The Street Crew

Here's how work gets done in Dhaka:

Of course, it all starts with a woman.

In our neighborhood, the asphalt crew was working recently on UN Road a couple blocks from our house. Storm sewers were put in one year ago (also by hand), and now the asphalt crew is smoothing over the holes and trenches left by the installation.  

The Asphalt Machine

Once the fire, fuelled by sawdust-like bits of fabric, is going well, the gravel and oil are combined and mixed by the rakers, who then move it onto the "truck" for delivery.  It's spread over the trench or hole, oiled and then flattened with a more familiar piece of equipment.  

 As with everything else here, a certain division of labor is always present.  

Loading the hot stuff on the truck.

The Delivery Truck

No back-up signals.  

Dropping the load

The Oiler, the Raker and the Spectator

Someone has to be in charge.

The Fireman (seated on burlap bags) throws fabric fuel on the fire.

Spring Break 2014; Thailand, One More Time

The beach in front of our hotel at Koh Samet

For Millie's final Spring Break with us, we decided to fly to Bangkok, shop for a few days and get to a beach, preferably without flying again.  Then, the political situation in Bangkok got a little crazy in the streets and a some kind of small bomb went into one of the shopping malls we frequent, so we changed plans.

Instead, we went to an island, Koh Samet, a two hour+ drive by taxi south of the airport.  Our taxi driver took us to a dock, and introduced us to his friend, who took us by speedboat to the beach in front of our hotel as the sun rose over the Gulf of Thailand.  We waded ashore and waited until the staff showed up and checked us in.  Fortunately, our room was available immediately.  Since we had been up all night flying and driving, we slept.



Our hotel on the beach was not your 5 star, giant chain but a small place with a pool, a restaurant, wifi, sun, shade and the Gulf.

Actually, we never did find the nice part of town; the island is a middle class Thai family weekend retreat from Bangkok with none of the major chains. Lots of boat traffic, but not much wildlife.  Unlike the Western tourism-developed areas like Koh Samui, this was kind of backwater, but under extensive development. Like some of the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri in the 50s: hotels were strings of small cabins overlooking the beach or the rocks.  The newer, fancier, bigger ones were being built next door.






We walked down the ferry pier to this statue coming out of the sea, had dinner at a restaurant on the beach, and bought wine and junk food at a 7-11; mostly, we read books and worked on our tans. Then we headed back to Railay, near Krabi, opposite Phuket, and up the coast from the Malaysian border.

This is the one place in Thailand I wanted to see again.  We had come before, in October, 2012.  Railay is a half-mile wide peninsula so covered with giant limestone rock formations that the area is accessible only by boat.  Our hotel was on the west side of the peninsula, facing Phuket Island and the Andaman Sea, but we could have stayed anywhere, and it would have been spectacular.  

Swimming with the fishes in the Andaman Sea

We did almost the same things this time: a one-day, crammed-into-a-snorkel/tourism-boat trip with 20 or so strangers (but good snorkling), spent an hour one morning kayaking around the rocks with Millie and witnessed several absolutely breath-taking sunsets.  Mostly, we did the pool chair, bar, beach, pool, nap routine, punctuated with a stroll down "walking street", a little alley of bars and shops leading away from the beach.  And I got a Thai massage.

Then we headed back for one night and one day in Bangkok.  Millie got us to a mall with a cinema, settled us into Captain America 2 and went shopping.  Later, we had really good Vietnamese food, and Gail and Millie found another mall to explore, this one below our hotel.

The next morning we got to a floating market and toured Jim Thompson's home below, a museum.

Thompson was an American OSS agent in SE Asia during WWII and returned to develop the silk industry in Thailand.  He got rich and famous but disappeared on a trip to Malaysia in 1967.  He had built a home in Bangkok by combining five traditionally built Thai houses (high pitched roofs, floors on stilts, separate cooking area, etc.) After a late lunch, we headed back to the airport and on to Dhaka.

Christmas in Myanmar

Abby and Gail with the Padong ladies at Inle Lake

Christmas in Myanmar

We have managed to see just about everything in Asia…okay, we didn’t see Everest from a small plane when we were in Kathmandu or a tiger in India.  But we have wandered through Angkor Wat in Cambodia and around the Taj Mahal in India, sailed in Hai Phong Bay in Vietnam, floated along next to blue whales off Sri Lanka and kayaked around Krabi in Thailand. 

We hadn’t, until this trip, seen the temples at Bagan, the gem market in Rangoon, the dancers at Mandalay, or the ladies with brass rings around their necks at the floating markets of Inle Lake.  And we've now seen the orange clad Buddhist monks, by the thousands.  In all, this may have been our best Asian trip.

But first, a word about what really counts: being fair and lovely.  For the past four and a half year, we have been regaled by Indian television about the beauty of being white: almost every commercial break will have a least one advertisement for a cream, lotion or ointment that will keep your Asian skin tone pale.  In Myanmar, women have used a cream or powder called thanaka, made from a tree, for 2000 years.  You can buy the tubs of paste or powder, or even an entire log, just about anywhere. Almost every woman we saw wore this, some in interesting designs, some in smears.  

Nearly sunset in Bagan

We flew into Yangon from Bangkok and stayed one short night before flying early next morning to Bagan.  You don’t come to Bagan for the city since there is none, only poor villages and villagers trying to figure out how to make money off the tourists. 

You come for the temples, stupas and pagodas that were built by the local kings between 1000 AD and the late 1200s.  Scattered on a plain about the size of Manhattan, these mostly brick structures, some small, some huge, are everywhere you look.  Foreigners like us pay $5 to enter the archaeological zone, although we saw no archaeology.  You can hire horse carts, bicycles or motor scooters, or a car and guide, to get around the dirt roads to see the pagodas up close. 

Riding the Wind over Bagan

But the coolest thing to do in Bagan, probably the whole country, is to take the hot air balloon ride at dawn.  The Balloons Over Bagan company picks you up at your hotel in a homemade bus, built on the frame of a WWII vintage American Chevy or Ford truck.  When you land, you are met by the same bus, and get a champagne breakfast with “the best bagels in Bagan”.  The ride was silent and wonderful. 

From Bagan, we flew to reed-rimmed Inle Lake ($3 to enter the ‘zone’), where various tribal villages, floating markets and gardens line the shores.  A half-day long-tail canoe (a canoe with a engine driving a propeller on a long shaft) ride took us to the women with the brass rings around their necks.  Gail had read a National Geographic article about them when we lived in Samoa, and had always hoped to see them.  Now, several years later, she got to be photographed with them. 

Getting around Inle Lake

We also saw silversmiths, fabric and garment factories and, of course, a golden pagoda, complete with a working ATM.  This particular pagoda has a central shrine with guys rubbing gold leaf onto what appeared to be five brains, or maybe rugby balls.  Only men are allowed to attach the gold leaf; women sit around the outside and pray or watch.  There are a number of kiosks that sell packets of gold leaf inside the temple.  We had the feeling that Buddha would have been chasing out the moneychangers if he had showed up. 

The lotus fiber girl

Turns it into thread

The Floating Gardens

Pushing his boat through a canal

Pushing new garden

From Inle Lake, it was a short flight to Mandalay.  Mandalay was the last Burmese capital before the Brits came and has some cool stuff.  The 700+ foot high Mandalay Hill with another golden pagoda on top is the place to catch the sunset.  And like everywhere else, there are teak monasteries full of monks and more and more gold pagodas.  We took a day trip out of the city to the U Bein bridge at Amarapura, bought silver jewellery for the ladies and even got a lacquered “begging bowl” like the monks carry early each morning as they gather alms.

The Dancers in Mandalay

U Bein Bridge at Amanapura

After Mandalay, we took a vacation from our vacation at Ngapali Beach.  I had a couple days of stomach flu but the girls had a good time, snorkelling a little and hanging out with Millie's homework.  

On Ngapali Beach

The Rock at Hotel at the Rocks

High Tide at The Bay of Bengal

North side of Schwedagon

Back in Yangon (Rangoon), we got to see the Shwedagon Paya, an incredible 12 acre temple/pagoda complex containing, we have read, more gold than the Bank of England and more jewels than the Tower in London.  It’s like the Vatican for Buddhists, with people praying before dozens of shrines, monks loitering and reading newspapers, and plenty of tourists from way out of town.  Photographs do not capture the scale and scope of the place…and like the Vatican, you could wander around it for hours and never feel like you had seen it all.

The Jewelled Hti or umbrella of  the Paya

The paya is surrounded by small planetary shrines; which correspond with the day of the week a person was born.  Those born on a Tuesday would pray at the shrine on the lower left.

Meanwhile, in another part of town...

 Pa O people at Botathbaung Pagoda, Yangon

At Botathbaung, also in Yangon, people come to venerate the last hair of the Buddha.  We happened to arrive with a group of Pa O people, walking single file into the Pagoda. About 2200 years ago an army of 1000 soldiers brought the eight hairs of Buddha to this spot.  One remains here, and is in a reliquary.  (In Europe, many cathedrals have similar reliquaries containing a finger of John the Baptist.)

With the Pa Os at Botathbaung

What they came to see.

A procession for girls going into a nunnery

All in all, we loved Myanmar. The incredible architecture, the varied peoples and their constant sweetness, and just enough curiosities to keep us entertained.


These are a few random pictures.

New Year's Eve at the Traders Hotel, Yangon

The gem and jewellery market at Yangon

Woody and Gail, Bagan, 2013

A crosswalk above the Streets of Yangon

Owls observing breakfast 

  

A celestrial figure, a pre-Buddha spirit that shares space at
Schwedagon