Monkeyrockworld

We spend some hours with Khine in a tea house, we talk and talk and he helps us out planning the best itinerary we can to face an independent tour of Myanmar, the atmosphere around us is a bit unreal, like we are talking in slow motion, in a black and white movie from the 50s. But indeed it’s real, and I drown myself in cups of Chinese tea while we ponder whether its best to take a slow boat down the Irrawady river or to visit Kalaw of Hsipaw… he’s building up a great anticipation. Before he leaves us, he takes us to buy tickets to Kinpun, base camp of the Golden Rock mountain, one of the most sacred peaks in the country, and he gets us our first taste of an appetizer they have here called Selat and  made out of crushed leaves, tomatoes, dry fish, peanuts and oil. A quite tasty snack consumed at the roadside under the majestic Sule pagoda, just a few minutes before sunset calls for the day to quit. We decide to leave Schwedagon for the 17th of November, when we’ll meet up with Carlo, my best friend now in Cambodia, and Lorenzo, another good friend of mine with whom I shared life on a boat in Australia’s Darwin. Meeting up here will be one thousand miles away from that experience, and I can’t wait.

The first night in Yangon is creepy: the streets are so busy, bustling with life, food and music, but someone forgot to turn the lights on. We promptly discover that it’s not a mistake, it’s the dry season, and the city often suffers powercuts that they try to prevent using electric generators… still, the city is almost pitch black and the street sellers use the scarce street dimlights to provide some enlightening to their patrons. It’s a very picturesque situation, we have to walk very carefully because the road is a constant rally of potholes and open ditches you don’t wanna end up in, I’m sure. Seems like people are happy to see us, and cars and buses storm the streets everywhere, humming with music and sounds… everybody is out on the street, eating, talking and minding his own business, and it seems like there is no life inside of the apartment blocks that look like someone just forgot about them, empty concrete eye sockets without human eyeballs.

It’s unreal, its beautiful chaos, its something we never experienced before. Is a city of darkness, haunted by dark faced Bamar devils cooking their infernal meals out on the street side. We get to the riverside and we see boats shuttling people somewhere in the dark, like a hellish picture of Carontes, people sitting in small spaces, everything lit by a yellowish dim light making this a perfect nightmarish moment. And I am not describing Yangon as hellish because it is a terrible place to be, but only because its atmosphere is resembling the one of a Dante’s fantasy tonight… it’s probably just the first impact, but compared to what we left in Thailand, it truly seems like we abandoned safety, and we dived at least 60 years in the past, if not a couple centuries, when the gaslight ruled this world.