Honey: Selected Journals from the Years Away
From Book X: Myanma Days
27.7.17: Gwa, Myanmar 

 

I was feeling a little stifled in Yangon, despite liking the city overall. This happens with pretty much everywhere: I fall into the place, envision myself living there indefinitely, then end up feeling some restless and anxious urgency driving me off again. Some of this could be attributed to Hostel Living: a lack of permanency, and the general culture they carry – but then there was my underlying desire to get alone. Everyone I’d been to the pagoda with was heading up to Bagan the following day, and it would’ve made sense to join them – become a bit of a group, take some photos together – but I just couldn’t. I was always getting drawn back away.

Then there were the more practical reasons to stick around: Joelle was coming to Yangon, and we’d planned to travel together until I flew back to Bangkok from Mandalay. She and I had kept in touch since parting ways in Hampi, with her sending some advice on trekking in Nepal and me planning to visit while in Europe – but then she’d gotten a job at the Dutch Embassy in Yangon, and it’d all worked out somewhat serendipitously. Because of Myanmar’s currently complicated political situation – what with the military committing genocide and all – she’d only just gone to The Hague to pick up her diplomatic visa and was flying in at the month’s end.

So I had five or so days to kill in Myanmar before she arrived, and I knew if I stayed in Yangon I’d lose my mind – so I decided to head out to Gwa, a small fishing village on the western coast. I’d heard about it from Simon and Emma, the British couple I’d been tubing with in Vang Vieng; they’d been through Myanmar and said Gwa was really off the beaten path. They’d stumbled across it on a recommendation and said there’d been no foreigners, and nothing to do except rent a scooter from a local and drive around some. Which all sounded absolutely great to me, particularly after hearing about Florence’s experiences in the south – and before heading to Thailand myself, and then Europe. So the next day at around 11:30AM, after eating at the Lotteria down the street from the hostel, I got a taxi to the bus station for K 8500. Oftentimes the drivers in Myanmar ask for K 500 more than you propose, as if they want to walk away feeling like they talked you up at least a bit.

Traffic in Yangon is terrible. It doesn’t matter where you are, what time of day it is – it’s always terrible. This is generally used as hyperbole, but not in Yangon; you spend more time stagnant than you do moving. You’ve got buses, trucks, motorbikes, cars – all trying to get down a single lane, with little to no regard for each other. It must’ve taken an hour and a half to drive the 20km to the bus station, at which point I was already royally impatient and pissed. When we pulled into the station, my driver rolled down the window and started yelling: “Gwa, Gwa!” to just about anybody who’d listen. Everybody always said everything twice like that. A random guy standing beside a bus jerked his head our way, repeating: “Gwa, Gwa!” and pointing to a bus stand. So the driver pulled the car over there and pointed inside, saying: “Gwa! Gwa!” one more time before leaving me.

I’d made a bit of a mistake. Because the bus wasn’t leaving until 4:30PM, and would pass through Gwa at around midnight – neither of which was ideal. I think I’d known this beforehand and simply ignored it. What I should’ve done was got my ass up for the 7AM bus, which reached Gwa in the afternoon – but I suppose back at the hostel that hadn’t sounded so hot. I said to the ticket girl: I don’t have a reservation on the other end, will they be awake at midnight to take me in? She was like: Yes, yes. So at that point my options were somewhat limited: I could go back to the hostel via a K 8500 hour-and-a-half long taxi ride and eat at Pizza Hut, or I could just get on the bus and see what happened. I think it was simply how appealing the pizza sounded that told me I ought to go ahead. Plus, there was nothing left for me back there. So I bought my ticket and sat down to wait.

I had three hours until the bus departed. In the waiting room there were these tiny ceiling fans that moved in a circular motion so that every six seconds you got a small gust of wind aimed in your direction. I was wearing my purple Goan shirt that’d shrunk in the wash and made me feel constricted and fat. On the television – a box attached to a mechanical arm that was jutting out from the wall – they were playing Race to Witch Mountain with the sound off. I was somewhat disappointed with myself for being able to identify the movie so easily. There was a woman in neon orange scrubs carrying around a tin tray of pills and candy, with people absently taking some as she passed. When she reached me I asked what they were all for. She pointed at them and said: Stomachache, headache, motion sickness. I said: Do you have anything for sleep? She handed me two and said: These should do it. I said: Thanks. At 4PM they started loading us onto the bus, just as it began to rain.

The bus was quite nice: one of those buses that are high off the ground and immaculately chilled inside. I got put next to this young guy who was constantly chewing what appeared to be paan, and spitting the remnants into a black plastic bag hanging from the seat in front of him. He was using his phone to message someone on Facebook in Burmese, and sending a lot of emojis – always three in a row, either smiley faces or kissy faces. The person he was messaging would reply with one word, and then the guy would send a whole slew of emojis again. I wanted to tell him to maybe cool it a bit, play hard to get – but I didn’t know how to convey that, and also I’d have to admit to eavesdropping. Pretty soon he switched to watching Aerosmith videos. Most of them involved the band rocking out in some vague place while a short film played out simultaneously. In one there was this teenager who was using virtual reality to ride a motorcycle and make out with a supermodel at the same time.

With traffic as it was, we were barely moving – and after about an hour I had to go to the bathroom. I waited another hour until I deemed it appropriate, and when we stopped to let someone off I got down and did the bathroom motion. The driver pointed to the side of the road. So I went over there, but since it was still daylight and there were people all over I thought it wasn’t such a good place. So I walked across a wooden bridge through some marshes to where there was a big rickety house; I tried to go in some bushes, but then this little kid was yelling – and when I turned around there was an old lady sitting outside the house shaking her head, which presumably meant: Don’t do that there. On the path before me was the little kid, thrusting a finger up at me and screaming in Burmese. I did the bathroom motion to the old lady, but she just kept shaking her head – as if to say: How could you? Luckily a group from the bus had followed me across the bridge and was waving me over. One guy, a rather short man with a Shah Rukh Khan-esque ponytail, said to me: “You have to go pee-pee?” I said: Yeah. So he ushered me through the village and into this stall, before using it himself. Then I walked back to the bus, past the yelling kid who was still pointing at me and screaming. A lot of guys in Myanmar peed publicly by squatting down in some corner and holding their penis with both hands, which always seemed very unnatural to me.

I must’ve fallen asleep, because when I awoke it was dark out and we were pulled over to the side of the road. Everyone was getting off the bus and walking across this bridge, so I did too. The bridge was long and wooden, and leading to a shack sitting on the water that I presumed to be a restaurant. The trouble was that the restaurant seemed to have no electricity, and thus no lights – just a battery-powered fluorescent desk lamp with bugs swarming around it. Most people had their phones out to light the way, but I’d left my iPod on the bus. Pretty soon the staff started bringing out these tiny white candles; they’d melt the end of the candle and stick it to the base of an overturned porcelain bowl, giving the shack an eerie orange glow. I wasn’t really feeling it, though. It was probably my fault. Maybe it was because I’d just woken up, quite unaware of where I was and what I was doing. But I was feeling really desolate, and like I had no idea what was going on and never would. I also knew that whatever food was going to be served at this restaurant was going to be very bad. It’d been my experience that the cuisine in Myanmar, at least out in rural areas – it wasn’t particularly good. Oftentimes it was white rice, and then some questionable gravy and even more questionable meat. It always appeared to be the parts of the animal you really didn’t want to associate with eating – like the ankle joint of the chicken, all slimy and wobbly. It also all seemed to sit for an unspecified amount of time before actually making its way to you. I’d prided myself for a while on overcoming my pickiness, but out here it really had come back around and reasserted itself.

The first thing I did was try to go to the bathroom in one of the pitch-black stalls, but once inside I could feel the bugs – thousands of them, it felt like – climbing all over me, with a couple of them even trying to crawl into my nose. It was some real Temple of Doom shit. So I stumbled out of there and back across the bridge to pee beside the bus; then I went back to the restaurant. The guy with the Shah Rukh Khan ponytail from the pee-pee stop was gesturing for me to sit, so I did. He was with my bus buddy, whose teeth were dripping bright red from the paan. Shah asked if I wanted anything to eat, and I said no on account of the food being bad in Myanmar; then he asked if I wanted a cigarette, and I said no; then he asked if I wanted some tea, and I said sure. So this kid brought over a cup of hot water and a package of tea, and I poured the powder in. Shah pointed at a spoon on my saucer, and I started stirring.

To be honest, Shah’s English was pretty good – but his accent made it so that I understood maybe 30% of what he said. Part of this was because the Burmese often don’t pronounce R’s and D’s; they call Myanmar “Myanma,” and Thailand “Thaila.” I was pretty sure he was headed to Ngapali Beach – maybe six hours north of Gwa – but I couldn’t tell if he lived there or worked there or was just visiting. He was married to a British lady, and they had a kid together; I asked to see a photo, and he showed me one from their wedding and one of his wife holding a baby. They were wearing matching black-and-white striped outfits, which made it look like they were in jail together. I couldn’t tell if she was a hot British lady, or an old British lady who’d scooped up this cool longhaired Burmese dude. We drank our tea, and pretty soon the bus driver started flashing the headlights. So Shah tried to pay for my tea and I said no, and I tried to pay for his tea and he said no – so we both paid for our own teas and got back on the bus.

I was starting to get particularly anxious now, because it was 9PM and then 10PM and then 11PM, and I had no idea where we were or when we’d reach Gwa. I was looking at maybe an arrival time between 12AM and 1AM, but it’d taken ages to get out of Yangon – so now even that didn’t seem likely. And I was thinking that there was no way this village was going to have hotels open, and that the girl at the bus stand had been a total bullshit artist, and I was about to end up stranded. It seemed like maybe I’d flown too close to the sun on this one. The thought crops up a lot: This is it, I’ve really gone out on a limb here, and this will be the end of me. Like I was chasing down something, my luck trailing just behind me – but now it’d fallen short and I was about to get my comeuppance. Classic Narrative Trope. I’d technically been through worse than a remote village in Myanmar at 2AM – but that guy in Into the Wild got done in by some berries, so it wasn’t unheard of.

At midnight, though, we stopped. We’d been winding along this really long road, sections in the pouring rain, through the hills and mountains, sometimes stopping to let a bus from the opposite direction pass us on the narrow path – but now we’d fully stopped. I waited for about 15 min. before I got out to see what was going on. Up ahead of us was another stopped bus beside the road; I walked to it and then beyond, to whatever was happening up the road. There were a couple of flashlights dancing in the distance, and then a motorbike with its headlight shining on something – but otherwise complete darkness. When I got closer, I saw it: another bus, half on the road and half off. At first I thought there’d been some kind of accident, and maybe I’d see some shit – but there wasn’t. The bus just looked like a beached whale, flopped upon the shore. The front was pointed towards us, coming onto the road from the right, facing upwards; and then the back was sunken down in what appeared to be mud. Everything else seemed to be intact. It was just a bus stuck in the mud. The problem, though, was that the left side of the road was a steep ditch for water collection – so there was really no way to pass by with the room given. Motorbikes could, and maybe a car, but no way a bus. Basically we were stuck. There was a thick chain tied to the bus’ front bumper, where they’d probably tried to pull it out with something, but it hadn’t worked. The bus was white, and had “Captain America” written in big red letters on both sides. This made me even angrier for some reason. I asked the crowd: So what now? Someone said: We wait for a crane. “A crane?” I said. “Like a big ass crane?” The guy nodded. I said: So we’re going to be here a while. The guy was like: Yeah.

So this was so incredibly not ideal. The only positive development was that it might actually take so long to get out of here that I’d get to Gwa in the morning, thus eliminating the Late Night Arrival problem. But the new problem was: I’m stuck in the wilderness of Myanmar for an undisclosed amount of time. I hadn’t eaten anything since that shitty Lotteria burger at 11AM. I was pretty sure there was water on the bus, but they weren’t really passing it out. And worst of all, it wasn’t even like a cool story. The bus hadn’t flipped over or blown up, this wasn’t a military zone or anything – it was just a bus stuck in the mud in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t any danger; it was just the way things were. This was probably when I started thinking: Okay, enough it enough. This is stupid. It’s been over a year, and I’m still out here getting stranded. This doesn’t even feel like cultural immersion anymore. This just feels annoying. When I got back to our bus, I sat down on the pavement outside and took a lot of deep hot breaths. Pretty soon Shah and Red Teeth came out too and sat beside me, and this time when Shah offered me a cigarette I took it.

It’s difficult to describe an extended period of stagnancy like this, to convey the anguish that goes along with waiting. 3AM rolled around and still nothing. By 4AM most people seemed resigned to the fact that this was the night. As in: Well, nothing we can do for now. At first there’d been a lot of commotion up by Captain America, with guys inspecting the wheels and talking amongst themselves – the way men always act when something breaks. But after a couple of hours they all dispersed, and seemed to take on the attitude of: Oh well. I couldn’t believe it. I refused to believe it. So no one was going to do anything? We were just going to sit here, overnight, all of us, all these trucks and buses? I couldn’t understand why people weren’t angry – angry with Captain America for its hubris, angry just generally, beating at the bus with their umbrellas. Why no one was demanding an immediate, definite solution. I had never felt my western mentality so acutely – never realized how absurd it was, and yet still clung to it with all my might. I walked back and forth maybe three times. Shah and Red Teeth were on the pavement, watching the latest Pirates of the Caribbean on RT’s phone. It rained off and on. I could see, from my vantage point beside our bus, that nature was overtaking us. There were the bugs: bugs that were fucking huge. The door to the bus was open, and they were swarming around the entrance, up inside, covering the glass. They were so big they’d just smash right into you. Out in the expanding forest you could hear the faint noise of things stirring, traveling either in towards us or out from inside me. It seemed as though the wild would just grow right over us, that they’d find all of it years later: skeletons and shrapnel and overgrowth.

As the hours crept on, I grew even angrier – but the anger seemed to shift toward something that was simultaneously insular and universal, something that stood apart from what was actually happening. Shortly after we’d stopped the driver had turned off the bus, which meant he’d also shut off the air conditioning – which meant the cool comfort of the luxury bus was slowly dissipating into hot, humid, stale air. The windows were sealed shut; the only real airflow was through the open door, which the bugs were now making their home – everything else was left to drip, slowly, and wither. Humidity, out here like this, is otherworldly: it makes you feel as though your skin is melting in real time, working you towards a very mechanical and measured death. It’d chased me across countries – but now it was here, facing me down for endless dark hours. And so pretty soon everyone else seemed to accept their fate, and climb on the bus to sleep – even Shah and RT, which left me alone in the enveloping night.

I think, logically, I was aware that this was entirely my problem and no one else’s. Like it was a total waste of gas and power to have the AC on – it might end up stranding us doubly. But that didn’t really matter to me. The reason I could tell I was getting angrier, almost manically so, was because I started thinking things like: I paid for an AC bus; I paid for that bus to transport me from Point A to Point B with AC; nowhere was it ever said that in the event of an overnight hold-up that that promise of AC from Point A to Point B would be rescinded. So basically I started thinking real prick stuff. But the underlying problem really had nothing to do with any perceived injustice – that was a cover for something else: the feeling of lonesomeness. By that I don’t mean physical lonesomeness – that Shah and RT had gone on the bus to sleep, leaving me alone on the road – I mean lonesomeness in the sense that no one else was experiencing this feeling with me. No one else felt the way I felt, or could understand how I felt. I was alone.

This all gave me these vague remnants of feelings, or premonitions of feelings, that I’d had for years but had disappeared for quite a while. I suppose I could call it my only true fear, besides the fear of death: the night when you’re expected to sleep but cannot. And not only that, but everyone else has fallen asleep peacefully, off in some realm beyond, and you’re left to fend for yourself. I could see myself, as a child: Papa had gone out of town for business, and Brett and I were sleeping over at Grandma’s – we were small enough that we could both fit in their Jacuzzi bathtub, rolling around through the jets. And then night had come along, and Brett and I were set up on the adjacent sofa beds in the computer room – and there I am, howling off into the infinite time, while Brett and Grandma sleep; I don’t know what it was, what caused it, the panic, but I screamed. The thing about the night is that it’s not as dark as we imagine: it’s bright, with this eerie white glow about it; one might assume it’s moonlight, but it’s not – it’s this ceaseless tame sheen that’s certainly more terrifying than darkness. Brett slept soundly, rustling once – the only time I stopped screaming, sniffling, thinking I was alone no more, that I’d woken him. I was actively trying to – him or Grandma. I always thought it was bizarre that no one did, that it was possible for them to leave me so absolutely while still being physically present. The panic swelled up and vibrated, and seemed to find some circular motion that said: This is how we live now. In the morning I told Grandma. She said: Why didn’t you wake me up? The thought had never occurred to me. It was as if I’d been trapped in that liminal space, like I’d been at the mercy of something larger.

This went on. Mostly it affected sleepovers: Sam and Eli would fall asleep at midnight, after a night of video games and snacks – and I’d stay up with Sam’s mom playing Guess Who? until I finally fell off at 4AM. Or then there Mom or Dad would be, in the midst of the night, to pick me up; we’d ride home silently, in the eerie glow, me ashamed, them probably just tired. No one ever gave me a hard time about any of it; no one ever asked me to explain why it was happening, or how it felt – the panic, anxiety, fear. And then you get to college, where it seems that a requirement of sleeping with someone is to actually sleep with them – her and you, in this twin bed, a boundless heat and energy between you, and then the eerie glow all over again. I remember knowing almost immediately that no amount of alcohol or marijuana could make it leave, that once whatever had led me there began to dissolve I’d be left with the same thing all over again – me, and it. This is a very easy way to become labeled as an ineffectual monster almost immediately, and maybe there’s some validity to that.

Over time, I’d actually gotten over it somewhat – I’d had no choice. You couldn’t travel like this and not be able to sleep when necessary – hotels, hostels, buses, airports floors, in excruciating heat, in liberally horrible conditions. As with most things, travel had cured me of something by forcing it out of me. But this was clearly an extenuating circumstance. It was like some hypothetical in which all variables were presented, just to see how I’d respond. The main issue being that everyone else on the bus had grown up in humid conditions like this: they were used to sleeping through it, whereas I wasn’t. So there I was, outside of the bus, sitting on the pavement, while the night and rain wore on, and the wildlife crept closer. I could feel the feeling beating back inside my chest: the same. A young man and woman came off the bus and sat beside me, embracing beneath a shared umbrella. It was difficult to tell whether they were lovers or siblings.

Eventually I did sleep, before the sun finally came back around. The bus driver, in a wave of mercy, did turn on the AC for a few 30-minute increments – and I was able to concentrate enough during one of them to fall asleep. I must’ve woken up a few times during the night, drenched in sweat, crying out – but was able to pass back out. I was alternating between a pure hatred towards RT for the body heat he was contributing beside me, and a deep regret over the trouble I was clearly causing him. At one point, in some fugue state, I balanced a water bottle on my forehead – maybe to distract myself from the immense discomfort I was in – and when I passed out it fell over on him. He was a good sport. When I awoke for good at 8AM, he was handing me some sort of packaged baked good with pineapple goo inside. I took it and ate it.

Shah, RT, and I got off the bus to have a cigarette. That was when I noticed RT’s massive Slipknot tattoo on his forearm. It looked like the Slipknot logo if it’d been done by someone with virtually no experience drawing the Slipknot logo, and no experience giving tattoos. We walked up to have a look at Captain America, which was still in the exact same spot. I couldn’t believe it. It was 9AM and we’d made no progress. Now, though, people were starting to get impatient. “They are hungry,” Shah said, “and we have no food.” When we got back to our bus, he went onboard and came back with two apples; he handed me one and cracked the other in half, splitting it with RT. The apples were massive and shiny and had these pink mesh socks on them. So we sat on the road and ate them. RT was smiling his RTs a lot. I got the sense that he thought Shah was pretty cool, and was really digging that we had a little group going here.

So then I started thinking about something that I probably shouldn’t have been thinking about. But I think Shah was thinking about it too. The something being: how do I get out of here. Because I very easily could, I think. I had money, and I was white – the latter being even more important. I could sense something in the air: a vague agenda of: Let’s get this foreigner out of whatever the fuck this is. I assumed part of it was their desire to not have their country presented to me in such a negative light – but then also the general ethos, propagated by the western world: we deserve better. We deserve better than a bus stuck in the mud, and a lack of infrastructure to get it out of said mud. We deserve something closer to First Class, something uninhibited by bullshit like this. Maybe they were just being nice to me – the way Americans certainly weren’t in inverted situations – but I could feel it. I could feel it because I kind of believed it. If I was being honest with myself, I did feel as though I deserved better than this – better than them. There were cars and bikes coming along, and I could easily hitch a ride. Gwa was some two hours ahead, apparently – but whoever was on this road had to at least be passing through there. Shah brought it up himself: he said I could pay someone to take me along. I knew I wouldn’t even have to do that. They’d pull over, see me, and just do it – they’d be offended if I even offered to pay. I believed, and I think we all believed, that that was the way it ought to be.

But wasn’t that the whole problem? There were hundreds of people stranded, but I deserved to get taken on while they waited? And why? Because I was impatient? Because I couldn’t wait? I was heading to a village with nothing in it; I literally had all the time in the world. I knew, then, that I couldn’t go on. Even if the opportunity presented itself, I wouldn’t be able to. And if I had been able to, I wouldn’t have been the man I thought I was. Because who are we, really, if we succumb to the things we know to be untrue within ourselves just because the rest of the world allows it?

Fortunately, I didn’t have to find out. Because pretty soon a truck came rolling up, its pickup filled with oil drums: it had arrived to pull out Captain America. So RT and I followed the truck, sharing my umbrella, along with the rest of the loitering crowd. Everybody had turned out for the big show, and the men were back to yelling orders aimlessly. It seemed like everyone was trying to get a piece of the action. We watched as they tied the chain to this new truck, and got it taut before sticking a piece of wood behind the truck’s back tire to keep it from rolling off. I was thinking there was no way this was going to work. The truck driver got in position, and a young guy removed the wood; then the truck roared as Captain America groaned and lurched forward. Immediately everyone started freaking out and yelling and waving for the truck driver to stop. After a series of short pulls and freak-outs, they actually succeeded in pulling Captain America onto the road; the crowd erupted in cheers, and I started clapping even though no one else did. I turned around and saw Shah down the road, smiling in the rain. He had a few grey wisps of hair sticking out of his ponytail; it made him look wise and sage-like, standing there in his lungi.

It still took a while to get going. We didn’t actually start off until 10AM, and that was only after Captain America and the other buses heading in the opposite direction got to pass through – which I thought was kind of fucked up on account of this all being Captain America’s fault, but no one seemed to agree with me on that. And then once we finally did go on, we didn’t make it far before stopping for breakfast. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to stop, wanting mostly to just get to Gwa at this point – but whatever. Breakfast was rice, with the small terrible gravies and meats, but I was so hungry at this point I ate it. Shah said breakfast was on the bus driver, because of all the trouble we’d been put through. I got a coffee, which was hot water and a package that said 3-in-1 on it: coffee, sugar, and cream. I poured it all in. Shah said his wife was probably worried; he hadn’t had any service for the whole night. I asked RT if he had a girlfriend, and he showed off his RTs and said yes. I kind of wanted to ask if it was the girl that hadn’t been reciprocating his emojis, but instead I just told him I liked his tattoo.

At 12PM we reached Gwa. It was raining real hard now. No one else was getting off. So I got my bags and said goodbye to Shah and RT. I said: Thanks so much for helping me. I felt like I was going to miss them. This had happened so many times, but I still didn’t know what to say to convey how I felt. You were my friend out there, in that wilderness. You’d been kind. You’d shared water and food with me – cigarettes, information. Most of all, you’d made me feel like I wasn’t alone. Like I could count on you. You didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to do any of it. But you had. So, thank you. But you can’t really communicate all that to someone very quickly, when you’re about to step out into the rain, and away forever. So instead I just said thank you, and got off. I hobbled through the downpour, over to a shack that turned out to be some sort of jewelry shop. The bus held for a long time. As if they were weighing the situation, leaving me out here, so clearly with no idea what I was doing. Maybe they were thinking about it. Either way, they drove off.