Time swirls, magical new places appear and fade behind, and then comes the penultimate day. Tomorrow we must begin the journey home, back to the grey and cold of Northern Europe. Yet penultimate is not ultimate. We have one more day in Mandalay.
I want to see the shores of the Ayeyarwady River, so we walk out into a blazing hot morning. The street devolves as we walk north. In front of our hotel, it is wide, dusty, and sun-baked. We pass the fire-tower, wave to the firemen, dodge a few Tuk-tuks. After a few long blocks, dusky trees spring up from the edges of the street, and the buildings shrink to older shop-houses. Red and blue sunshades push out into the pavement, narrowing the street to a meandering lane. We have entered the busy market zone, and the business of the day is in full swing.
To walk through an open-air market in Southeast Asia is to be immersed in a sensory tidal wave. The eyes take in enormous heaps of unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, piles and pyramids of colours and hues. There are mountains of garlic, white bulbs stacked like the skulls of the fallen. Eggs climb in towers so tall the weight alone should crush the shells. The carcasses of chickens gleam white and yellow from atop battered trays. Eels wriggle in protest at their impending doom, splashing water across the hot pavement, or a sandalled foot.
The sense of sight is overwhelmed by the olfactory. This is no mere bouquet, no tickling scent to tempt the passerby. Walking past the heaped mounds of dried fish, the air you breath is the scent, and the scent is the air. It borders on an assault, keen and acute. I am not leaning in from the outside to sniff a delicacy. I am engulfed in the cocoon of a single overpowering sensation, a sealed bubble that transports me to rocky, sun-pounded shores, drying seaweed, and fish-fish-fish-fish. My feet manage to shuffle past the fish vendor. I am released from the spell, only to be caught up in the next sensuous drift.
There is a soundtrack to the film of sights and smells. The calls of vendors mix with the babble of bargaining aunties. Scooters, Tuk-tuks, and Jumbos weave past the shopping throng, tootling their horns or shouting warnings. The tinny speakers of cheap radios blare in a cacophonous buzz of competing music.
I love all of it, unabashedly and truly. A hot, smelly, noisy street market is one of my Asian hallmarks. Noodle soup for breakfast and bustling open-air markets; these are a few of my favorite things. They serve as welcome home mats spread before my traveler's door. Relax, they say; you are back where you belong.
If I were to lose my sight, I would move to Bangkok and never leave. Let me live in a place where the smells and sounds and tastes can splash images across my mind's eye. If I am sightless, then damn subtlety to hell. Let me have jarring diminished chord progressions of sound and scent, played by a deranged jazz-man of the senses.
The street was squeezed down to a narrow lane, the market growing tighter and more congested. We crossed over a fetid drainage canal, and turned to follow its course. The market fell away behind as we walked a quiet lane between half-ruined walls. We were entering a shady district of monasteries.
The grid of Mandalay was left behind, and with it the craziness of Mandalay intersections. Many of the intersections in that monstrous checkerboard are uncontrolled. There is no stop sign, no traffic light, no yield sign; nothing. It is a free-for-all, governed only by the need to get somewhere, tempered by a Buddhist sense that it is wrong to cause harm. The result is a wonderfully comic vehicular ballet of polite horn-tooting, braking, and acceleration.
Here is a little video I made of the chaos in action:
The Ballet of an Uncontrolled Mandalay Intersection
We are walking up a shady lanes, past monasteries shielded by walls overgrown with bougainvillea. The faces of little monks pop to the open windows, like robed jack-in-the-boxes. They smile and wave, like any other school children distracted from their lessons.
Past the monasteries, the neighborhood is a tangle of lanes lined with low-slung teak shophouses. It is as if we have stepped into another city, leaving the orderly squares of Mandalay far behind. This is familiar territory, resembling so many tangled enclaves in so many other SW Asian cities. There is a pagoda of course, Chanthaya Pagoda, and the golden stupa hovers above the labyrinth.
Turning past the pagoda, we descend a narrow footpath into the beating sun of midday. We have come to the Thinga Yarsar Canal. A long teak footbridge is reflected in the mirror of still water. It is picture-postcard pretty, but better to look than to smell. The water of the canal is fetid; a sluggish soup of who-knows-what. It does not smell nice, Friends and Neighbors.
As we head out onto the teak bridge, we can look straight down at the sludgy water lapping the thick pilings. Without the benefit of the reflected sunlight, the canal is a sick green colour, the kind of green that only exists in graphic novel illustrations. It is of a hue that is alien to this world.
I think to myself that nothing could live in this miasma, and just as quickly I am proved wrong. There are schools of minnows cruising the upper few inches of the soup; thousands and thousands of the little wrigglers. While I am pondering how anything survives this toxic water, a whiskered mouth gapes open; a hideous, disembodied maw. There were more of the tentacled mouths, surfacing like miniature servants of Cthulhu. They gasped, puckered, gasped, and then sank beneath the day-glo green. Right gave me the creeps, it did.
On the far side of the canal we passed the empty city amusement and water park. The ferris wheel was idled under the beating sun. We threaded our way through a few more narrow lanes and emerged onto the throbbing arterial of the Strand Road. A line of blessed shade tress rose on the far side of the dusty boulevard, and beyond that lay the Ayeyarwady River.
Unlike mad dogs and Englishmen, we know enough not be the anvil under the hammer of the tropical sun. At least we knew it today. We found the first likely looking local bar, set up shop on the shady terrace, and spent the next bit of time soaking up tepid drinks and watching the river roll by. There was a lot to watch.
The Ayeyarwady is a busy river and a major transportation route. There were a great many boats scattered up and down the silty banks. There is not much in the way of docks or piers. Very little survives the swirling currents of the river in the height of the rainy season. Cargo is loaded and unloaded by hand. Gangs of coolies hand-carry the loads on rickety plank gangways. They were at it under the beating sun, toiling like a line of ants. Everything they toted looked heavy: Sacks of rice, bags of cement, huge bundles of whatever. Just watching them made me tired.
Eventually we turned our faces back toward the center of the city. It was time for cool showers, clean clothes, and our last dinner in Mandalay. But before I could peacefully settle down to my meal, I needed a haircut.
If you desire immersion in a truly cross-cultural experience, look no further than a chair at the local barber chair of whatever odd city you are in. It could be the track-side barbers at Hua Lamphong station in Bangkok, a Cambodian tonsorium in a dusty crossroads town, or even my Türke barbers here in Vienna. The guidebook is not going to help you with the local version of "Take a little off the top and cut the sides close."
Smiles, goodwill, and hand-gestures; that will get the job done. Once they recovered from the surprise of a Farrang walking out of the night, the young crew of Myanmar barbers sprang into action. A chair was offered, the apron spread, and then we got down to business. Pointing is great in a pinch. I pointed to a Number Two trimmer attachment and motioned to the side of my head. My young barber's face lit up. "Okay, Numbah Two." We were off and running, hair falling everywhere, while his compadres gather around to cheer him on.
I ended up with a decent haircut for about a buck, and my guy got a 100% tip. The crew did not even make fun of my bald spot. Smiles all around, everyone is happy, and we vanish into the night.
Okay, sure, we had Myanmar BBQ last night, and we are having it again tonight. What can I say? It was a different joint, at least; a full city block from the prior joint. The Mandalay folks love a BBQ dinner and, you know, when in Rome... Skewers, dammit! Everything tastes better served on a stick.
Thus ended out last evening in Mandalay. Sated and tired, we rode the elevator to the rooftop bar. The kids brought us almost-cold soda. We watched the geckos hunt insects, drank our drinks, and let the night run its own course. Mandalay may be slow to grow on a traveler, but I am going to miss this town.
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