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Woke up at midday, check-out time. s***. Cursed myself for laziness and not setting an alarm. Missed the free breakfast as well. I hurriedly jammed all my s*** back into my backpack and left it at reception. Went out into the heat of the day to find some breakfast. Some backpackers were at a stand that was selling something like pancakes. "What's that?" I said to them, looking down over their shoulder. "Coconut pancakes. They're delicious." So I got some of them, both the coconut variety and also a peanut one they were selling. I took them to the Chinese tea house from the night before. The pancakes, not the backpackers. I ordered milk tea. The Chinese tea was again complimentary. I ate the pancakes and drank the tea and tried to write some postcards. Then I realised I hadn't troubled to write down any addresses. I cursed my stupidity. I looked over my printed-out maps. I was trying to find the grave of the last Mughal. That is, the last emperor of India. After a failed mutiny against the British in his Delhi fortress, he, Shah Zafar II, was exiled to Rangoon (Yangon) to live out the rest of his days, but not before being presented with the decapitated heads of his three sons. Sufi mystic, poet, wise old bearded man, exiled emperor and last of his line. The British buried him in an anonymous plot in the prison yard and covered it over with grass so none would know where he was buried. Just before his death, he wrote the lines: "Not to be heard, not a spirited song / I am the voice of anguish, a cry of colossal grief. / Life comes to an end, dusk approaches / in peace I will sleep, sheltered by the grave." It was only in the early 90s that his final resting place was uncovered during excavation for a new building, and a mausoleum built at the site. The mausoleum is on a small and unsuspecting street north of the downtown area lined with trees. I took a long and leisurely walk via the markets and picked up some old postcards from a street seller to tack up on my wall with the other paper trinkets collected from my various travels. Here are some things I saw on my wanderings: a monkey tied to a tree, tearing the stuffing out of a teddy bear as three children watched on in the courtyard of a Catholic church. A street with people sitting in the backs of small trucks typing out paperwork on old typewriters. Grand colonial mansions on tree-lined avenues. I wondered which one Nick Drake grew up in. Where the mausoleum was marked out on the map I found a Seventh Day Adventist church. I walked into the church grounds and asked two workmen if this was the right place. Neither of them spoke English, so they called out a nun to help me. She told me it was up the road and to the right and wished me luck. I sipped at a litre bottle of water through a plastic straw as I walked and wished I had brought some form of sun protection. The Burmese sun is fat a straw draining out my vital fluids, leeching my energy, and burning the back of my neck and arms brown. The mausoleum was easy to find just like the nun had told me. A large orange Islamic-looking edifice with portraits of the Shah hung all round. I took off my thongs at the steps and walked in. A sheik dressed in white toured me around the premises. The Shah's poems were displayed upon the walls his tomb. A middle-aged English couple came in after a while and asked me how I'd found the place. With a little difficulty and persistence and a great deal of walking, I answered. They had a driver waiting for them outside. The man said he'd lived in Sydney when I told him where I was from. He had fond memories of Australia and driving through the desert back in his twenties. We stood looking at the grave for a while and the couple said goodbye and left. The sheik asked me for a "donation". I had no small notes so I gave him a fiver. The sheik took my 5,000 kyat note (about $5) and stuck it under the floor rug. Next stop was Shwedagon Pagoda, the city's grand golden stupa, just shy of 100 metres tall and containing eight strands of hair from the Buddha. (Side note: I'd seen the Buddha's tooth in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Sri Lanka a few years earlier. There are pieces of him in pagodas and stupas all across the orient, of which wars have been fought to obtain them). I read in my Lonely Planet print-outs that all entrance fees go to the government. There was no moral penalty for shirking them. As if I needed a reason anyway. In Burma, more than any other place I've been, one can often avoid paying entry by find one's way in through the side entrance. Shwedagon was and is no exception. You are supposed to take the escalators up to the grand platform where the golden stupa and a great number of other smaller temples and stupas stand. I went up the escalators to have a look. The ticket collector informed me that since I was wearing shorts I would have to buy a Burmese longyi (essentially a Burmese version of the Scottish kilt that you see being worn everywhere by men and women alike). That would be eight dollars entry plus ten for the longyi, if you please. A young Spanish couple had taken the escalators up with me and were in the same predicament. (Lots of travelling couples in Burma.) We had a moment and all came to the same conclusion. No way. The Spanish took some photos from the ticket booth and went back down on the escalators. I tried to see if there was another way in. There's a small path that circles the perimeter. I followed it around, and sure enough, a stairway led up from it into the temple. No collectors. I snuck in holding my thongs and trying to pull my shorts down over my knees. And the guidebook was right, Shwedagon is quite an impressive place. It's like someone tried to recreate their impression of heaven in pagoda form on an artificial mountain. Stupas, spires, serene Buddhas and divine entities of all shapes and colours, and the vast golden stupa at its centre, throwing off so much sun it was painful to look at, even through sunglasses. Lots of gold, lots of gilded ornamentation, robed monks, gongs, bells, and camera-toting tourists (such as myself) wandering around in the midst of it. The pagoda has been there in one form or another for millennia, through earthquakes, insurrections, reconstruction efforts, and the British. I finished up with more Huck over a milk tea across the road. Nobody had troubled me to show my ticket. Which I didn't have. I read Huck until the sweat had dried and the breeze had cooled me down and found a taxi to take me back into town and to the British-built post office. Unfortunately, it was closed. No stamps. This would become a recurring theme of my trip. More walking the streets of Yangon. Yangon by night is all old-world mystique, smokiness, anise spice, boiling pots in colonial kitchens, industrial scenes through shop front gratings, twentieth-century printing presses, old Indian men smoking in doorways, children with painted faces and bindis. To the itinerate wanderer like me, intoxicating. I went back to the same Indian place for dinner. There was an Englishman seated in there. He saw my Huckleburry Finn and we got onto talking books. In the American edition, he told me, they'd censored out all the N-words. Political correctness gone mad. He was a some kind of cultural professor in Burma to study the colonial architecture. He'd been living in Italy for years and a fluent speaker of Italian. In the midst of our conversation an old Burmese man and his wife came in and took the table between us. Ah, the Burmese said, noticing my book, Mark Twain. Huck in train stations, Huck making friends. I had my bus to Bagan at half past seven. You should get a move on, the Englishman said. The highway bus station was on the outskirts of the city. The hotel had told me to be back at five for the taxi. There's no way a taxi could take more than two hours to get there, I thought. I waited till after six before getting the bill and walking back to the hotel. Where were you? the concierge asked me. The taxi left an hour ago. I was supposed to share the ride with a European couple but they'd left without me. You better hurry, he said. I grabbed my bag and hurried out onto the street. I flagged down a cab on the main road and agreed on eight dollars for him to take me there. I was still feeling quite comfortable with more than an hour to get me there. According to Google Maps (I'd pinned everything out before leaving Ho Chi Minh) the bus station was just past the airport, so I had a relative idea of how far and hence how long the ride should take. I wasn't too far off, but I cut it pretty close. Yangon traffic is all of the four-wheel variety. Motorbikes are barred from the city centre. It tends to jam up pretty bad on those narrow streets, a fact not helped by red lights that stay red for up to two minutes at a time. I sat in the back of the taxi with my big headphones listening to Pentangle and letting all the day's sediment settle in. The night bus left late, as I'd expected, and though wrecked I got hardly a wink of sleep all night. The bus itself was fine, and so was the road, taking the modern highway to Mandalay. Too much sugar and tea.
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