Arriving in Burma

“I love her like she is my mother,” our taxi driver told us.

It was our first evening in Burma and we were rattling through the streets of Yangon in a $2 taxi on our way to the famous Shwedagon pagoda. We’d finally ventured to ask a local what he thought of Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader of Burma, kept for decades under house arrest by the military junta.

“I keep a picture of her on my phone. Here.”

We were shocked.

“Aren’t you afraid of what might happen to you because you have this?” we asked. In Burma, “defaming the government” or supporting the pro-democracy movement are crimes punishable by imprisonment or forced labor in a work camp. (For that same reason, I’ve altered the identifiable characteristics of everyone mentioned in these posts.)

“It is for truth. I talk political and I have her on my phone because I love truth. I am afraid but I love truth more,” he said.

These kinds of conversations became a theme of our visit to Burma, but this was our first day and we were surprised to meet someone who would talk with us so openly. “You are very brave,” I said.

“Compared to some people I am a coward. Some people are really brave.”

Yangon’s streets are leafy and pleasant. The broad sidewalks are a market for vegetables, meat, used books, anything you can imagine. Every component of urban civilization is on display. Barbers cut hair in the street next to key makers, next to a shoe repairman, across the street from a girl folding betel nut and lime into a leaf and selling it for ten cents. A group of boys play a fast-paced dice game with bottle tops, and a few houses down some girls are betting on dominos, perched on tiny plastic chairs.

How is it that colonial architecture looks so good when it’s falling down? All the buildings are in a state of artistic decay. There are holes in the sidewalk that could break your leg. And there are the anachronisms of a closed society: balance scales, tiny blue Mazda taxis with two-stroke engines from the 1940s, mechanical typewriters.

Buses stop frequently, and it’s a hell of a thing to see. An attendant jumps out of the open door as the bus slows and shouts out what I can only assume are the names of the onward destinations, while pushing people on and off with a violence that makes me flinch. Old ladies are shoved into the street and the bus is moving again in a few seconds.

Some people are camera shy, but most are happy to have their picture taken. A few stop you and pose, expectant.

The Burmese have been living under some form of occupation for hundreds of years. After the British left they never really attained self government. The father of the country, Aung San, the father of Aung San Suu Kyi, was killed before he could take power and a military junta has ruled the country ever since, for forty years. Where else in the world has the military run a country for so long?

So I expected to find in Yangon an oppressed, suspicious people. And there is a suspicion here we didn’t find in the rest of the country, but there is also a hint of cultural energy that surprised me, that we didn’t find in Cambodia, for example. Open-front tea shops and bars are on every block. Guys with long hair and tattoos sit together at a cafe and talk, gesturing excitedly. A library we pass is full of people and a sign that says “free wifi,” though we are told by an apologetic girl that there is no wifi.

The city is diverse, with Indian, Chinese, Burmese and minority people passing each other in the street, dropping a few bills into a passing monk’s bowl. A camera shop TV shows Al Jazeera English.

We walk at random into the open doorway of a decrepit building and find a second-story art gallery where we meet a Buddhist artist whose paintings have strange themes. We are warned not to go to the 3rd floor; “it is collapsing.”

For an entire day we don’t see a uniformed police officer, but the Lonely Planet warns that secret police follow every tourist at some point during their trip. Once on a side street we are told to turn around, that foreigners are not allowed here.

But the streets are beautiful in their activity and colors, and we feel welcome here.

“Sorry, we are sanctioned country,” the concierge explained when we got to our hotel, “No credit card. US dollars only.” He looked embarrassed to admit it.

In Burma, there are no ATM machines, and except for three hotels, credit cards are mostly useless. The three exceptions proxy charges through a shady company in Las Vegas.

Exchange rates between the dollar and the Kyat, pronounced “charts,” vary widely. So like most travelers, Stephanie and I flew into Burma with a money belt stuffed with crisp US dollars. And crispness matters — an older note, a visible fold, a discoloration, a tiny tear or pen marks on the bill mean that the government money changers with whom hotels and other services must exchange their dollars will refuse to accept it, or change it at a lower rate.

Despite our best efforts to get brand-new bills before leaving Munich, about 20% of our money did not measure up to the standards of the Burmese guesthouse operators. One $50 bill was rejected because its serial number began with “CB” — a sure sign that it’s counterfeit, we were told.

So in Burma I have seen the cleanest, starchiest US dollars of my life, to all appearances fresh from the mint.

By contrast the local money is ratty in the extreme: taped, stapled or sewn together, smelling of pond water and disintegrating in your hand in a manner reminiscent of the shroud of Turin, Kyat are accepted in any condition without a second glance. Stephanie once received as change a 200 Kyat note in such a state of disrepair that it was given to her in a little plastic baggy, lest its various components blow away.

After our short ride with the politically courageus taxi driver, we arrived at the Shwedagon Pagoda to find a staggering Buddhist edifice, one of the largest Buddhist constructions in the world, a giant conical stupa covered in 85 tons of gold, topped with a 76-karat diamond and surrounded by other religious buildings of similar magnificence. It is opulence in a very poor country, and I wonder what the Buddha would think of it, but it is unutterably beautiful.

It happened to be a full moon, and there were a lot of people at the pagoda. I am used to the frowning solemnity, the hushed shuffling of a Christian cathedral. Both are built to awe, but there is a coldness and distance to a cathedral, whereas Shwedagon on the full moon pulsed with life: young professionals stop by after work to pour water over a statue of the Buddha or to apply a tiny sliver of gold leaf. A husband and wife meditate together on the marble while their children run and play around them. There was a lively vibe, more like a public square after work, or a shopping mall on the weekend, than a church.

We picked up a wonderful guide who explained that each corner of the eight-pointed pagoda represented a different day of the week (Wednesday is divided into morning and evening for some reason). People gather at the corner of the day they are born to pour water over the Buddha, and over the statue of their “birth animal.”

As we circled the pagoda we noticed a group of people clustered around Tuesday — the lion. “That is her corner,” our guide whispered. “Many people come to honor her. That is why they close the pagoda on Tuesday, so she cannot come on her day of birth.”

“She” is Aung San Suu Kyi, and many times in Burma we will hear her referred to in this furtive way, a pronoun with no antecedent. It is appropriate to the mythical status she has among the Burmese people.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s father, Aung San, is the “number one hero” of the Burmese nationalist movement, the man who signed the Aung-Attlee treaty granting Burma independence from Britain. He was the clear choice for Burma’s first leader, but he was assassinated before he could take office. Because of the tremendous respect his memory commands among the Burmese military, his daughter has a kind of protection. She cannot be killed or exiled, so instead they’ve put her under house arrest and limited her movements.

If this story sounds familiar, it is nearly identical to the first half of The Lion King, with Aung San Suu Kyi as Simba. Some people in Burma believe — I am not making this up — that the Disney movie predicts her eventual triumph over the greedy military jackals who pillage the country’s wealth and stash it in secret accounts in Singapore.

Burma is not simple. In a couple of weeks you don’t have time to gather more than a few distorted impressions. For some more pieces of the puzzle, and far better photos, be sure to check Stephanie’s blog.

From Yangon we flew to Bagan, a completely different part of the country, filled with ruins. Bagan is one of the best places I’ve ever been. And the subject of my next post.

Myanmar Visa in Bangkok

We have made it to Burma. The visa-acquisition process in Bangkok was smoother than I’d dared hope. Here is a brief account, written mostly to help future travelers who find it on Google.

The Myanmar embassy in Bangkok is surrounded by a tall grey wall topped with iron fencing, and the visa processing entrance is down a little side street. It opens at 9am. It has different hours from the consular office used by Myanmar citizens. Do not be fooled.

We were told that the embassy only processes a limited number of same-day visas every day, and people showing up after 10am are turned away. So we showed up at 7:45 expecting a queue of travel agent runners in front of us, but we were the first ones there.

If you walk down the side street away from the main street, after two blocks you find a little shop that is effectively an adjunct of the Myanmar embassy. They will take your visa photos, give you the application forms and a pen, glue your photo to the form, etc. This place is a must. They know what to do and what not to do. It is also very easy to find: look for a little yellow sign on the right side of the street that says “photos, copies, visa” (or words to that effect).

Apparently getting the visa is no problem if you do not list a profession like “journalist” on your work history (reverse side of the form). It has been rumored that the embassy in Bangkok will google your name and refuse a visa to anyone with obvious journalistic connections, so if you are a journalist trying to sneak into the country you might want to get your Burmese visa elsewhere. Of course in this day and age, it’s a strange distinction to draw, when everyone’s blogging or otherwise communicating their experiences.

We got back to the visa entrance at 8:30 and found a cluster of Western travelers waiting for the door to open. None of them knew about the shop. We strutted around with our completed, stapled, and glued forms and sent the whole lot scampering to the shop, leaving us first in line.

The cost for a same-day visa is 1200 baht. We paid our fee, handed over our forms and passports, and were told to come back at 3:30 to get our visas. We had printed the itinerary for our flights to and from Yangon, but they didn’t seem to care. The whole process inside the embassy took about 15 minutes.

And at 3:30 we had our visas (which had our pictures on them). That’s it.

This time in Bangkok was marginally more pleasant than previous experiences. We discovered the elevated train which is far nicer than the subway in Boston, and we availed ourselves of the excellent shopping to pick up a few supplies we’d neglected to pack (probiotics for my prima donna of a stomach, a new lens for Stephanie’s camera, DEET-based bug spray). Prices are similar to the US.

Yesterday we flew on AirAsia to Yangon, and I’m writing this from our hotel lobby. Yangon is mindblowing. Walking the streets is a huge adventure, like time travel. But more on that later. It deserves its own space.

And they’re off…

After a hectic few days of airline booking and bag packing and visa procuring and hard drive backing-up and impulsive camcorder purchasing, we find our hero (that’s me) at Munich airport preparing to board an Emirates flight through Dubai to Bangkok.

He is is hunched over the last few crumbs of a bagel (not poppy seed — more on that in a sec) and though excited about the adventures to come in the next six months of travel, he already looks a bit worn-out. His eyes droop and his shoulders sag.

Why, you might ask, with this rich bounty of travel ahead of him, and his amazing and sparkling wife by his side, why does he look like such crap?

Part of it is Bangkok. In the opinion of our hero (still me), Bangkok is a sleazy migraine headache of a city. Bangkok is way too stimulating and a little bit disgusting, like accidentally putting on someone else’s underpants in the locker room.

But Bangkok is just a means to an end. It happens to be the only city in the world where our hero, ok, where, I and my wife can get a visa for Burma in less than one day. Which is essential, because we have booked an AirAsia flight to Burma on Friday for two weeks of unplanned exploration. We have a hotel room for the first two nights in Yangon, and after that we’ll just go wherever the wind takes us. A favorite way to travel.

But the main reason for the baggy eyes and dark circles is that amidst all the planning and packing, I stayed up way too late the last three nights hacking.

For some reason, my best ideas come at the most inopportune times, and three times in the last week I was so completely taken by an idea that I hacked deep into the night. The German winter sun is a shy bastard and stays hidden until late morning, giving you long, uninterrupted periods of darkness in which to work. I am convinced this is a major reason for the unstoppable power of the German economy.

Of course, each time I went to bed at 10am, it was after working on a completely different idea, so now I have three brilliant, unfinished hacks on my hard disk. I’m trying to delude myself into thinking that I’ll work on them while traveling, but experience says otherwise. We’re going to be moving every two or three days and there’s so much to do and see. Between that and, hopefully, keeping you apprised of our movements, there just won’t be enough time.

Which brings me to the itinerary. In the next three months we plan to visit Thailand, Burma, Rajasthan, Nagaland, Nepal, Bhutan, Assam, Singapore, Papua New Guinea, and Komodo. It is strange even to be able to tell you that. Normally when traveling, we tend to just wing it, but this time around we wanted to go to several places that require advanced planning, and so we had to get ourselves organized. Google Docs was involved and spreadsheets were produced. Print-outs were even made. It’s unheard of.

After Komodo we have a brief stop in Tennessee for my sister’s graduation from college, and then we go to South America for 6 weeks, and then Africa, and then finally we move to San Francisco to live happily ever after by the end of the summer.

But first we have to get through Dubai. Which brings me to the issue of the poppy-seed bagel. As it turns out eating a poppy seed bagel before transiting Dubai is a good way to end up in Arab prison. If you don’t believe me, google “poppy seed swiss dubai” and check out the story of the poor Swiss schmuck who was imprisoned for three poppy seeds found on his clothing as he passed through Dubai. He didn’t even eat the bagel in Dubai! Other similar stories can be found – google for “dubai melatonin,” for example.

So the bagel I ate was covered not in poppy seeds but pumpkin seeds, in true German-bakery fashion. I’ve searched extensively but haven’t yet found any sign of punishment for fragments of pumpkin seeds, but I’m worried nevertheless. I’ve gone into the bathroom and shaken off my shirt a few times already.

And now they’re calling us to board. Wish me luck.

Birds

In the Everglades in December I had a lot of chances to look at birds. They were everywhere, ancient and amazing.

At the same time, I was taking flying lessons.

So it was impossible not to notice birds exploiting the same aerodynamic effects I learned from flying.

Here are a few, for your reading pleasure.

Ground Effect

Wings fly because they are supported by the air. The wing pushes down and the air pushes back up.

When a wing is very close to the ground, the air that’s pushed down is trapped between the wing and the ground and forms a higher-pressure cushion of air, giving the wing more lift, so that it can fly at a lower speed. This is called ground effect.

One of the things you figure out pretty quickly when you’re learning to land is that in ground effect, the airplane just wants to keep floating and floating. And so if you have a limited amount of runway to work with, you want to approach the landing without carrying too much extra speed.

In Florida I noticed a lot of birds skimming the water and it was amazing how far they could glide just above the surface without having to flap their wings once.

Dihedral

Stand in front of an airplane and look at its wings and you’ll notice that they are not completely parallel to the ground – they are angled up. This angle is called the dihedral.

The purpose of the dihedral angle is to make an airplane self-stabilizing. If a gust of wind causes one wing to drop, the airplane will slip sideways toward the lower wing. This causes the lower wing to generate more lift, to rise, and to restore the airplane to wings-level, without the pilot having to do anything.

And that’s why in a little Cessna, even in slightly rough air, you can often let go of the yoke and let the plane fly itself (unless the guy sitting next to you is a big fatty and unbalances the airplane).

Swarms of turkey vultures dot the sky over Southern Florida, making the location of every road kill.

In this picture you can see that when turkey vultures are soaring, their wings are angled up, like a Cessna (or an Airbus).

I’m not sure why some birds have dihedral and others don’t, but I suspect turkey vultures benefit from it because they do so much gliding. Some airplanes actually have negative dihedral – fighter jets, for example – to make them less stable and more maneuverable.

Landing Flare

When you’re landing an airplane, at the very end, you pull back on the yoke as the airplane sinks, to stay in the air as long as possible so that you touch down with the slowest possible airspeed.

The landing flare also angles the lift vector backwards and helps to slow the airplane down.

Unfortunately I don’t have a cool picture of this but I noticed a lot of birds would flare at the last minute before perching on a tree branch or landing on the ground. They would also flap their wings as they flared, sort of like a thrust reverser on a jet.

Gyroscopes

Of course, birds are ornithopters and fly differently from airplanes. They don’t have propellers or jets creating a longitudinal thrust.

They also don’t have spinning gyroscopes and an artificial horizon to tell them which way is up when they’re flying inside clouds, like instrument-equipped airplanes do. Which is why it has long been believed that birds cannot fly through clouds.

Or can they? Pilots have reported bird strikes in instrument conditions. And in 1972, an ornithologist in New York bought a military surplus radar and tracked birds flying through clouds for several miles – and they were going straight.

It shouldn’t be possible for birds to fly through clouds, but it is. How do they do it? Do birds have some kind of gyroscopic organ, or a magnetic sense that tells them which way is the ground?

I’ve done some googling but haven’t found a definitive answer. The best article is this 1993 classic, The Turn in The Atlantic.

Happy reading.

And for the record

And for the record — I’d prefer to think of myself as interspersing pauses with torrents of words, like bursts of quick gunfire from the semiautomatic pistol of a brawny freedom fighter, one whose sweaty years in the jungle haven’t knocked the dreams of liberty from his heart.

— Ira Glass

This thing? This’ll run you about three thousand bucks.

This thing? This’ll run you about three thousand bucks. Yeah. It’s steep. Man, let me warn you, you are entering the world of.. of adult toys. Wait, no, that doesn’t sound right. I don’t mean adult toys like dildos and shit. I just mean, airplanes will make you broke just as fast as cocaine, man.

—My flight instructor in Florida, when I asked him what he paid for his Garmin 696 portable panel.