As we watch the current disaster play out in Burma we try to understand the government there and its decision, so far, to not let help for their people into the country. The following is a Pagosan's experience in that country.
Note by Norm Vance:
Price for sending $500.00 to Burma: $75.00
Price for a new passport in Burma: $97.00
Son flying out of Burma: Priceless!
The last posting of Ian’s adventures was introduced with a tale of misfortune, losing his money, credit cards and passport. It took over a day, and even with Dad’s help, cost over his budget. But he is now on his way out of the country that is like “being in a cave.” It will be interesting when his blog on this saga is received. From the few words he has gotten out I observe that it is sad that the people seem to be the nicest, most helpful and caring on earth ruled by a military- tribal government where, one misstep off the “safe path” can result in your head hanging from a jungle tree. Mom and Dad will be glad when he is out of there.
A Pagosan in the Far East
Ian Vance | Apr 5, 2006
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| Note by Norm Vance: Those reading this series of articles know my son, Ian, is backpacking Southeast Asia. Other than the occasional traveling companion found by chance, he is on his own. This kind of traveling can be rewarding and dangerous. The reward can be found in his writing, the danger is found mostly in his Mom and Dad's worrisome minds. A few blogs ago Ian observed; "The map is not the terrain" is a good rule of thumb to follow. Sticking to the map will yield predictable results but, in the end, you'll be following someone else's trip, not your own. Sometimes it is beneficial to wander off the beaten path.
It isn’t too hard to picture Ian euphorically dancing off into the Asian jungles amidst the verdant vines, singing monkeys and buried land mines. Ol' Dad preached many warnings of this and a host of other potential disasters before he left on this sojourn. It got to be repetitious so I settled on crossed fingers and prayer. I think the sight of so many people with one or no legs in Asia solved the dancing thing!
The last article posted here was introduced with Ian’s plan to go into Myanamr, the former Burma, AND still Burma to those who cannot pronounce Myanamr. I related that this is a land of restricted internet use. So, Ruth and I, along with his blog friends, settled into a three week period of silence. You can imagine the instant horror instilled when an e-mail popped up from Ian last Friday with the title, “Serious Trouble.”
I could not hit the button and I could not, not hit the button. So, it is possible to get an e-mail out of Burma, as Ian said, “with a little trickery.” The serious trouble was that Ian had his satchel stolen containing passport, debit card and all money except for $40.00 in his pocket. From a tiny village in the Burmese outback came a call for HELP! It launched Dad into five hours of phone calls and internet work trying to save the day. Some of what I learned could be helpful to anyone traveling abroad.
Lessons
- There are 210,000 Western Union offices on the planet and exactly zero of them are in Burma.
- Even if Ian could get out of Burma and to Bangkok, Thailand, Western Union still requires their secret code AND a photo ID to pass out money. DUH, all of his photo IDs were stolen!
- If you want to phone into Burma you best have two tin cans and a very long string.
- Surf for “world time” and you find a website with the current time for anyplace on earth, even Burma. According to the time differential, Burma is exactly on the other side of the planet from Pagosa Springs!
- Pagosa’s Wells Fargo Bank was extremely kind and helpful going way above and beyond the call of duty for a panic stricken father.
- As we all know, the U.S. government grinds along at a snail’s pace EXCEPT for one small office in the Washington D.C. State Department building with an “American Overseas Citizen’s Services” sign on the door. In that office Elizabeth Ryan answered the phone and said, ‘We don’t do bureaucracy here, we get it done, NOW!” And, she did. In about thirty minutes she had five hundred dollars sitting on a desk in the Rangoon, Burma U.S. Embassy Office with Ian’s name on it.
As I prepare this article to be put on the website the following message came in:
"So, I am "safe" in this borderline police-state and tomorrow we will see what sort of hoops I have to jump through to get out of here. The energy is busy, tense, and strange with a capital 'S'. Although the embassy doesn't open until tomorrow, there were guards patrolling the perimeter and a barrier of rusty-yellow oil drums surrounding the building. As one local told me, "In Burma you are in a cave," and it was an apt phrase. Amazingly enough, although I am more than ready to return to civilization, part of me wishes that everything had been returned so I could stay another week or two. And perhaps it still will…"
Ian has written that Burma has been a “life changing experience in many ways.” When he gets out of Burma he plans to write about this entire adventure and I’ll share it here when it come in. Stay tuned and, for now, read his previous experiences in Hippyville.
 | There's always a thrill I get - nervousness, the tingle of the unknown - when I find myself about to enter a new country, experience a new culture, ride the ragged edge of transient adventure once again - and for Myanmar, this sensation, that butterfly-flutter in the pit of the stomach, was compounded tenfold. On one hand, I knew I was entering a society ruled by the totalitarian fist, a region of enormous fertility and poverty, a country with a long history of repression and violent reprisal whenever the natives declared they'd had enough...
...But a good part of it, of that nervousness, that thrill, I have to admit it, stemmed from base material possession. As I boarded the plane, I found myself intimately aware of carrying nearly a thousand USD on my body, a tremendous sum for a shoestring traveler now used to the ease and availability of the ATM machine. But there was no other option. In 2003, senior general Than Shwe authorized the attack on the one powerful voice of democracy in Burma - Oxford graduate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi - slaughtering 250 of her staff. 'The lady,' as she is referred to, in hushed conversations, all across the country - after re-instating Aung San under house arrest for the fourth time in a dozen years. U.S. president George Bush imposed full economic sanctions, resulting in all foreign banks packing it up and shipping out. Thus, no place to cash a traveler's check, no 'safehold' to withdraw hard currency, no digital transfer with the hum and click of a few buttons pressed. Neighboring Thailand seems like it has an ATM machine on every other street corner; even formally-remote Laos has a machine or three in the capital and, elsewhere, a nominal banking system where one can use the plastic card to secure future travel adventures. No such luck in Burma - you had to bring your cash in, and for me - always slightly paranoid of my essential possessions in even the safest of locations - well, close to a cool grand on my hip seemed like a heavy burden of responsibility. It felt heavy. I'd taken it in mostly smaller bills, 20s 10s and 5s, with 50 $1 bills - for I'd done my research, I was well aware of the concept of 'tea money' and how a small-note bribe might smooth any difficulty among the corrupt bureaucracy that (barely) kept Myanmar stable.
Moreover, I was a writer - a "journalist", even if it be for an online publication dedicated solely to the southwestern Rocky Mountains - and I'd read that the possession of a laptop or the discovery of a journalistic background could garner one a quick deportation. On the visa application I listed my occupation as 'RADIO (Music)' and even went so far as to take the Pagosa.com link off the MySpace webpage! They check on the people coming in, so I'd heard; the government has installed a vast secret police among the populace and you have to watch what you say, especially among the locals - mentioning 'the lady', or the policies of the military junta, or the Heroin refinement factories near the Chinese border, or the campaign of near-genocide waged against the Karen and Kayah ethnic minorities - by talking too much, you could implicate the native person, land them in the clink and/or much worse.
So I was prepared. I'd keep my mouth shut and my ears open, my money close at hand (well, at hip, where the travel pouch was secured). I'd be as careful as possible when I dipped my toes into this isolated nation, this mystery that is Myanmar.
 | Entering the airport was surreal, and in some way it reminded me of entering Russia, though the atmosphere couldn't have been different. St. Petersburg had been a madhouse, people everywhere shoving for baggage, jabbering in Cyrillic, the decor straight out of the 70s communist sensibility, the electrical signs that indicated flight numbers flickering erratically, as if the supply of raw juice wasn't quite adequate - Russia was like entering a time warp to some quasi Connery-era James Bond location.
The Mandalay Airport, on the other hand, was cool, clean, white, empty...and dim. Only a quarter of the overhead fluorescent lights were turned on, and the light that managed to seep through was weak, giving the white floors and walls and counters a grayish pall. In the areas beyond the immigration counters and the one operating baggage carousel, shadows gradually spread and came to dominate, a sinister haze of empty, unlit nothingness. Even the immigration signs separating locals from foreigners - meant to be lit, I could tell - were turned off. It was spooky, so quiet you could hear a pin drop. It felt dangerous by the nature of its professional facade, oppressive in its cold modern construct.
After a long wait, I handed my passport to the immigration officer, who looked it over and then did what he did to every other tourist on that flight (maybe thirty) - I had to join another line, wait it out, and finally be officially stamped into the country. At baggage I found my backpack, but before I could leave the terminal I was stopped by a young boy who checked my air ticket and the stamp on my bag - making sure I (or anyone else) wasn't hauling off luggage not their own - and this unexpected courtesy was a direct contrast from Russia, where I had waited and waited for baggage that never came...
Mandalay lies some 45 kilometers from the airport and I had to split a taxi with a Dutch couple - $5 each - to get into town. The couple were clueless, I gathered they hadn't even cracked open the ubiquitous Lonely Planet guide they were toting around - so I spent a period of the ride filling them in on some of the basics - educated, not experienced, basics - while keeping an eye on the countryside. The hot season had arrived in Southeast Asia: the fields had turned yellow and withered leaves tumbled from trees - but my eyes were on the people. The women delicately balancing fruits or pans or any number of items on their heads, the small truck-buses with 25 people squeezed in the back like sardines and another half-dozen seated atop, the old women sweeping trash and collecting water bottles for recycling, the men dressed in traditional longyi (skirts) smoking cheroots in tea shops, the children - brown and skinny with bright eyes and wide grins - playing on the sides of the avenue as we jolted down the cracked and crumbling pavement into the city proper.
Oh yes, this felt foreign - 180 degrees different from ultra-developed Thailand, from laid-back Laos and the reconstructed Vietnam - the sidewalks treacherous with shattered stone, the buildings a hodge-podge of concrete housing-block, wooden colonial-remnants, the rare gleaming-glass facade of a shopping mall - and the people: unmistakably Southeast Asian, but with a stronger Tibeto-Chinese cast, alongside hordes of Middle Easterners and Indians: all engaged in the standard flow of everyday Mandalay life, while foreigners bussed by, gawking at the wild energy.
The women wore colorful garments that often looked home-spun; at least half the locals had yellow paste on their faces, a bark-compound that serves as both sunblock and cosmetic - some smeared, some applied in streaks, some intricately designed in leaf-form or cabalistic symbol. Old men with long beards shouted at coolies hauling goods from trucks into shops; trishaw bikers lounged, waiting for customers; women sauntered gracefully down the rubble-strewn streets, hawking goods from the baskets on their heads - the intermixture of languages, the odd fuzzy clip of traditional music from a radio speaker, or a disco variation on Kelly Clarkson's Miss Independent (sung in Burmese) ~ suddenly I felt that I had truly arrived in the East - the capital 'E' intentional - in a way that commercialized Thailand could only offer a bare, well-oiled simulacra of, that Cambodia revealed in ruined glimpses, that Laos had on the rustic periphery - it felt chaotic, yet friendly and good-natured; everything looked run-down and dirty, but the mood wasn't depressed, unlike the former Soviet Union - the people smiled and joked and the language was dynamic. (Continued below)
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Here I was - in Burma - and though I was nervous, excited, enraptured by the inescapable awe that comes with the first contact of that which is foreign and unfathomably different - in some strange way I felt comfortable. I felt as if, after two months plus on the road, I'd finally found an environment that seemed truly Asian - wild and loud and weird and busy - the dust and the orange glow of the dying day, the baking heat, the smells of curry and decay. The almost-childlike eyes and the betel nut-stained grins. It was all enticing, and it called me forward, as if I'd been here before, in a dream, some lost summer reverie...
And yet that feeling of oppression... underneath all this, I knew the Iron Fist still loomed.
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