Getting Into Caves in Hpa An

Some people don't like caves. Their position is defensible. Caves can be dim and dank and are often inhabited by creatures you wouldn't like to pet. They frequently reek of bat shit. You can get lost in caves quite easily and there's always a chance the roof could collapse or a tunnel could flood and leave you trapped in a subterranean tomb. And also, this:

On the other hand caves can be incredibly neat places, too. Besides skin-eating fungi and calamitous rockslides, you can find lakes, rivers, and even forests. Or, in the case of Hpa An, temples.

~

If there's one thing Myanmar has plenty of (besides methamphetamine and squirt guns) it is temples. You'd be hard pressed to spit a wad of betel nut anywhere in the country without hitting a temple, which is actually a terrible idea and would probably end badly for you. The Burmese are among the most devoutly Buddhist people in the world and have been enthusiastically, or otherwise, building temples all over the place for the past millennium or so. When I tell people about traveling in Myanmar, I feel like Bubba in Forrest Gump: 'Well, there's sandstone temples, gilded temples, ancient temples, temples on mountains, floating temples, temples full of cats...' After a while it can all start to seem same-same but different.

Shwedagon Paya is Myanmar's most famous (and most photographed) temple,.

Many of the backpackers I met in Myanmar were hesitant to concede this; the truth came out sheepishly,  like they were admitting Citizen Kane was boring. But the temple fatigue in their eyes was obvious. I actually like visiting pagodas, but I could understand how they felt. Contemporary travel is basically an expensive hunt for the perfect Facebook profile picture, and temples rank just behind beaches, sunsets, and beach sunsets as Southeast Asia's most thoroughly-beaten dead horses, photographically speaking. Your friends are unlikely to enjoy clicking through a hundred photos of crumbly old Buddha heads.

It would be nice to pretend I was too enlightened to hold such dismissive views, but in reality I rolled my eyes as lethargically as the guy in his Vang Vieng tanktop the first time I heard about Hpa An. The only reason I ended up going there was a short email from an American couple I'd met weeks before. They described it as a sleep little country town where you could kill a few days spelunking before catching a riverboat to Mawlamyine, where Orwell once shot an elephant and Kipling wrote some very misleading poetry.

'Cool,' I thought. 'Caves are awesome. As are riverboats.' The caves were indeed awesome, but I never caught that riverboat.

~

Main street of Hpa An by day.

My first glimpse of Hpa An was a blurry one, as it came at 3:30 am one foggy morning. I'd arrived on an overnight bus from Yangon with a talkative Chinese girl whom I seriously considered smothering at least a dozen times during the ride. We climbed off the bus and collected our bags, standing beneath a gaudily illuminated clock tower in the town's central roundabout. Wide empty streets snaked in every direction past rows of shuttered windows and unlit storefronts. I held a business card for a place called Soe Brothers, one of the few guesthouses in town licensed to allow foreigners and not notorious for bedbugs.

We found the place with little trouble. Unfortunately the night clerk informed us that they were full, were likely to be full tomorrow, and also that it was really goddamn early and wouldn't we please fuck off. He had a point, though the Chinese girl continued to pester him with questions until he wearily slammed the door in her face. 'Serves her right,' I thought smugly until I realized that meant I was screwed too.

So we wandered off down the dark lifeless street, tottering under the weight of our heavy packs. There were no signs of human activity - the townspeople were heavy sleepers apparently. I was beginning to suspect we were walking through a ghost town when an ancient motorbike cart rumbled to life and we were suddenly blinded by its ferocious headlights. A high, thin voice called out, ' Hello my friend, where you go?' I felt my stomach sink as the cart pulled up alongside us and the driver grinned at me with snaggly betel-stained teeth. Touts are rarely pleasant people even under ideal circumstances, and our circumstances were far from ideal. For once the Chinese girl fell silent and I was forced to do the talking.

'We go guesthouse...Soe Brothers,' I lied, hoping he'd bugger off once it was clear he'd make no commission off us. Instead he laughed and spat a stream of bright red betel juice onto the pavement, wiping his mouth with a dirty shirtsleeve. 'Soe Brothers no room! I know good house very cheap for you, close! Close! Very cheap! Aircon!'  The Chinese girl looked at me skeptically and I fidgeted with my pack, fully aware we were probably about to be scammed but unable to think of any better ideas. 'How much?', I asked him, trying to convey an aura of savviness and intimidation that he cheerfully ignored. The red-toothed man just smiled again and spat, then leaned toward me, his large dark eyes positively beaming. 'Cheap, my friend - cheap.'

Then he pointed to a large purple building down the street and drove away.

~

The next morning I rolled out of a ridiculously comfortable high-legged bed and shivered appreciatively under the icy AC unit. The place was even nicer than the tout had said. I walked out into a bright purple hallway and headed for the shared bathrooms, where I had to wait for a minute as they were being cleaned by an ancient Burmese woman with skin like tree bark and a broad, toothless grin. Despite the early hour she was clearly drunk. The old gnome chattered at me in rapid-fire Burmese and made a grand display of placing a roll of tissue on the back of the toilet. Then she hugged me fiercely and gave me a peck on the cheek before swaying off down the hall, mumbling drunkenly to herself as she dragged a broom behind her.

The desk clerk downstairs was less intoxicated but equally friendly. I handed him 7,000 kyat (about $7 USD) for the room and asked if he had a motorbike for rent. His round, nut-brown face lit up with excitement as he searched the cavernous folds of his longyi, finally producing a battered cell phone. 'Just a moment please,' he apologized politely before launching into a torrent of Burmese. Minutes later another fat, cheerful man pulled up at the door with a shiny white Honda Wave. I exchanged my passport for a key and a map, smeared a blob of sunscreen across my face, and hopped on the bike. Even the sudden appearance of the Chinese girl in her hooded sun-mask couldn't ruin my mood. When she finally managed to clamber on the back (on the fourth attempt), we were off.

~

Hpa An sits in a beautiful corner of southern Myanmar. The mighty Ayeyarwady River flows through the town, bordered by neat rice paddies that turn from green to gold around the harvest. The terrain is mostly flat with dense thickets of subtropical forest, except for the limestone mountains that rise from the landscape like a sleeping giant's toes. Nestled inside these mountains are Hpa An's semi-famous caves, some of which are home to temples more than a thousand years old. The caves are not Hpa An's only attraction, however.

The desk clerk had told me about a waterfall-fed swimming pool only a few kilometers from town. His description conjured images of a secluded mountain grotto where naked forest nymphs frolicked in the water while applying impressive amounts of Pantene Xtra-Silky conditioner to their scalps. I decided we'd make a stop there, followed by the Field of One Thousand Buddhas (a self-explanatory site) and perhaps a few of the larger caves before heading back at sundown. It was an ambitious plan, but we had an early start and I drive fast.

However, I had not factored in the Chinese girl's stunning incompetence as a navigator. Despite the map and her iPhone's GPS it took us nearly an hour to reach anything remotely resembling a mountain, an impressive accomplishment considering how easy it usually is to find a thousand-meter-tall pile of rocks. Nevertheless, after nearly a dozen stops to ask for directions we finally arrived at...the Field of One Thousand Buddhas. It wasn't the swimming pool, but it would do for starters.

Field of One Thousand Buddhas.

The path leading to the field was lined by souvenir stalls, carnival games, and even a decrepit Ferris wheel. Apparently a festival had concluded the night before and everyone was still too hungover to clean up just yet. Piles of garbage were scattered everywhere and stray dogs picked through the debris, searching for an abandoned corn dog or half-eaten box of popcorn perhaps.

When we reached the field we found that it did contain a lot of Buddha statues, but these were far outnumbered by plastic bags. The peaceful, weatherbeaten Buddha faces seemed unperturbed by the sea of garbage around them, but the Chinese girl was decidedly less Zen - all the trash made it difficult to take decent photos. I pretended that the refuse didn't bother me and made some airily patronizing remarks about environmentalism being a conceit of the rich. But secretly I was disappointed that the Buddha field moonlighted as a landfill. Somewhat grumpily, we departed for the waterfall.

~

A quick digression about the climate of Myanmar - I visited during the beginning of dry season, when temperatures soar above 100°F/38°C and the mugginess becomes so oppressive that the entire country shuts down for two weeks for a national water fight. So we shouldn't have been surprised to learn that A) the 'waterfall' was actually a feeble trickle feeding into a small rock pool and B) the pool was crammed with Burmese. There were old ladies splashing around fully clothed and younger women hand washing colorful longyis. A pack of rowdy teenage boys performed backflips off rocks while listening to a Burmese cover of 'Living on a Prayer'. They were watched closely by a group of girls who braided each others' hair and snapped endless selfies with their mobiles. A handful of heavily tattooed monks stood in the shade and chain-smoked; they were young men in their teens or early twenties and most of them looked like they'd rather be in swim trunks than robes.

The 'waterfall'.

Tatt'd up punk monks.

The air was filled with happily chattering voices and the smell of grilled corn. It was really an idyllic scene until a man started screaming.

~

From across the pool, I saw a small thin figure being carried toward the water like a trussed pig, yelling piteously at the men who held his arms and legs. He had a small neat beard and an unmistakeable look of panic in his eyes. His cries grew more urgent and pathetic as they neared the pool and I gritted my teeth, not wishing to intervene but horrified by the bullying before my eyes. The man was clearly mentally and physically disabled. He began to sob as he was dropped into the water, his legs sinking limply as he splashed his arms furious in a vain attempt to keep his head above the surface. The two other men grabbed him by the shoulders and forced him down into the muddy pool, deaf to his anguished protests.

I clenched my fists and looked around to see if anyone was going to help the man before he was drowned in broad daylight. Nobody seemed to care. And it was soon obvious why.

~

When the man's head reemerged from the water, he was transformed. His eyes shone with joy rather than fear. He waved his arms happily back and forth as he lay face down on the surface and his two 'tormentors' pushed him in lazy figure eights. Some teenagers offered him their inner tubes, and soon the thin bearded man was surrounded by a group of Burmese old and young, all of whom were laughing and playfully splashing water. Eventually one of the men hoisted him onto his back, like a father carries his child, and staggered out of the pool. They sat together at the water's edge as he ruffled the thin bearded man's hair and dried his damp face, avoiding the thin man's mirthful swipes with patient good humor.

In a Western country, the thin bearded man would probably be placed in a hospital or group home. But there are no social services for poor rural Burmese, no bureaucratic safety net for those unable to harvest rice or build houses or repair machinery. Life is difficult enough for the sharp-minded and able-bodied. One might expect the handicapped to be doomed to a Hobbesian existence at best - nasty, brutish, and short. In a country that had suffered for decades under a brutally repressive military junta, who has tears left to spare?

Yet I couldn't help but notice the neatness of the man's beard, or the rows of straight white teeth when he smiled. Somebody was taking care of him. I sat and watched while his two protectors rubbed his stick-like limbs with soap and combed his hair with unmistakeable tenderness. They dressed him in clean dry clothes and held a bottle of water to his lips, looking like two burly mothers tending to an enormous newborn. The thin bearded man turned his head back and forth between them, flashing his brilliant smile and eyes full of gratitude and I felt like crying like you sometimes do when the world gets too beautiful.

~

The next morning I parted ways with the Chinese girl, leaving me free to explore the countryside on my own. I spent the following three days zipping around on the White Wave, mostly getting terrifically lost and not minding it at all. It was an excellent way to meet local people in an unobtrusive and mercifully brief way, hollering 'mingalabar!' while cruising past tidy bamboo houses and occasionally stopping to take pictures with groups of schoolchildren or bemused old ladies carrying enormous baskets of vegetables on their heads. One elderly man who introduced himself as Mr. Diamond Flower insisted on personally guiding me to Kawgoon Cave (nearly 10 kilometers away), apparently skeptical of my ability to make a few right turns without getting lost. At one roadside shop I shared a Coke with some hip young dudes on their way to jobs in Thailand. They told me that they liked Obama and thought Miley Cyrus was very sexy. 'She twerk is good,' one of them winked suggestively.

Mr. Diamond Flower

I did eventually make it to the caves, which were just as spectacular as advertised. Some had giant reclining Buddas and intricate wall carvings covered by shimmery golden paint and bat guano. At one cave I stood with some middle-aged monks and tossed bananas to quick handed monkeys who fought each other viciously for the airborne fruit. At another I sat in silent meditation deep within a rocky alcove until a group of candle-bearing teenagers crawled inside and screamed so loudly I feared a cave-in. In other caves I found places of perfect stillness and tried to imagine solitary monks sitting in the darkness hundreds of years ago. Mostly I succeeded in ignoring the Snickers wrappers and plastic bottles that littered the larger passageways. But nothing impressed me as much as the thin bearded man in the arms of his friends.

~

A few weeks later, as I was preparing to catch my flight back to Saigon, a backpacker asked me what I thought of Hpa An. We were sitting at a little restaurant on 19th Street in Yangon, a place famous for its cheap mojitos. He wanted to know if the cave temples were really worth seeing. I picked a mint leaf out of my teeth and said, 'Yeah, they're great. But make sure to check out the waterfall too. It's incredible.' 

Bicycles in Bagan

What if I told you I was into Legos? I mean, really into Legos. Like, I spend my weekends building medieval palaces with other Lego enthusiasts and sometimes pop an airport or two together before work? And I subscribe to magazines about Legos and have a bunch of apps on my phone that track how many green rectangles I've used this month and how much time I've spent building my own blocky little Death Star? Also, I spend thousands of dollars on cutting-edge carbon fiber Legos which are super strong and much lighter than regular Legos, and I've even bought these special gloves to reduce pinching and subcutaneous soreness during the really grueling marathon building sessions?

Wouldn't you find this very, very odd?

~

Say what you will about cardiovascular fitness and carbon footprints, but bicycles are a deeply flawed mode of rural transportation. Slower than motorcycles and less relaxing than a leisurely stroll, they are rendered nearly useless by sand, hills, loose gravel, and a thousand other things you are very likely to encounter outside the city. Spending an hour astride their narrow seats is like visiting an amateur proctologist. The whole 'cycling keeps you fit' argument only works if you ignore the rows of human manatees pedaling futilely away in fitness clubs around the globe. And nobody looks good in spandex except people too self-respecting to wear spandex.

In fact the only people who don't look ridiculous on bicycles are children, which is mostly because children are so generally ridiculous that a bike isn't going to make much difference. But as an adult, cycling requires a Herculean effort of will to suppress the very reasonable suspicion that you look like an ass.

~

One morning in Bagan, a small town in central Myanmar, I was thinking about bicycles. I had a strong feeling I would soon be spending lots of time atop one. This made me deeply unhappy.

Bagan is famous for its temples, which sprawl for miles in every direction along the banks of the Ayeyarwaddy River. The landscape is  Martian - endless stretches of parched reddish soil,  dusty patches of scraggly brush trees, occasional swirls of thick brown dust. By sunup a suffocating haze settles over the place and temperatures exceed 100°F / 38°C. Before you've had your first coffee, Bagan is a blast furnace.

About the temples - there's a lot of them. And they're spread out across the 13 x 8 km Bagan Archeological Zone. Most backpackers stay in the small hamlet of Nyaung U, while both Old Bagan and New Bagan are home to extravagant luxury resorts catering to rich Chinese and European tourists. Although Myanmar's tourism industry is nascent, the government has made a strong effort to brand Bagan as a classier Angkor Wat, without the Pub Streets and marijuana pizza. For the chic and sophisticated* traveler, Bagan offers every indulgence from exotic thanaka facials to teakwood bus tours to sunrise balloon rides.

*Rich.

The rest of us get bicycles.

~

Backpackers like me are stuck with bicycles as their primary mode of transportation in Bagan. Air-conditioned minibuses or private cars are prohibitively expensive and foreign tourists are forbidden to rent motorbikes, per government decree. The official reason, according to the pleasant round-faced woman who owned our guesthouse, was concern about inexperienced riders damaging ancient structures or injuring themselves. Reasonable enough, but more nefarious theories abound. One is that the surrounding countryside is still wracked by ethnic turmoil the government prefers to keep quiet. Myanmar's military junta has an extensive track record of brutality and it's not difficult to imagine this being true, though the political climate has improved considerably in the past few years.

Another popular, less genocide-y theory suggests the real culprits are the horse cart cabal, a jovial gang of geriatric scallywags who promise a romantic carriage ride around the temples for an exorbitant fee. From personal experience, I can tell you that a horse cart ride is enjoyable for exactly two and a half minutes before the snail-like pace and rickety wooden seats become torturous. As an added bonus, each cart is equipped with a large canvas bag to catch the giant steaming turds these poor beasts drop with alarming frequency, which then attract a staggering number of enormously fat black flies. It's clearly an industry in need of a competitive advantage.

So for penny-pinching equinophobes, the options for getting around Bagan are limited. The sheer size of the temple fields make exploring on foot impossible - you could walk for hours without stumbling across anything noteworthy. The scorching heat and choking dust are equally strong deterrents to an afternoon constitutional.

The solution, according to Lonely Planet? Bicycles - the perfect way to explore the temple ruins and get some exercise while you're at it! With a trusty guesthouse map and a few bottles of water, you can see it all for only a dollar a day! You'll be helping the environment and working up a healthy appetite for dinner...what could be better?

Well, a motorbike. A motorbike would be better.

~

We arrived in Bagan on an ancient overnight bus from Yangon, the old southern colonial capital. Like most overnight buses in Myanmar, this one concluded its journey at the hideous hour of 4 am. When I stumbled off the bus, red eyed and irritable, I was followed by Aron. Aron was a large, friendly Indian-American man from Michigan. He'd barely made it on the bus after a last second dash to the airport for his lost (and, later, found) luggage. Which meant I'd been only moments away from having two seats to myself for the ten hour bus ride, an unheard of luxury in Southeast Asia. I like to imagine that I hid my disappointment when he managed to flag down the bus and climb aboard, but it's doubtful. Unfortunately for him, Aron's friendliness mattered far less to me than his largeness. It was a long, elbowy, mouth-breathing trip.

At the bus station we were met by our Aussie friend Tom. He'd arrived even earlier than us, but he'd splurged for the VIP luxury bus with its ample legroom and moist towelettes. He looked fresh-faced and energetic, far more youthful than his fifty-odd years. Despite the early hour he was bright and chipper. I wanted to punch him.

'Push bikes!' he exclaimed happily, gesturing at the ridiculous contraption beneath him. 'Got 'em right next t' the guesthouse, only cost ya a dolla, lovely old man in the little shop. You ride push bikes back home, Aron?' The big American nodded enthusiastically and I wanted to punch him too, before I suppressed my homicidal instincts and threw my bags onto the nearest horse cart. As we slowly clomped down the road I felt like a man going to his own execution. The thought of martyrdom cheered me up a bit.

Once we'd arrived at May Ka Lar Guesthouse and carefully tossed our belongings into various corners, Tom explained his plan for the day. He'd pinched a map from reception and began circling points of interest with alarming vigor. I noticed that many of Tom's circles looked quite far from each other and fought the urge to weep.

Our first stop, Tom declared, was Ananda Paya, one of the largest temples in Bagan. He told us it was a fine place to spot the hot air balloons that float above the temples at sunrise. We could climb to the top and photograph the hell out of the whole panoramic scene. Since it wasn't yet 5 am, we had plenty of time for coffee and breakers, and maybe a quick search for Wi-Fi (Tom had investments). Aron was delighted and minutes later I found myself on a bicycle for the first time since junior high.

You may never forget how to ride a bike, but Mother Nature is not impressed by your powers of recall. 'So you remember how to pedal, eh?' she gloats, tapping her fingers together sinisterly, 'Let's see you push that thing up a sandy hill in face-melting heat.' By the time we reached Ananda Paya, the bicycle and I were waging a war of wills I was destined to lose. Thanks to Tom's very inaccurate guesthouse map, we'd been following a thin spiderweb of obscure dirt paths through viciously dusty terrain. Our slim tired Chinese city bikes were constantly stuck in sand drifts, much to the annoyance of the rider who then had to hop off and carry the stupid thing to firmer ground. As we climbed the temple steps I noticed that both Tom and Aron were panting heavily. At their age, in this heat...? I was suddenly thankful for my emergency first response training, until I remembered that I didn't remember any of it.

Happens every day.

After we snapped our obligatory sunrise balloon shots and scowled at the noisy Chinese tourists obstructing our view, the Bagan Death March continued. Slowly and laboriously we pedaled past lacquerware workshops, gleaming white resort spas, and the famous temples. So, so many temples. Endless clusters of temples, isolated clumps of buildings in barren fields baking in the heat. Sun-bleached tents of sandpainting hawkers and coconut vendors surrounded the bigger ones, piles of sandals outside the front gates a clear indicator of a particular temple's popularity.

I began to understand the appeal of the hot balloons. Bagan is best observed from above, where the spectacular sprawl of over two thousand temples can be taken in at once, the mind appropriately blown by sheer architectural profligacy. Viewed individually on the ground, the temples have a bland uniformity thanks to years of lazy, underfunded restoration. The vast majority were rebuilt with dull orangish bricks and a singular disregard for craftsmanship or historical accuracy. They seemed old but not impressively so, the way a 1990s living room would seem dated while failing to trigger any nostalgia. I felt inexplicably embarrassed by the shoddiness of the work - a rich cultural marvel like Bagan deserved better.

Good from afar, but far from good?

Still, the payas had their charms. Some of the smaller ones were completely unvisited and you could sit quietly in front of the large Buddha statues at each entrance until the gatekeeper came to sell you sandalwood figurines. The cool stone floors and dark passageways were welcome relief from the blazing sun outside. At the larger temples herds of Burmese pilgrims swept through on breakneck tours as if they hoped to see all two thousand in a single day. We took photos with bold children and beaming old men, trying to hide our surprise every time a saffron robed monk whipped out his iPhone for one more shot. Despite the hordes of vendors and piles of unsightly garbage, the payas of Bagan exerted an undeniable spiritual attraction. The Burmese pilgrims, most from big cities like Mandalay and Yangon, seemed delighted to make the journey and quite sincere in their reverence, even if they did spend most of their visit snapping pictures with their smartphones and stuffing money into omnipresent collection boxes. They laughed at my inexpertly tied longyi, but it was all in good fun. I liked the Burmese immensely.

Which was good, because the bike was slowly crushing my spirit one kilometer at a time. Earlier in the day I'd controlled my frustration by humming vulgar, cathartic verses about how much I fucking loathed bicycles and imagining myself throwing the awful thing beneath an oncoming bus. However, by the afternoon I was a broken, dead-eyed husk of a man. I gazed after each passing motorbike with desperate longing and massaged my aching quadriceps with a lunatic's intensity at every stop. I answered all of Tom and Aron's questions with a weak smile and, 'Sure, sounds good,' a deference which I hoped would convey the terrible injustice of my situation yet seemed to go completely unnoticed. My clothes were drenched with sweat and my hair was a soppy, neck-sticking mess. Eventually I was too exhausted even for self pity. The bike had won.

~

At sundown we rode back to the guesthouse, Tom and Aron chattering excitedly about refreshing showers and icy Myanmar beer. I pedaled lackadaisically behind them, coasting as long as possible before gravity and inertia compelled my legs to pump again. We arrived at the front gates just as the air began to turn cool. I wiped the dust from my face and wheeled the cursed bike to the old man next door. He smiled broadly at me as he pinched the tires and squeezed the handbrakes.

'You rent again tomorrow?' he asked, gently parking the bike next to the others lined up in his shop.

'Yeah'.

Goddamnit.