Who’d a thunk the jock would care?
Bangkok is
hot
. Literally.
Since we’re in the capital of Thailand only long enough to change flights, I take the chance to head outside while we wait for our flight to be called to board. But the closer I get to the doors, the less I want to go out into that sauna.
I’m a little disappointed. After all, when am I going to get another chance to see Bangkok?
But soon enough, we board, and yes, I’m again stuck with the S.T.U.D.’s token stud as a seat partner. Fortunately for all concerned, this leg of the trip is short.
And then we’re in Yangon—better known to everyone as Rangoon. What’s with all that name changing? Burma . . . Myanmar. Rangoon . . . Yangon. It’s too confusing. At least Mandalay’s still Mandalay, and the Mogok Valley goes by its real name.
We reach the Mandalay City Hotel later that evening—the next evening? The evening before? All this time zone changing is hard on the brain. By now I’m so sick of planes, airports, and Max reading Antoinette Matlins that I don’t bother to look around, even though I’ve heard the views from the hotel are incredible. I should have enough time for that in the morning. But morning comes too fast for my jet lag, and it brings new experiences with it. When we meet downstairs at the restaurant for breakfast, we also meet our . . . what shall I call them?
Escorts
is too tame a term.
“Pssst!”
Miss Mona hisses to get my attention. “I’m not sure I trust them.”
“I’m sure I
don’t
trust them.” I nod toward our “guide.” “Check him out. That bulge on his belt and under his shirt? That’s a gun.”
Miss Mona sniffs. “Then that’s no guide. I insist they provide us with a real guide, not some thug who’ll do who knows what to us. Let’s call the embassy.”
“Ah . . . the diplomatic relations deal, remember? I doubt the U.S. Embassy can help us.” I give our “translator” a good look. “That other one’s armed too. And you know the Myanma embassy told us that to get the visas we had to accept a secret service escort for the whole time we’re here. That must be the third one, the one who’s wearing a suit, and who hasn’t said a word.”
Miss Mona leans closer. “Let me tell you, I don’t like him any better.”
“Do you want to go to the Mogok Valley?”
“Of course. That’s what we came here for, honey.”
“Then we’re just going to have to put up with them, deal with the ickiness of it all, get the footage we want to use, and then hightail it back home.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Max says from behind me. “I don’t like the look of this.”
“You mean the Myanmar Welcome Wagon?” Sorry. Sarcasm just pops out sometimes. Okay, okay. Maybe more than sometimes.
I gotta work on that, right, God?
“I mean the government types that are going to watch everything we say and do until we board the plane for the U.S.”
I turn to him. “You know what, Max? They’re spies. We know that. We knew the rules from the get-go. But we also wanted these visas, remember? We’ll just have to watch our step. None of us has a hidden agenda, and we don’t want to check out the inside of a Burmese prison cell.”
Miss Mona looks horrified.
Max looks worried.
Me? Beats me what I look like. But I can tell you I’m not loving this. And I’m not feeling the love here, either. They did invite us, but they sure haven’t gone out of their way to make us feel welcome. Did we make a mistake by coming? Is filming the legendary Mogok Valley mines worth the chance of getting stuck with a Go-directly-to-a-Mandalay-jail card?
Sigh.
I want to see the mines. The other? Not so much.
After breakfast, we head out, and in the parking lot, I get my first glimpse of Mandalay Hill. It dominates the city and the flat plain below.
“Nice, eh?” our translator asks. “You want climb to top? You see city from there, the Royal Palace and Fortress, the Irrawaddy River, and Shan Hills.”
I smile. “It’s beautiful. But it looks steep.”
“You climb the stair, okay?”
“Stairs? Up a hill?”
He nods.
“Okay. I guess that’ll work.”
Miss Mona comes close. “What’ll work?”
“To climb Mandalay Hill. He says there’s stairs we can use.”
“You and Max can certainly do all the climbing your little hearts desire, Andie. I’m staying by the pool.”
Our translator beams. “Pool nice, eh?”
“Sure,” I say. “But we have pools in the U.S. Mandalay Hill is here. It’s more interesting than the hotel pool.”
“So true,” Max adds. “But will we have time between working to go for a climb?”
I frown. “We can make the time, right, Miss Mona?”
“Climb away. I have me a stack of good books, and the poolside lounge chairs have big old umbrellas. Add some iced tea, and I’m all set.”
Our translator clucks at the unenlightened among us. “When Gautama Buddha visit hill, his hand point to flat land, and he prophesy. He say great city and religion center will be at bottom of hill. Now there’s pagodas,
shreeens
, three bones of the Buddha, temple with statue of King Mindon.”
Shreeens?
He must mean shrines. I shudder. I’m not so cool with Buddhism and all that. It skips God, Scripture, and Jesus. “It’s a religious site, then.”
“No, no, no. There be many souvenir place, and many astrologers tell you future.”
Yikes!
I look at Miss Mona, note her raised eyebrows. Laughing right now’s not the best idea, so I bite my tongue.
“You want go today?” the man says.
“I think not. Let’s go to the Mogok Valley. That’s what we came to see in Myanmar.”
We get into the van provided for us, and our driver greets us with a slight nod. He too is packing . . . something. The bulge at his waist looks much too much like those of his cohorts. Miss Mona and I hold hands to pray.
The drive from Mandalay to Mogok has to be the loneliest in the world. For a while, the one-and-a-half-lane road runs by the Irrawaddy River.
The views are unbelievably beautiful. Pagodas and shrines that look like inverted cones dot the green, green landscape. Every so often along the road, you see a man or a woman loaded down with parcels. The river itself is wide and runs gently between the grassy banks.
At one point, we spot a battered, rusty ferry, loaded to the gills with bag upon bag of freight piled up to the ceiling of the lower level. On the next level up, folks are crammed around tables and benches. Metal barrels wreathed in puffs of smoke have been co-opted for cooking, and a woman behind a counter covered with what looks like Myanmar-style fast food serves the travelers. While we watch, a teenager dumps out one of the cooking barrels overboard—trash removal’s no big deal on the Irrawaddy.
“Oh, dear,” Miss Mona says a little later. “This doesn’t look good.”
“This” is what can only be called a military checkpoint. And considering the country is run by a military dictatorship, we shouldn’t be surprised. Still, something about AK47s just doesn’t conjure up warm fuzzies.
Miss Mona and I cling to each other again, our voices quiet in prayer. When we chime in our amens, I glance at the S.T.U.D.’s stud. Max looks ready to jump out of his skin, so I turn back to the Lord.
“Father God? It’s me again, okay? I’m still asking you to keep us all safe, Miss Mona, Max, Allison, Hannah and her camera, and the rest of our crew. We’re real strangers in a really strange land, and you’re our only protection—those guns our ‘escorts’ are wearing are just as scary as the ones the uniformed military guys have. Thanks for all the protection you’ve blessed us with already, and I can’t wait to see what you’ll do next. I love you, Father.”
Miss Mona whispers, “Amen.”
I catch a glimpse of Max’s expression. Sure enough, he’s thinking about my “weird” way of talking faith. It might seem weird to him, but it works for me. I know my Lord hears me. The Bible says he listens, and that’s good enough for me.
When I look out the window, I see our “escorts” coming back to the van. Lucky for us, they must have said the right thing or had the right kind of papers or the right color money, because in minutes we’re on our way again.
Max relaxes. “Bet our trip would’ve ended back there if these guys hadn’t been with us.”
“There’s no getting around this place without them,” I say. “That’s what happens in the communist world.”
“Oh, look, Andie!” Miss Mona says. “Isn’t this all so sweet?” If I didn’t know better, I would think we’d just boarded a time-travel machine. Very simple, rustic farms dot the flat land every so often. Less frequently, we pass small villages. The locals’ favorite form of transportation seems to be foot traffic, but the really wealthy ones ride bicycles and oxcarts. Cars? Maybe two or three.
After a couple of other checkpoint moments, the road begins to twist and turn, taking us into the mountains that had seemed so far away when we saw them from outside the hotel. We pass timber plantations and more quaint hill villages, these springing from the jungle vegetation that seems thicker than when we started. Later still, we see scattered mining operations, and that gets my juices going. It’s the first sign that we’re coming into gem country.
I can’t stop myself. “It’s happening!”
Miss Mona leans closer to the window. “Oh, Andie. I do wish your auntie was with us. She’d just love this.”
“She would, but can you imagine how much trouble she’d get into? Just think what she might have done if she’d seen those AK47s.”
“She’d likely ask the military men to show her how to use the dreadful things. Remember, she wanted to muck out that stall.”
“Who can forget? And you know? If she had asked for automatic weapon lessons, we’d all be guests of the Mandalay city jail . . . for-eh-ver!”
Max sleeps.
By now we’ve passed through five—count ’em, five— checkpoints. I hope there’s not a whole lot more of this dusty, rutted road to go. I press up against my window too, and watch, stomach in throat, as we wind through a narrow mountain road with sheer drop-offs on one side, and Gulliver-sized flowers on the other.
Then, all of a sudden, we round a bend on the road, and voilá! We might just as easily have arrived at Dollywood. Just ahead of us, a totally out-of-place, twenty-foot-high sign looms over the road. Our translator turns around in his front passenger-side seat.
“Look. It say ‘Welcome to Rubyland.’”
All the comforts of home. Not.
“
This
is where we’re staying?” Miss Mona asks.
I look at the plain-Jane building, our hotel. It’s nothing like the beautiful Mandalay Hill Hotel. There’s no glam in Mogok. “That’s what our keepers say. Come on. I’m sure it’s clean. And you did want an adventure.”
She sighs. “I did, didn’t I? I guess it looks like an adventure. Now you tell me. Why does everybody and their brother always bring up how clean a dump is to try and redeem it in all its dumpiness?”
Oh-kay.
“Just think all you’ll have to tell Aunt Weeby when we get back.”
“I’d better take pictures.”
“You better not think of going back empty-handed.”
“I miss her.”
I never thought I’d say this in Myanmar. “Me too.”
“But she really couldn’t have handled this, honey, not with that foot busted into bitty pieces the way it is. Oh, and all that hardware they stuck in there. Poor thing . . .”
“Don’t feel guilty, Miss Mona. Aunt Weeby’s probably taking your business apart and rebuilding it from scratch. By the time you get home, you might not own a TV network anymore. Who knows what that wacky brain of hers might come up with?”
“I’d best be calling her, don’t you think?” Miss Mona runs a hand over her sleek silver hair. “Well, Andie, you’re right, of course. Let’s get to getting here. We need to bring in our luggage, unpack the essentials, and then . . . then we need to go get us some rubies!”
I glance at my watch. “It’s four thirty already. That crazy dirt road trip took six hours. I don’t know that there’s going to be much happening at the—oh, I’m gonna butcher this name—
Panchan-htar-pwe
outdoor market by now. I think we’ll have to wait until tomorrow for rubies.”
“Bless you! Now there’s a name for you. The who market?”
When I shrug, since I have no idea what the correct pronunciation of that mouthful of letters might be, she chuckles, then continues. “I’m sure we can find us something to eat at that Paunchy-something-or-other market. Don’t you want to try some native food?”
Do I look like I want the runs?
“Only,” I say, “if it’s so fresh it wants to get up and leave, they’ve fully cooked it, and the cooking utensils are clean so we don’t come down with bubonic plague, bird flu, or any of Job’s disgusting ailments. You do know we can only drink bottled water, right? If we forget, we’ll have to break out the Imodium. Oh, and we can’t get on the wrong side of gun-toting locals, if you get my drift. The hotel’s dining room looks super-fine to me.”
“That’s all good with me, honey. Let’s finish up here.”
We unpack, and in the end, meet the others in the hotel’s modest but—you got it—clean dining room. The S.T.U.D. crowd sits at two long tables, where we’re served about a dozen Asian mystery-meat-and-veggie delicacies, all with a side of rice. Our armed nannies sit at a smaller table to our right, and while we laugh our way through the meal, they keep their deadpan faces on, say very little, and shovel down their mountains of chow.
It actually tastes pretty good. But between bites, I pray the tons of MSG I’m sure lurks in the mystery mix doesn’t sideline us all with permanent migraines.
I don’t know about anyone else, but two hours later, I zonk out the minute my head hits the pillow and don’t wake up until the sun streams in through our window.
A quick bath followed by a simple breakfast has us on the road to a ruby mine by nine o’clock. When we reach our destination, what I see makes me wince. Yes, I’ve been to other mine sites in third world countries before, but the crude and primitive conditions never fail to move me.
“This place is rougher than those Hollywood actor types’ unshaved chins,” Miss Mona says. “Is this typical?”
“Pretty much. But this one’s . . . oh, maybe a little worse. You’d think as long as they’ve been mining here, and with the price of Burmese rubies what it is, their operations would be more upscale.”