 |
|
 |
PATRICK ZACHMANN/MAGNUM FOR TIME
Hanging on: Riding the train to Battambang, Cambodia
|
|
I was urged to abandon my journey even before it had begun.
At the Burmese embassy in Paris, located on the third floor of a nondescript bourgeois apartment block, the middle-aged secretary in a floral-print blouse and a plain brown skirt raised her hands in surprise: "Train, you wish to travel by train? No one travels by train! They are uncomfortable." I explained it was essential to my trip. Sensing my determination, she added in a nervous whisper, "They are not safe—there are accidents." By the time I had collected all my visas from the various embassies, I had been warned that to travel by train across Southeast Asia was to risk being derailed in Burma, robbed in Thailand, kidnapped in Cambodia and stoned by rock-throwing youths in Vietnam.
But none of that deterred me as I began my odyssey by rail in the Burmese capital, Rangoon. The station there hardly befitted a capital. Train departures were announced on a blackboard, and there was only a single platform, which was separated from the rest of the station by a security fence. Whole families slept, ate, lounged or sat cross-legged chewing betel nut, reddening both their gums and the station floor with scarlet spittle as they waited. The "up" trains to Mandalay and Myitkyina were apparently fully booked for days. If only the trains received as much grease as the hands that sold the tickets.
I paid "the foreigners' price"—more than 10 times the local rate—for a couchette in a carriage with no access to the rest of the train. I then climbed aboard the restaurant car instead. I was told the carriages were hand-me-downs from the Japanese, but the posters on the wall showed autumnal Alpine scenes, at odds with the train's overall grime, leaking roof and creaking wooden frame. I had the impression I was sailing on rough seas. As we pulled out of Rangoon, the waiters—now out of sight of the station masters—removed their bow ties. The DJ in the restaurant car turned the boom box to thumping volume, and I drank my insipid local beer to Burmese covers of Boney M, Julio Iglesias and the Eagles.
As the carriage swayed and lurched across the countryside, I mingled with the other passengers, meeting businessmen, students, craftsmen, beauticians and transvestites. Everyone who had a smattering of English wanted to practice, and those who didn't communicated with hands and facial expressions. The transvestites were teased, but not maliciously. Good humor reigned, even when discussing Burma's political woes under its military rulers. "They have built some excellent golf courses," said a smiling young man from Rangoon. And from a chuckling barber: "My 50-year-old mother says this is a transitional period—she has been waiting 50 years for the transition to finish."
The journey to Myitkyina seemed interminable as we often had to wait for the "down" trains to pass at the rare stations where the single track turned into two. Like much of Burma, the clock in Myitkyina has stood still for decades, and a few horse-drawn carriages are still used there as taxis. Yet this is also a frenetic frontier town where fortunes are rapidly made and lost, where only the humidity dampens the jostling to earn some kyat to spend, reinvest or convert into gold and precious gems.
Not many foreigners, apart from Chinese mining barons, travel to the jade mines in the mountainous north, due to the war between the central government and the armies of the Kachin independence movements. Now that a cease-fire prevails, and the generals and the guerrillas are talking peace, the real danger lies along the track that takes you through the jungle to the source of the world's finest jade.
I talked to the travel agency with a monopoly on tours to the mines, and set off by car. We passed the spot where minutes earlier a truck had skidded in the mud and plunged down a ravine to join countless others. It's a perilous but heavily trafficked route, with four-wheel-drive pickups incessantly ferrying hundreds of migrants—mainly miners, but also sex workers and other fortune-seekers who are all hungry to profit from the spoils associated with precious stones. Eight hours and 240 kilometers later we emerged onto a fertile plain that is Burma's largest jade center. The small surrounding towns are a tribute to the miners' predatory greed: earthmovers are constantly modifying the landscape, removing thousands of tons of mountainside; the newest Land Cruisers with smoked glass windows roar past; and untouchable dons remain cloistered in compounds protected by thick walls, watchtowers and searchlights.
The government, in a bid to maximize its revenues, has leased more than 330 licenses for parcels of land, some to private armies (in some cases even onetime enemies). Soldiers watch over teams of miners who are housed in compounds that are like barracks. Labor must be corralled so that tired bodies don't succumb to heroin or one of the brothels where HIV rates are rumored to be among the highest in Asia.
I descended 150 meters in a metal cradle down a mine shaft. In the intense heat and humidity, bare-chested men in pants and sandals drilled and pickaxed the rock face, tracing the veins they hoped would lead them to imperial jade, the greenest and finest of all. Others hauled the excavated rock in metal chariots to the mine shaft, returning with timber for columns and beams to keep the tunnel from collapsing. In the neon light their bodies and faces glistened as the grime clung to their sweat-bathed skin.
In the mining town of Sein Taung, bars, massage parlors and tea rooms showing World Wrestling Federation fights and Bollywood, Hollywood and Chinese movies compete for the custom of young men with money to spare and few options to spend it. But the dollar is not almighty. Every bar, restaurant, mine and house here (be it Buddhist, Christian or Muslim) has its shrines—not just to gods and prophets, but also to the nats. As night descends, hundreds of people of all ages, ethnic groups and faiths gather at a local park to placate these spirits. As tradition dictates, a gay man acts as the intermediary, dancing to the accompaniment of cymbals, bamboo claps and gongs. Tonight, he is trying to appease Ko Jyi Kyaw, the popular spirit of gambling, drugs, drink and cockfighting. I am invited to sit at the front of the center circle on the dirt floor and am given a gift—a can of beer that had been placed in Ko Jyi Kyaw's portable shrine. I am enchanted by the charm of an impoverished people burdened by their land of plenty—it is the country's wealth that has caused the barons to take everything. As I walked back to my hotel room in the ink black, moonless night, a female voice on a bicycle called out, "I love you." Then she rode off without slowing and without another word.
|
|
|
