Minds Your Head/BAGAN

I wear my Moustache Brothers shirt to the airport in the morning, just to see if something happens. Maybe 'cause I haven't done anything reckless and stupid in too long, and I had a blog to write. I'm looking out for you guys. Unfortunately (?), nothing happened. I very coolly unclenched my buttocks and took my unassigned seat on the plane. Emergency exit seat again, as luck would have it. That has to be about one out of every three flights on this trip, not that it's foreshadowing anything. Really, it's not. Where was I? Oh yeah, right before this dude Chekhov let me hold his gun. But before that...

A taxi from the Bagan airport into Nyaung-U costs 5,000 ks, which leaves me with less than 100,000, or a little over 100 USD, for the next six days. Which should be fine, it's not like Myanmar doesn't have ATMs or any other way to get...oh. Time to hit the shoestring section of Lonely Planet harder than a silverback gorilla playing whack-a-mole in a middling New Yorker cartoon.

I price shop hostels like a person who is responsible with money, and still end up paying 7 USD, which is a little heftier than the $3 quoted in Lonely Planet. On the bright side, I meet a French couple who let me borrow their battery charger. It's for a different model, but if I shove it in haphazardly I can get the metal contacts to touch. On the non-bright side, I get all this done just in time for the electricity to be turned off for the afternoon. Which means no camera for the temples of Bagan, one of the most amazing sights in the world (maybe? doubtless with my luck). Something out there really just does not want me using consumer electronics.

Regardless, I'm going to use photos from when my camera did start working, just to break up this wall of text. If you're a dude who has "verisimilitude" tattooed across your chest in Olde Englishe font then I apologize, for this and a lot of things in general.

So you don't have to wait to look at this.

I'm late for a horse cart I arranged to meet earlier, but as I walk around looking for a new one, his brother stops and picks me up. We talk mostly about Korean movies and Korean girls. He thinks Korean girls are the hottest. Not a bad stance. I'm still curious about those Uzbeks, though.

Bagan is stunning. More than 2200 temples, monasteries, and pagodas crowd the dusty, clay-red landscape. Climbing to the tops of certain pagodas offers some of the most incredible views I've ever seen. And it's all barely regulated. Whereas similar sites in the world would have UNESCO crews fixing up everything, and barring entry in half the temples, the closed government here means you practically have free reign in the 13 x 8 km plains. Clambering through narrow, claustrophobic stone staircases and all over massive, decrepit stupas is the shit, and that same oppressive government meant I had all of it more or less to myself. There were touts outside all the major temples selling postcards and paintings and lacquerware, but other tourists were few and extremely far between. The entire experience can be boiled down to this: Feeling like Indiana Goddamn Jones. Few things get better than that.

Fuck lacquerware, the market here is wide open for fedoras and bullwhips.

One of the big stops on the horse cart circuit is Shwezigon Pagoda. Some women and children immediately beeline towards me an insist on giving me a tour, but I'm onto their game. I keep trying to split off before I'm pestered for money, but they're persistent, so I give in. They want to give me a tour, let's go. What's that, another Buddha? Careful, I'm not sure my heart can take much more excitement. They half-follow me and I half-follow them around the place, the women occasionally clucking and warning, "Minds your head!" They show me how to wash the Buddha heads, and rub the Buddha tummies. The cutest little girl pins a tiny paper butterfly to my shirt. Once they're done showing me around, the women ask for a "present". I tell 'em I've got nothing for 'em, and they see I mean business. They all stomp off, muttering angrily. The little girl unpins the paper butterfly from my shirt with great efficiency and solemnity, like I've just been dishonorably discharged from her adorable army. I'd be lying if I said it didn't sting a little.

Before breaking for lunch, we knock out a couple more temples, I see more Buddhas than Siddartha's mirror, and I disappoint even more vendors and touts.

Do you think they call Christmas lights "Buddha lights" here?

Regardless, they still all insist "Minds your head". I'm not sure if this means anything, but the one time someone tells me to minds my head without trying to sell me anything, next thing I do is bash my head in an especially narrow staircase. Probably doesn't mean anything.

This place does look like it's lousy with curses.

The horse driver takes me eat at a vegetarian restaurant called Be Kind of Animals, which pretty much nails the point. I get some tomato curry and tamarind juice, and an elderly Swiss gentleman at the next table orders orange sodas for his horse cart driver, before chatting me up. My first thought is he must be a rich prick, but it turns out he's a retiree building schools in rural Myanmar.

"I always come out to Bagan every few weeks, just to have a shower and an aircon. There is no electricity in the village I stay in. It takes eight hours for me to walk from the village to the road where taxis are, so I cannot come too often."

Fuck me. After he shows me some pictures of the school he's currently building, I mention my stuff stolen in Ko Tao so that I can futilely try to keep up in the hardship game. He insists that Burmese people could not have stolen my things, and it must've been the Thais. Apparently he regularly leaves around a bag of all his cash, thousands upon thousands of dollars, and even though all the villagers know where it is, none of them touch it, nor would they even think of touching it. I don't really know how to respond, so I ask what it is he used to do, and he tells me his work was mainly around Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Middle East. He says he built textile factories, but that's exactly what the world's most charming retired arms dealer would say. He goes on to say that he's been to the USA 50-60 times, and every state but Hawaii.  I ask if he's been to Seattle. He loved the fish tossing at Pike Place. Before he leaves, he regales me with a tale about his favorite place in America.

"I love Las Vegas! Do you play poker?" I reply that I know of Texas Hold 'Em, and that's about it.

"Texas Hold 'Em, that is poker for babies! I play Omaha Poker. It is the most difficult. One time I was in Las Vegas playing Omaha, and I was playing with the world champion, the 3rd best in the world, the 7th best, and 3 others. It was my greatest game. I was up 50,000 dollars, and I took it and walked away. I knew it would get no better, so I walked away. It was a good day."

No sir, I wouldn't mind being that guy for a a few years to a lifetime, even if he does remind me for some reason of one of those old Nazi war criminals who escaped to South America. But that's just me being an asshole, and why I'll never be that guy. Bummer.

Just as we finish the tour it starts to rain, so we start to head back to the guesthouse. Along the way, I run into Mathieu, and I'm a little surprised to actually see him. I know we said we might meet up, but it's still a pleasant event when it actually happens. Probably something to do with my insecurities. He's with Kim, a Dutch girl who was also at the Moustache Brothers show. We eat dinner together, and hear that tonight is the Full Moon Festival. According to Lonely Planet, this means a lot of drunken revelry. According to the horse cart driver, it means absolutely no drunken revelry, because it celebrates the day Buddha became...Buddha. And I guess he didn't like the sauce. We spy a parade cruising by, and it leads us to a local volleyball match next to a pagoda. We sit on a wall to watch, and are immediately beset by a mob of children asking our names, asking for money, asking for food, water, candy, high-fives, handshakes, photos, to be picked up, to be swung around...I play jankenpo and do some clapping games with some, while other children keep trying to smell and kiss my hands. One of the children is wearing a Nazi shirt. Kim takes a boatload of photos, and finally the volleyball match ends with a fight. We promise the children we'll come back the next day, which was a lie.

Feeling dusty and filthy, we split up to take showers. The shower stall at the guesthouse has a red lightbulb, for that special gas chamber ambiance that you want. Our night ends with a puppet show at Pyiwa, that just consists of a lot of manic puppet dancing. It's not bad. Kim is leaving the next day, so I arrange with Mathieu to move into the room they're sharing.

In the morning, I give back the camera battery charger I've borrowed, psyched to finally rent a bicycle and get some pictures of those temples. Of course, it's raining. After breakfast, I use a squatter toilet for the first time, IN MY LIFE. My thighs felt like hot, quivering jelly that had just lost a fight to a much stronger alpha-jelly. No wonder you see old Asian people wandering around parks at night, doing their little exercises. Gotta get shredded if you wanna poop.

The rain finally stops around 1pm, so I try to check out of my guesthouse. There's no one at the front desk, only a boy outside asleep. I wake him, but he doesn't speak English or know what "checkout" means. I point to my money, my bags, and my room key, but he's still clueless. He calls in some old guy, who notices that I'm supposed to stay 2 nights. He fucks me on the exchange rate from kyat to USD, but there's not a lot I can do about that.

At the other guesthouse, Golden Village, I ask for Mathieu's room. "What country?" "France." "Room 202." He greets me in the room and we meet Kim at a restaurant. There, I find out that Mathieu is into punk music. I ask him what bands he likes. "Rancid, Dead Kennedys, The Clash, Choking Victim..." It's like he's reading the handmade liner notes of one of my high school mix CDs.

Way too eagerly, I ask him, "Oh my god, 'Crack Rock Steady'?!"

"Are you ready to stop / The rotten blue menace, let's go kill us a cop!" Mathieu sings back.

In unison, we belt out the chorus: "Crack rock steady! Are you ready?! Living above the law!"

Kim looks on with what a fancy man might call "abject horror". I don't give a shit. I just found a new best friend for the day.

Before Kim leaves, she the two of us sign a friend journal that she keeps, which strikes me as a fantastic idea for traveling. We both write a little note in the book about meeting her and jot down some contact info, and read some of the notes other people have also left her. Then she packed her bags and took off, and it was just me and my new punk buddy.

It's now around 1pm, so we've got a decent amount of time to still hit the temples. We rent bicycles, and set out on a road picked at random, singing "500 Channels", "Ca Plane Pour Moi", "Danger! High Voltage", and anything else that has a dumb chorus you can sing loud enough to spook the locals.

It should come as no surprise when I say this, but the pictures I finally managed to take did not match the initial wonder I felt the day before.

Total bullshit.

The lighting was poorer, and the temples we saw a bit less magnificent. Yet...I was having immensely more fun. And it was all thanks to the music, because music matters to me. If I may, a moment about music:

I think most people would agree that good music feels like the greatest, coolest, most fun guy you'll ever meet. You love hanging out with him, can't wait to introduce him to all your friends, invite him around everywhere you go, get really excited when he shows up at the bar. He's life of the party. For me, I was a socially awkward kid for most of my life. I found I could protect myself and deflect attention with a pair of headphones. When I had few friends, or none at all, music was there for me. Music was love. For me, that great cool fun guy that everyone wants to hang out with, I had a not-so-secret crush on him. I was, and continue to be, enraptured by him. I want to know all about his friends, his parents, his children. I want to live inside him, have him always around, have him never leave my side. I want to introduce him to my girlfriend, and see where things go. I want to know his other lovers, and bicker and rejoice over his being.

Hence why having any sort of mp3 player on my trip at all times feels so vital. Hence why I nitpick over the songs that go on said mp3 player, and waste time at slow-as-molasses internet cafes downloading new ones. When I'm traveling, access to music can be more important than my passport. For me, singing punk songs with an agreeable Frenchman while biking through a rust-colored mythscape could be considered a transformative experience. A+, highly recommended, would bike again.

It could just be the sugarcane juice talking, though. I drank a lot of sugarcane juice.

Apparently these new, box-looking pagodas are built by all those corrupt government officials trying to buy their way into nirvana.

A guy on motorcycle stops and says he can "show good sunset". We take him at his word, and of course when we get there he turns out to be a painter and wants us to take a look at his paintings. Mathieu buys a small one of a monk. Still, he told no lie. It good sunset.

After we've headed back to our guesthouse, Mathieu asks if I've heard of the band Morning Glory. I say no, and he says the most French thing I've ever heard: "Tonight, you will fall in love." He may even have kissed his fingers "muah". They're a crust-punk band similar to Choking Victim, and he plays me their song "Gimme Heroin". I do fall in love, and in return turn him onto Aesop Rock and Dead Prez.

Mathieu also brings up something I said earlier about running out of money, and offers to loan me some money. I balk, but in time accept $25 from him. I need it. All in all, I've got about 64,000 KS (66 USD) now, and a heart that would put the post-holiday-terrorism Grinch to shame. My situation's still rough, but a little less blowjobs-in-the-near-future grim.

Temple Tour Tribulations/MANDALAY

I meet my driver, Boma, after breakfast around 8:30, or "late" as he calls it. He gives me a lot of guff for sleeping in, especially for a guy showing me around on my dime. You'd think he'd be happy to spend less on gas, but I guess punctuality is more important to some folks. He takes me to Kuthodaw Pagoda, where they have "the world's largest book": the Tipitaka, the entirety of Therevada Buddhism's scriptures, written across 729 marble tablets housed inside as many white stupas. It looks like this:

There's a lot of these things.

Here's one of the things in the thing.

You could probably crush a couple of these on a long plane ride.  729 long plane rides.

There's just so many...

...It's...stupa-ndous.

Sorry. Here's some stupa puppies.

In fact, some eagle-eyed readers may remember seeing it from above, in one of my pictures atop Mandalay Hill:

Hemingway probably would've snipped a few lines here and there.

As I'm walking around the "book", I hear a young girl say "hello". I whirl around trying to place the noise, but it takes awhile to realize she's above, on top of a stupa. Curiously, the place is lousy with people picking something in the trees planted around the pagoda. People are just...vertical in this place. I don't know. An old man with one eye is sweeping and must have seen my confusion. "Piss?" he asks, and gestures towards a gate. Gives new meaning to the term "bathroom reader"!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA laughed the trees.

Once I've had enough, which is fairly quickly because what am I gonna do, read?, Boma whisks me to a couple of other tourist spots. However, I've refused to buy the $10 Archaeological Zone ticket necessary to see these sights, 'cause it supports the corrupt government and I'm socially conscious 'n shit, so I see 'em all from the gate. I feel smug as all hell.

Who needs to see the inside of another goddamn temple when you've got oodles of self-righteousness to occupy your time.

I'm actually able to go inside Mahamuni Pagoda, also known as "the Shwedagon of Mandalay", which I'm sure is an impressive and meaningful statement to some people. The big thing here is the Mahamuni Buddha image, supposedly one of only five images of the Buddha created during his lifetime. According to Wikipedia he also breathed on it and "imbued it with his essence", which sounds like something you shouldn't be doing in public, spiritual leader or not.

I find a spot were people are praying in front of the Buddha, and after kneeling for a minute a monk comes up and tells me that I'm in the women's section.

Typical feminazis, hogging all the best views.

He leads me to a government dude who rents me a longyi for 1,000 kyat (about a dollar), infomring that it's the dress code of the temple. After all my efforts, the government got me to pay up for something in the end. Somehow, I always knew when I finally gave in to The Man, it'd be while wearing a dress.

And color-clashing like a motherfucker.

Mr. Monk proceeds to take me on a whirlwind tour of the temple, including the Buddha chamber. He shows off the gorgeous mosaics and decorations, and also asks me how to say "velociraptor" in English, because I am wearing a t-shirt depicting a bandito riding such. We're both learning a lot, I guess is what I'm saying.

Worshipers are allowed to reverently affix gold leaf to the Mahamuni Image, as long as you don't have gross girl hands.

The temple has some pretty extensive grounds in addition to the Buddha pagoda, with a museum and a pond full of fish and turtles that are fed rice cakes by passing visitors. The museum is a bit rundown and covered in dust, but does contain some impressively ancient relics from across the country.

Also this lobster.

Throughout the temple my main man monk was able to explain the little rituals going on around us, things I had seen before but I had no idea about. I mean, it was all the usual "luck/wealth/prosperity/tradition" in the end, but still, it was nice to understand the protocol of the devotions.

Wettin' heads

Rubbin' tummies

He also gave me a quick rundown on some of the early stories from the religion, but none of them compared to what was depicted in this one painting:

Whoa, no one told me Buddhism was metal as fuck.

All in all, Mahamuni was a good time. Travel writing: Nailed It.

Place got some moves.

Mon monk ami curtly ends our tour near the entrance, and I prepare to bid adieu. Unfortunately, he's got a different idea. Turns out he doesn't agree that this is one of those free good-time tours that I keep thinking exist for some reason. Instead, he informs me I should give him 50-100 dollars USD. "For English books in the classroom," he says. Bad, bad monk. I tell him I don't have that much.

"40 is okay," he says. I pull out all the USD I have and show it to him. It's 7 dollars.

"15 is okay," he intones, ever so graciously. I repeat that I don't have that much, just 7 dollars. He tells me kyat is also okay. Just to humor him, I pull out all the kyat I have, about 900 in small bills. I hand it over plus the USD, an amount by which he is visibly displeased.

"Normally people give me 100 or 200, and I give them big blessing. But since you give so little, I give you little blessing." He gives me his "little blessing" and fucks off back inside the temple like the dick he is. Of course, I find out later that real monks will never ask for alms or donations, and I was scammed totes for real. For about 8 bucks, but it's the principle of the thing. I may not have many principles left, but a flimflam monk taking me for a boner ride is definitely against them. If only there was some way I could have known...

Maybe the fact that he looks like a goddamn Skeletor could have been a clue.

Next stop on our tour is Inwa, the ancient capital of Burma from the 14th to 19th centuries. If I ever seem strangely knowledgeable or well-read about this sort of stuff, rest assured I'm looking up about half of it after the fact. While traveling, I'm pretty much a dum-dum. If you want to know where the nearest caipirinha happy hour special is, though, I'm fucking Arthur Frommer. You know, the dude at the end of Euro Trip.

We eat lunch, and I futilely try to charge my camera. We drive over a bridge that Lonely Planet tells me is forbidden to take pictures of, so I take a picture of it.

I mean, come on.

A ferry takes me across a river to where I can get a horse cart to see yet more government ticket monasteries from the outside.

Vroom!

Just a whole bunch more of this junk.

Burma, I hate to judge anyone for their hobby, and clearly building pagodas is your thing, but like, board games are going through kind of a renaissance right now. Maybe shake it up a bit, is all I'm saying.

Maybe it's because I've been reading a lot of Lovecraft at night during thunderstorms, but I'll eat my hat if this isn't a tomb of something unfathomable that slithers in the darkness of men's dreams.

Yeah, I'm just about over all this.

But I'm not over dogs! This one's got a LEAF. Yes you do! Yes you do!

After seeing Namyin watchtower (that's right, the Namyin Watchtower)...

This one.

It's got a Forbidden View of the Forbidden Bridge.

Travel Tip: To avoid touts, wait for their AI routine to finish and eventually their sleep animation will activate. Now you are free to stealth past.

...I take a break for lunch. This being the main tourist circuit, some Canadians from my hostel are in the same restaurant. We chat awhile, and they tell me that seeing the monks eat breakfast in the morning was lame. The monks, probably tired of being watched by tourists, would take their lunches back to their rooms, because they are in fact people and not idealized automatons of Western mysticism. And after all the shit Boma gave me for being late and missing it, one would expect at least...fucking Yoga Flames from Street Fighter or something, I dunno.

The bike doesn't make it much farther before blowing a tire, which Boma gets patched at a small shop on the way. These things happen, etc. We limp along to Sagaing, where I climb Sagaing Hill.

You know what kinda hill I'm talking 'bout.

Travel Wrong: Nice Views and Pleasant Vistas

Wonder what's up these stairs?!

WHOA SO UNEXPECTED WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN IS THAT LIKE A GUY OR SOMETHING?!

Our last stop is sunset at U Bein Bridge, the oldest and longest teakwood bridge in the world. I didn't really know teakwood was a thing before this, but count me suitably impressed. A gathering of people from the Moustache Brothers show are also here, and a couple of Myanmar beers later we get on a boat together to watch the sunset. Of course, my camera continues to have no battery left. If you've ever been to Mandalay, rest assured the view is exactly the same as all the paintings everyone is always trying to sell outside temples. Families, monks, and the guys who sell souvenir images of the the aforementioned all walk its teaky length home, silhouetted against the last purple-pink light of the day.

One of the Moustache Brothers folks, Mathieu, mentions that he's taking a bus to Bagan tomorrow. He's the kind of backpacker (French) who's been traveling for seven months, spends a month in each country, sees everything, probably lacks intermediate math skills because too cool for school, etc. We make vague pronouncements about seeing each other in Bagan.

On the way back to the hostel, Boma's bike gets another flat, which he patches. Can't help it, etc. Then it goes flat again. Geez, Boma. I don't want to tell you your job or nothing, but maybe...new tire? I'm not even mad, really. I walk most of the last few blocks, until some guy gives Boma a trishaw, and we ride that the last block or so. We settle up, and I give Boma 10,000 ks. He is not happy about it, and insists I should help him pay for his busted bike. I do not consider it. In fact, my brain shuts down the neurons that might have even attempted to fire up a thought that would weigh the possibility of considering it. Also, that mountebank monk is still pissing me off. Sooo...no deal. Sorry, Boma and Boma's Bike. I ask the staff of Royal Guesthouse about sharing a taxi the next day, but all the ride shares are full. Getting my own is going to cost 12,000 ks. Woof. Sleep is getting uneasy again.