Disaster #?

Oh dear, poor Myanmar. That was a massive earthquake for Mandalay on Friday, 7.7 - our 2011 one in Christchurch was 6.2 and that was a forever spike in the city’s history. As if Myanmar hasn’t had it bad enough, with a civil war that’s been rumbling on for so, so long.

When, in 1980, we dipped into Burma as it then was, we were told as we approached that we shouldn’t take photos from our Thai Airways plane, because of military restrictions. We had so many forms to fill in that we hardly had time to look out of the windows anyway, recording all our financial assets on top of the usual immigration stuff; and then, once landed, had to write out duplicates before our bags were searched. Then we were driven into Rangoon/Yangon in a Vauxhall Velox so old that rust fell onto us with every bump we went over. And there were plenty of them. The city looked quite run-down, but had clearly been grand in its colonial days, and it was still colourful and lively, and the people were friendly.

Mandalay, though, where we flew the next day (our battered Fokker was the only plane at the airport when we landed) was quite different. Mostly flat, it was very spread-out, with no tall buildings other than the many imposing and elaborate pagodas. The streets were wide and tree-lined, and there were just a few battered buses and old cars trundling around - most of the traffic was horse-drawn carts, trishaws and bicycles. There were even cattle, sheep and goats grazing the grass verges. The pagodas though were breathtakingly beautiful and splendid.

The people were a bit shyer in Mandalay, but still friendly, though we were clearly seen as a resource, nagged by the bolder ones for money, pens, cosmetics, combs, anything. Fair enough - their lives were hard, and we must have seemed impossibly rich. Which of course we were, in comparison, though we felt we were doing it properly basic - especially when we were sleeping on bare boards on the Irrawaddy steamer going downriver to Pagan the next night, but that’s another story.

Our hotel was just outside the moat around the (even then destroyed) Palace, and we had a stroll around the extensive grounds. Lots of greenery, which rapidly became less attractive after I went up close to look at a flowering shrub, and disturbed a snake in its branches. It was all very lovely though, and we took a trishaw to the base of Mandalay Hill, to climb the 1,729 steps up to the summit. We had to do it bare-footed, because of all the temples along the route. That was a bit nerve-wracking, after the snake, and also because of lots of little brown frogs everywhere. Lots of golden Buddhas too, and pretty pagodas, and finally long views over the city which from there seemed to be mostly trees.

The next day we were taken to a workshop where small girls were hunched over looms, weaving silk thread into elaborate cloth, another where young boys hacked at blocks of wood held between their feet, bought some mosquito coils at a market that turned out to be a major production, and even watched a wedding in the hotel, very colourful and traditional, where the guests wandered in and out as the priest droned on. I had several offers during the day to buy my very ordinary watch. And then we headed off through the warm dark to the Irrawaddy River for the next stage of our Burma experience.

All that was, gasp, 45 years ago now, so presumably the city grew, getting taller and more crowded, full of buildings that are now, at best, full of cracks and, at worst, reduced to rubble. The death toll is currently 1700 but will inevitably rise. It’s just awful. Poor, poor Mandalay. (But not forgetting Bangkok either - where, apparently, most of the workers in the under-construction skyscraper that collapsed were actually Burmese. Sigh.)