Yolanda Zaw goes‘home’ to Myanmar
Returning to her birthplace, Yolanda Zaw feels a sense wonderment – and pride
In the land of a thousand pagodas, the sky burns gold at dusk. From my vantage point on top of the Sunset Temple in old Bagan, the land beneath looks mythical. Over vast distances, temple tops crop up through the greenery. There is a sense of wonderment. And for me a feeling of pride.
It’s strange coming ‘home’ to somewhere so foreign to you. It’s been almost 10 years since I last visited my birthplace, Myanmar. A lot has changed over the past decade but, as I was relieved to find on my recent trip back, the enigmatic charm of my childhood land remains firmly intact.
Once closed to the world by tyranny, Myanmar has spent the last few years gradually opening up. Yangon is a very different place to a decade ago. Fashionable restaurants and bars are emerging, not just to cater to the fast-growing tourist market but also to a growing expat community.
Rangoon Tea House, for instance, does traditional street food fare in a sanitised, Western-style restaurant setting. As someone reared on Burmese cooking, I can attest to the authenticity of the dishes.
It was while bopping to Bob Marley in the lively 7th Joint Bar – a reggae club enlivened by happy hour cocktails and open-mic karaoke – that I learn that Yangon has its own GAA team. The Myanmar Celts Gaelic Football Club has been going strong for three years, taking on teams in the region.
Nightlife in ‘new’ Yangon is good fun but when travellers come to Burma’s biggest city the No.1 attraction remains the omnipresent Shwedagon Pagoda. Said to be the oldest Buddhist stupa in the world, this 2,600-year-old beauty is plated in solid gold and dominates the city skyline. The perfect time to visit if you want to avoid the heat and crowds is after dark. Against the night sky Shwedagon is iridescent and awe-inspiring. Despite its popularity among tourists, Shwedagon remains a deeply religious place for locals who visit each day to pray. Walking barefoot on the cool tiled floors, you can’t help but feel an inner calm.
Temples are synonymous with Myanmar, but something not as well documented in tourist guidebooks is the country’s rich colonial heritage. Yangon has one of the world’s largest collections of colonial era buildings. Rangoon, as Yangon was known during British rule, was once the world’s busiest port. The buildings here were constructed to reflect the might and power of Empire. Today, many of these architectural treasures stand dilapidated and ruined, with little state funding dedicated to their conservation. Fortunately, many private trusts have sprung up in recent times to save some of these bygone beauties.
Yangon’s most iconic hotel is one of the success stories of the conservation movement and is where I stayed during my visit. The Strand Hotel was built in 1901 as imperial Burma flourished but quickly fell into disrepair with colonial withdrawal. By the end of WWII the once upmarket hotel was being using as a stables by the Japanese army.
Today, The Strand has been restored to its former prestige. Stepping inside is like floating into another era of grandeur. It’s understated, it’s elegant, it’s colonial era ‘old money’. And
‘I learn that Yangon even has its own GAA team’– the Myanmar Celts Gaelic Football Club’
each room comes with its very own personal butler. Downstairs in the bar is where you’ll feel the strongest sense of history. George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling (who penned the poem Mandalay) sat in this very spot sipping on the hotel’s famous ‘Strand Sour’. More recently, the Rolling Stones’s Mick Jagger and the film director Baz Luhrmann occupied these seats. I order the classic drink to see if it’ll awaken any untapped genius in me. Alas, it is just a cocktail not a magic potion.
Yangon can be covered in a matter of days but the ‘real’ Burma, in my opinion, awaits beyond the
former capital’s reach. Inle Lake in the Shan State, an hour’s flight from Yangon, must be one of the most captivating places in the world. Situated some 2,900ft above sea level, this giant lake hosts an entire population who live and work on the water.
Bamboo houses built on stilts line the arterial streams. Beside these homes, floating farms grow vegetables. Tourists get about in motorised longboats while locals paddle to school and work in small canoes. Fishermen from this region are trained in the art of one leg rowing where they manoeuvre a leg around an oar to row while the other foot stabilises, leaving both hands free to cast nets.
On market days, the whole region comes together to trade in vegetables, fish and crafts. Small children, their faces decorated with yellow paste, dart about the market stalls, their eyes full of mischief, their smiles contagious. Life on Inle Lake is as vibrant as its inhabitants.
From Inle, ancient Bagan is just a half-hour flight. No less than 10,000 temples once stood in the kingdom of Bagan and today some 2,200 remain. It’s easy to get ‘templed-out’ in Bagan, but there’s plenty more to this historic township. Visit a local farming village where schoolchildren sing out their lessons from bamboo-built classrooms or take a cruise on the mighty Irrawaddy River, the country’s most important commercial waterway and the ‘Road to Mandalay’ as it was once poetically christened.
It is on these calm waters that I get a sense of what Kipling was on about all those years ago when he wrote: ‘This is Burma and it is unlike any land you know about.’ His words ring true to this day, I’m proud to say.