The Road from Mandalay

26.09.15

The Road from Mandalay

We are traveling on an excellent road that runs 365 miles from Mandalay to Yangon. Pyay, where we are headed, is well before Yangon. So far the road is duel carriageway with a broad nature strip illustrated by pinkish-mauve bougainvillea separating both sides. Tomorrow is the start of the Buddhist Tooth Relic Procession in Paung-de, which is about an hour from Pyay.

The easy travelling ends abruptly when, after four hours, we turn right. Here the road is nothing to write home about, but the scenery is. Either side there are forests of teak and bamboo with splashes of scarlet from the Flame of the Forest. Small villages appear with houses of woven mat walls. The only traffic is a pair of buffalo, encouraged by their driver with a stick, hauling 15-foot lengths of dark green bamboo and young boys are herding cattle along with their bells clanging.

 The best that can be said for the road now is that it is hugging the contours of the land. We are climbing, climbing and climbing up and down round tight u-bends, not once but many times. This may be the Bago Yoma, a ridge of mountains separating Magwe Division from Bago Division in the middle of Myanmar.

Chaung Nat is a village where we hear a loud voice coming from a teashop and we’re reminded that on 8^th November the election will be held and hopefully the National League for Democracy will get in.

Tomorrow and for two more days we will be attending the Buddha Tooth Festival after which we are travelling on to Kayah State where neither Win Kyaing nor I have been before. Do we have to climb back over the mountain range, I ask, or is there a way to reach it without retracing our steps – I say hopefully. His response is not encouraging: Only if we can take provisions – so I assume there is no road across. Time alone will tell.

We arrive at a traffic light, the first we have seen after nine hours driving!

We have arrived in Pyay.

Pyay’s claim to fame is primarily for trade. It runs alongside the Ayeyawady River. It is near Napidaw the new capital and Yangon, the old one, and it is the nearest town to the World Heritage site of Sri Ketstra.

We go to our first choice of place to stay only to find it is full. So are the second, third and fourth places. Fortunately Golden Guesthouse, a little way out of town, has room for us and turns out to be a great place to stay.

Though information on the Tooth Relic Festival in Paung-de has been very hard to find – some must know of it and it promises to be very well attended.

Little did we know...

Usually, the first day of a festival is quiet with stallholders setting out their wares and photography is easy. Nothing could be further from the truth at Paung-de’s Tooth Relic Procession. Thousands, not hundreds of festival-goers, are jostling together and the sun is scorching down. We are carried around with the crowd and up into the main hall where, we hear, elephants will deliver the precious relic in about two hours. We decide waiting outside might be preferable and as we step out of the hall the jostling crowds divide and two elephants appear. We could hardly believe our good fortune. And, better yet, the elephants are standing waiting so we have time to admire their trappings and the costumes of the sin oozie who are elephant handlers and the group of young soldiers in spectacular royal court attire.

I wondered where the elephants came from. Did they live in Pyay, or did they go from one festival to another? I was partly right. The elephants are owned by the Forestry Department and the sin oozie are allowed to supplement their salary by taking part in this kind of event.