Burmese Days

 Katha

After a day’s drive south from Myitkyina we arrived at Katha – George Orwell country. Thanks to Audible.com I am listening to Burmese Days, which is making our visit even more memorable.

We only managed one village for the glasses today. The main village of Aung Thar, still in Kachin State but on the border with Sagaing Division, grows among other crops two seasons of rice: summer and rainy season as well as masses of bananas. We saw cows, goats, geese and chickens, so the main village must be quite well off. Not so in the part just outside. Here lived the really poor people who can’t actually live in the village as they have no land. We were particularly happy when four of them found glasses that helped them. Daw Gyi who is 70 said she didn’t know about glasses but a good nat had brought her some!

Burmese Days

Today we devoted to George Orwell and Burmese Days. We visited Orwell’s house, the Deputy Commissioner’s house (1892), which was Macgregor’s house in the novel, the hospital, tennis court (1924), prison and cemetery. Men were still playing tennis, the prison was terrifying with not only concrete walls metres thick but sharpened bamboo staves hammered into the ground if you managed to make it over the wall. The cemetery had been replaced with a library, and several offices built over it. The club still stands but is now an office and was locked.

George Orwell’s house is rather the worse for wear. It is now occupied by the police who look after it for the government. The house is two storey built of teak and raised on brick stilts. I gazed out of an upstairs window at a huge Banyan tree and wondered if Orwell had looked out onto this tree when he visited Macgregor.

From 1926-27 Orwell or rather Eric Arthur Blair served as Deputy Superintendent of Police. In 1934 he published Burmese Days based mainly on the society in Katha – known in the book as Kyauktada. It depicts the arrogance and aggressiveness of the British and the misuse of power of a Myanmar official: U Po Kyin.

Katha was originally named Kan Tha, meaning pleasant view, by King Alaung Situ of the Pagan Dynasty. He admired the river bank with a pagoda standing on the bank of the Irrawaddy now known as the Ayeyarwady. Now in January the river has much less water, so the view is different but the fertile mud the river leaves behind means it is great for farming.

Nat Pauk Elephant Camp

I discovered some useful facts today: Sitting on my shoes was kinder to my bottom than the steel bars of the howdah and my bare feet on the elephant’s neck was not just warmer, but softer too. We are at Nat Pauk Elephant Camp half an hour by car (not by elephant) from Katha. We had to arrive before 10.00am otherwise the temperature is too hot for the elephants, and their sin oozie (mahouts) hobble them and let them loose overnight in the jungle until 4.00am the next morning. The previous government owned all the teak forests in Myanmar for which these elephants were used for timber extraction. All the teak was sold to China. The new government has stopped this. The teak now belongs to the people and remains in Myanmar. The sin oozie (in their 20s) are pleased to be retired! Presumably they earn from visitors to their Elephant Camp and from taking them on elephant walks through the forest.

The elephants greeted us with much trumpeting when we arrived and the small ones, especially, lumbered up and down inside their paddock thrusting through their trunks in the hopes of treats (bananas of course). The smallest was only four months old and was an orphan, her mother died soon after her delivery. She was obviously loved and pampered by the sin oozie who fed her by bottle and who had taught her tricks like standing on her head with her chubby legs in the air! He had also taught her to bow with her head touching the ground which she did each time we gave her a banana. Small she was, but when another calf tried to muscle in on the bananas, she pushed it away with a back foot. It was like kicking – but softer owing to her chubbiness!

I have vowed I will never again come to northern Myanmar in January. It is freezing – and of course the mountains don’t help! So I was most grateful as we passed a banana plantation (for elephant treats) that the sun came out and the day warmed up a little. But as the sun came up the elephants had to return to the cool (read freezing) forest and we made our way back to Katha and a hot cup of coffee.