesses are not allowed anyways, but people try to make their living doing all sorts of handicrafts and selling it to the tourists. An average worker (for example a silk weaver) earns about 800 Kyats (about 90 cents) a day!!
But still people are so happy and smiling and just satisfied with what they have. And this is surely due to the prevailing Buddhist culture and to the fact that most of the people in Myanmar meditate a lot and follow a life according to the Buddhist principles. In fact, it must be the country where people worship the most. Wherever you go, there are temples and monks as far as you can see. No wonder we met many on the way. Here, I am with two monks we met in a Monastery on the bottom of Mandalay hill.
Monks have the highest status in the country. Everybody supports the monks freely with donations. They get served food everywhere they go, they can live for free in any monastery they like to and overall have just a very high social standing in the country. Despite their poverty, people donate incredible amounts of money to the monasteries throughout the country. The money is mainly used to maintain and restore the monasteries.
Well, one might think what he or she wants but after having done a ten day meditation course myself during the second half of my stay in Myanmar, I can at least partly understand the whole culture! If everybody in the world would follow this meditation and practice it at least for a little while daily and follow the path of Dhamma on his day to day life, the world would for sure be a much better place and there would be much less fighting and suffering!
The course was extremely demanding. I sat for about 10 hours daily meditating, i.e. observing my breath and body sensations, broken up by 1 – 2 hour intervals to eat or get some sleep I haven’t gotten at night.
We had to get up at 4 am every morning !! And overall, no talking to other people throughout the course (except your teacher). It was a really interesting experience and I can only recommend everyone to try it out once. You explore yourself in a totally different way. Lots of things come up during these 10 days and I haven’t gotten proper sleep for the last four nights. But in the end you come out really peaceful and you see many things in a different light. Here’s me meditating in front of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon after the end of my meditation class.
It was a really peaceful ending of my trip to Myanmar :-)
Myanmar people are the most lovely and beautiful people I have ever met. Everybody greets you with a warm and hearty smile and asks you where you are from and where you are going to. And they help you out wherever and whenever they can without asking anything in return! If only all the people in the world could be like this. There are also the most bizarre and unusual people. Check out this old women in a temple in Bagan smoking the biggest cigar I have ever seen. I don’t want to see an X-Ray of her lungs ;-)
Myanmar people are truly happy people, they are laughing a lot and almost never complain! And that all despite the suppressing military regime. It doesn’t make life easy for the Myanmar people. They try to control the flow of money as much as possible. I had to hand over the five US$ to the taxi driver under the seat!! Locals are only supposed to have local currency. It was also interesting that the official exchange offices would give you 450 Kyats for 1 US$ whereas the normal black market rate is at about 950 Kyats per Dollar. I didn’t quite understand this tourism policy! As a tourist you also get registered anywhere you have to pay fees to the government (like entrance fees to Bagan or using government transports like the ferry boat from Bagan to Mandalay). They write down your passport number and names so they always know where you are. Private businesses are not allowed anyways, but people try to make their living doing all sorts of handicrafts and selling it to the tourists. An average worker (for example a silk weaver) earns about 800 Kyats (about 90 cents) a day!!
But still people are so happy and smiling and just satisfied with what they have. And this is surely due to the prevailing Buddhist culture and to the fact that most of the people in Myanmar meditate a lot and follow a life according to the Buddhist principles. In fact, it must be the country where people worship the most. Wherever you go, there are temples and monks as far as you can see. No wonder we met many on the way. Here, I am with two monks we met in a Monastery on the bottom of Mandalay hill.
Monks have the highest status in the country. Everybody supports the monks freely with donations. They get served food everywhere they go, they can live for free in any monastery they like to and overall have just a very high social standing in the country. Despite their poverty, people donate incredible amounts of money to the monasteries throughout the country. The money is mainly used to maintain and restore the monasteries.
Well, one might think what he or she wants but after having done a ten day meditation course myself during the second half of my stay in Myanmar, I can at least partly understand the whole culture! If everybody in the world would follow this meditation and practice it at least for a little while daily and follow the path of Dhamma on his day to day life, the world would for sure be a much better place and there would be much less fighting and suffering!
The course was extremely demanding. I sat for about 10 hours daily meditating, i.e. observing my breath and body sensations, broken up by 1 – 2 hour intervals to eat or get some sleep I haven’t gotten at night.
We had to get up at 4 am every morning !! And overall, no talking to other people throughout the course (except your teacher). It was a really interesting experience and I can only recommend everyone to try it out once. You explore yourself in a totally different way. Lots of things come up during these 10 days and I haven’t gotten proper sleep for the last four nights. But in the end you come out really peaceful and you see many things in a different light. Here’s me meditating in front of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon after the end of my meditation class.
It was a really peaceful ending of my trip to Myanmar :-)
borislauser - 5. Dec, 10:23
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