Collecting Moments

It seems like women do the most difficult work in this country. They carry everything – stones, bricks, jars with water, sacks with rice and baskets with goods. They build the roads, deliver produce to the market, walk along the hot dusty streets to sell tea and fruits, and still take care of the children and look after their home. One of the things that struck me in Mrauk-U was the rice drying process. Women bring maybe 30 kg sacks with rice on their heads in the morning, level it by foot on long bamboo sheets, leave it to dry for the whole day and come back in the evening to collect the rice, put it into the same bags and carry it back home. The next day the same women bring the same sacks to the same spot, just to collect it again at night... Extremely hard repetitive work! What makes Mrauk-U so special is that life goes on around the ancient ruins. Children play football next to black-stone pagodas, farmers continue their daily work in fields between the old stupas, villagers come...

Today started with a simple but tasty rice and omelet breakfast at the guesthouse. The village was just waking up, children cycling to school and many ponies and carts. We realized that at night we ended up in Taungdwingyi which was still 100 km from Magway. The guesthouse owner assisted us with a local minibus which was quite quick to make the journey to Magway. It turned out to be dusty, noisy, unpleasant place. We have seen no other westerners in the whole town. We hitched across 1.8 km bridge the Ayeyarwady river to reach Nimbu. It was hot. People tried to help us with the buses but it was clear that hitching any distance westwards from there was nearly impossible. We decided to head back to Magway and book a bus all the way to Mrauk-U, the great west Myanmar temple town. A local travel agent was keen to help, he was the only one to approach us. The profit margin for the travel agent was clearly high but we were faced with no other options and he was very attentive and focused on h...

Our second day in Burma started with breakfast on the rooftop in our upmarket but cheap hotel. We said goodbye to U Linn Shwe's wife who came to check that we had a good plan to move on from Yagon. She was a little confused by our choice to walk to a main road and try to get a lift to the highway. There was an overwhelming number of taxis which repeatedly tried to “help” us. Eventually one agreed to take us for a reasonable price beyond the airport to the road leading to the highway. He dropped us off at a gas station and we asked the customers there for help (the gas station attendants didn't mind our attempts to engage their customers). Many people were interested but no-one seemed to be heading north until a woman, an executive assistant who worked at the local Coke factory, agreed to take us to the highway proper, she was on her way to work. She gave us insight into the yellow marking (“tanaka”) on many Burmese women's faces. She said women apply this as it softens the ...