This morning, we had
our complimentary breakfast downstairs in the hotel restaurant and
then went back upstairs to repack the bags. We'll be returning to
this hotel after our trip to Bagan, so we consolidated our stuff and
left a couple of bags behind. We then checked out and went for a walk
around town – our train wasn't due to leave until 4pm, so we had a
good few hours to kill. Zoe had been complaining that the sandals she
bought in the Mekong Delta weren't fastening properly any more, so we
stopped in at a little shoe store and miraculously found a nice $4.50
pair for her there and then. We lunched on burgers and beers at the
Western-style restaurant we found the day before yesterday, bought
some train snacks at a little supermarket across the road and then
went to a funny little very local restaurant up the road from the
hotel to play some cards, drink some beer and kill some more time.
(On the way there we came across a very peculiar sight. Sitting on
the pavement were two large dark grey fish, raised up on their front
fins. At first we thought they were models, but when we got closer,
we discovered that they were real fish – and they appeared to be
alive. There was a guy with them who had several more in a metal
bowl. They were some sort of catfish I think and were pretty
seriously armoured. What he was doing with them I do not know.)
And then, finally,
it was time to go. We went back to the hotel to retrieve our bags and
headed for the station. On the way, we grabbed some corn and
'focaccia' and then sat eating the former in the waiting area. When
the train pulled up, we walked out to find our carriage. The
inspector looked at our tickets and showed us to our compartment. And
it really was our compartment. We had an entire self-contained
section - complete with en suite bathroom, fan, wide seats that
pulled out to form a bed, folding tables, two top bunks, a small side
table and lockable cupboard, and a small luggage room - entirely to
ourselves. Which all makes it sound rather more luxurious than the
reality. There was a big puddle of water just inside the doorway and
when we opened the door to the smelly, cave-like bathroom we
discovered the source – there was a steady stream of water coming
down through a hole in the ceiling just inside the door. The door to
the little luggage room wouldn't close and kept banging for the whole
journey and getting the seats to lie flat was difficult in most cases
and impossible in two.
As we sat waiting
for the train to leave we admired the exemplary childcare going on on
the adjacent platform, where a half-naked infant was sprawled out on
the tiles, and then noticed a group of people setting up lights and
cameras on the platform right beside our compartment. A great crowd
of people began to form next to the fence on the other side and then
someone counted down and the cameras – both the film crew's and
those of every other able-bodied person in the area – turned to a
young couple acting out an emotional farewell. Someone came over to
the window of the compartment and told us that the male half of the
couple was quite a famous actor in Myanmar. Not ones to miss out on a
brush with fame, Sarah and I hustled over and asked if she could have
her photo taken with him. He very graciously agreed and then, when we
were done, asked her where she was from said it was nice to meet her.
(We later discovered that his name is Pyay Ti Oo and he's very famous
indeed – in 2011, his wedding ceremony was broadcast live on
Burmese television.)
Eventually, after
three or four takes, their work was done and the team packed up - and
the train set off. After booking our tickets but before getting on
the train, we had read some horror stories about the journey we were
about to undertake. Most of them involved the motion of the train and
it wasn't long before we learnt just how true those stories were. As
we got under way, the train began to sway from side to side, rocking
and rolling rather markedly. And then it began to periodically jerk
violently to one side or the other, throwing us against each other.
There was also a violent front- and backward motion, as if the
carriage were being shunted from place to place in the railyard. And
added to all of this was an up and down movement as if we were going
over bumps in the road. At one point while we were still going
through Yangon, the frequency of the bumps over which we were
travelling somehow became aligned with an underlying harmonic in the
carriage that amplified the motion and we were suddenly bouncing up
and down so violently that we were being thrown several inches into
the air. As we came back down again, the suspension springs were
reaching full compression, causing us to slam down hard on the
wheels. All of this violent motion was obviously too much for some
sort of reservoir on the roof, as it suddenly began to 'rain' outside
our front windows. It was also too much for the electrics – when
things finally calmed down a little, Sarah pointed out that both the
fan and the lights had stopped working.
The overall effect
of all this chaotic motion was akin to being in a small plane going
through a particularly bad patch of turbulence. But just to make
things a bit more interesting there were the sounds – the constant
clickety-clack, made louder by the fact that we were travelling with
the windows open and that said windows were situated right over the
wheels, and an intermittent banging noise, like a heavily muscled man
was hitting the underside of the carriage with a very large metal
hammer. It looked like we were in for a hell of a ride.
The beginning of our
journey took us along exactly the same route as we had taken
yesterday on the circular train, but somehow being behind glass in
air-conditioned relative comfort had removed us enough from what we
were seeing to let it drift past us without making a significant
impact. Today, however, with the windows open, the sights, sounds and
smells brought the reality of the extreme poverty through which we
were passing distressingly home to us. And yet everywhere we went,
the people we passed would almost invariably smile at us and wave.
As night fell, the
lights in the carriage (when they were actually on) began to attract
flying insects from far and wide, and we were soon joined by a large
dragonfly that terrorised the girls (Kindle Paperwhites are usually
great for reading in low-light situations, but not so much when
they're the only light source available to large flying insects). The
insects didn't just come in through the windows; a well-aimed shoe
dispatched the large cockroach that emerged from behind the little
cupboard. And then there were those that remained outside – large
numbers of fireflies floating about like little green embers.
When it was time to
go to sleep, I folded the seats down and we covered them with a
sheet. We decided that we would share the bottom 'bunks' – a parent
and child in each. The carriage was still being bounced about so
violently that we were a bit nervous that we would be bounced
completely out of the top ones. Despite this decidedly unrestful
motion (which at one point seemed to me as though the carriage had
been picked up by a giant child and shaken vigorously), we all did
eventually get to sleep, although Kate and I were woken regularly. We
had both taken the positions adjacent to the window and spent long
periods just staring up at the sky. In the unpopulated areas we were
passing through, the only light came from the vast blanket of stellar
pinpricks decorating the dome of the sky, punctuated regularly by the
fleeting streaks of shooting stars.
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