November 6, 2019
The Pyay Limited
The Pyay Limited
I was reluctant to take another Myanmar train due to bad memories of others. But Myanmar was again being difficult when it came to biking routes. We wanted to follow along close to the Irrawaddy River and we could have for about 35 miles south of Bagan but then it was kind of a dead end. We are not 20 years old, able to ride in horrid heat for 80 miles to a town that may or may not have a hotel that accepts tourists. It’s nearly impossible to find out if there is accommodation in the small towns and you can pretty much bet there is NOT. And because it’s so hot the thought of camping in front of a police station wasn’t as appealing as we once thought. It therefore would have taken many arduous days to get to where we wanted which was Pyay, also on the Irrawaddy.
Our guest house owner suggested we take the train. She spoke of it fondly even. She told us we could easily get a ticket an hour ahead of time, the train would leave at 4PM and arrive in Pyay around midnight. Easy, we thought. Eight hours. How bad could that be?
We rode to the train station in Nyaung-U (Bagan) and the price of a ticket was only 6,800 Kyat ($4.50) for one person, not bad for a 200 mile trip. The station master told us the bikes and panniers had to go in the baggage car at the end of the train and according to his calculations each bike with panniers would cost us an additional 1000 Kyat or 66 cents. Great! Easy! Cheap!
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We rode to the cattle car, er, I mean baggage car and hoisted the bikes and panniers up. We wanted them tied tightly to the side but the baggage car guy had no rope. How do you run a baggage car with no rope? He jumped out of the car and walked briskly to a vendor of stuff and took a package of rope, just took it, and walked just as briskly back to the baggage car. I wanted to follow him to make sure he tied things correctly but I thought I should pay the vendor for the rope. He and I were laughing about how the baggage guy just took the rope and took off. OK, he was paid. I turned toward the baggage car and the baggage guy was jumping in, colorful yellow rope trailing 40 feet behind him! He was a mess. I should have known just by looking at how dirty his clothing was. But he was happy and very energetic.
I never did get to see how he had tied the bikes because I was intercepted by another train employee who wanted to hustle us to our seats which were in First Class way at the front of the train, just behind the dining car. As we were boarding I looked behind me and the baggage guy was briskly trying to catch up to me. He wanted 1000 Kyat (66 cents), (apparently a popular amount) for his effort in tying things up although I had no reason to believe he had. The other guy wanted us on the train so I gave him the pittance and then set to wondering (for hours) whether the bikes were secure or not.
Once in our broken seats, looking at a metal shutter-like window that wouldn’t move, we were enthusiastically pestered by three young boys all with the same pattern thanaka on their cheeks, all wearing grubby black pants and sort of clean white shirts. They were the entirety of the kitchen staff, it turned out, and they really wanted us to order some food. I don’t order food on Asian trains anymore, end of story there. They were disappointed and kept telling us that dinner would be sweet and sour chicken. I turned to Andrea and said, “Mostly sour.” The boys were rather adorable but I was still trying to wrap my head around the fact that they were “manning” the kitchen - child labor laws?! One of them looked to be 8 years old and the oldest might have been 13. I don’t know how many times they swung by asking if we wanted food. I started to think their salary was based on how much they sold. It was even possible they were not being paid at all but got to eat for free, maybe left over sweet and sour chicken which might explain their enthusiasm about it.
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The designation “First Class” is meaningless on a Myanmar train. There is nothing, absolutely nothing that is first class about it. A train in the condition ours was in would have been melted down long ago in most countries. Everything had layers and layers of grime and with the high humidity we, too, instantly felt grimy. It was going to be a long night. I knew this was a bad idea. Why didn’t I listen to myself? Because our guest house owner told us the bus was worse, that’s why.
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At least there were very few people in our car and we did get a couple of conductors to raise our metal window before we left the station - one pushing from outside and one inside. The thing about Myanmar is that even though you can’t believe you are putting yourself in such a state of disrepair and grime every single person is absolutely genuinely nice and will do anything they can to make things comfortable for you. The problem is they don’t have much to work with. There was one working latch holding that metal window in the raised position and I wasn’t betting on it holding for the duration of the trip. As nice as the Burmese are there’s still just that one latch.
The first couple of hours were beautiful out the window towards the sunset. We were going through toddy palm country and there were thousands of them passing before our eyes. Speechless, Andrea and I gazed at the exotic scenes as if we were watching a beautiful film. Oxen pulling their carts home for the night, kids waving, cooking fires being lit inside homes, people washing the daily dust from their bodies at the neighborhood well, green hills with gold pagodas on top reflecting warm sunlight, crazy Myanmar music coming from temples and always smiling faces. For a time we forgot about grime, the smell coming from the nearby toilet, whether the metal window was going to suddenly come guillotining down taking off my arm, child labor laws or how the bikes were doing back there in that 19th century wooden cattle car. The air was actually a little cooler and we looked at each other with wonder; Myanmar was working its magic again.
Then it was dark, sunset show over, and the toddy palms had been enveloped in blackness. Our attention was back inside to all things wrong. The most major wrong thing was the rocking, rolling, swaying drastically from side to side, humping, jerking and loud banging as the wheels hit the rail segments that didn’t meet up perfectly. I waited for the derail.
Our seats were right at the front of the car behind the side doors to the outside. Both doors were open for some unknown reason and banging loudly with all the swaying. There were lots of train employees who passed them but did nothing. I finally took my life in my hands and got them latched. A while later one of the conductors noticed that they were latched and opened one of them so it could bang loudly again. He must have had his reasons but they were as lost on me as why we hadn’t derailed yet. The banging door was so out of control that eventually all I could do was laugh. The train was lurching from side to side and up and down so wildly that I kept laughing but secretly within my laughter there was some sort of planning going on; how to survive a derailment. I just figured that at some time in the night we would be in a heap of metal out in the darkness maybe alive but probably not. It was that bad!
Andrea said that the whole experience was like a Horror House at a carnival. You walk through the darkness and things you are not expecting suddenly come at you, touch you and from all sides. She was right, that’s exactly what this train ride was like.
There must have been 35 species of insects that landed on my bare arms and legs, fortunately none biting and oddly no mosquitoes. The overheard fan which had been fixed on us suddenly started oscillating. Tree branches came slamming in the open window. The train would rock violently. A loud bang of metal would come from below between the cars. Little boys suddenly were at our sides smiling and asking if we wanted food. A dragonfly suddenly lying on my arm, upside down, dead. A strange electrical burning smell filled the car. A rain storm came out of the darkness and suddenly I was getting wet. Out of nowhere a conductor slammed down a glass window I didn’t know existed because it was so filthy I thought it was wood. Andrea gasped, “A bat!!” but it was a frightened bird flying right above everyone’s head up and down the aisle. How it got in I have no idea. One of the boys carrying two piping hot mugs of coffee was trying to navigate the undulating aisle and veering towards Andrea. She was in my lap before I knew what was going on, letting out a shriek as she envisioned scalding hot coffee all over her. I was getting jumpy not knowing what was going to happen next. How could we know what was going to happen next when what had happened already we could have never predicted! And all the while a heavy metal door was slamming loudly like the gate to a haunted house on a stormy windy night. Eyes wide, we didn’t know what was going to happen next.
Many times I thought, “I’ve gotta get off this train.” It’s one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite films, Darjeeling Limited, by Wes Anderson. The train to Pyay was like a bad dream that went on and on through the darkness and as much as I wanted to wake up to end it, I couldn’t - there was no getting off this train.
We could see where we were on Google Maps on our iPhones. Midnight passed and the blue dot was nowhere near Pyay. We waited on a siding for 45 minutes for the northbound train coming from Yangon to pass. 2AM passed and we were still nowhere near Pyay. Although the air was cool the humidity was more real and we felt stickily grimy. “I have to get off this train,” ran over and over in my head. It was becoming an endurance test. 4AM passed and we were a little closer to Pyay. I had been thinking that at least we didn’t have to pay for a room and when we got to Pyay we could just go have some tea at an early morning tea house and then go find a room. But then I remembered that for the first time ever we had already paid for a room using Agoda. The cheap train ride had suddenly become quite a bit more, another of the things suddenly coming out of the darkness to distress me.
A little after 5AM we were stopped at the first of Pyay’s two stations, the one outside of town a few miles. The next stop was ours. Suddenly a station master was in our faces asking us if we were going to Pyay. “Yes, yes.” He said, “Pyay, this is Pyay, quickly.” No, this was not where we had intended to get off but he was insistent. But what about our bikes? Since we knew it wasn’t our stop we had made no move to get off and hustle back to our bikes. The amount of time the train stopped at each station was not long at all. There was no way we could get back to our possibly tied up bikes at the end of the train.
All we could do was frantically grab our things and run towards the end car. We weren’t even at the end of the train when it started to pull out again, whistle blowing. I yelled, “Bicycles!” Someone on the train turned a flashlight on our bikes leaning against some bushes, all the panniers still attached.
Still in disbelief at what had just happened we checked out our bikes and they seemed fine. We thought we hadn’t left anything on the train. I looked at Andrea and said, “Look, there are pieces of yellow rope tied to our bikes! I guess he tied them.”
lovebruce
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5 years ago
5 years ago
5 years ago
Absolutely spot on depiction of a marathon Myanmar train ride. Every trip to Burma requires at least one. I loved your account ... and was so glad it was you and not me!!
They don't keep the trackside vegetation in check, so the locomotive and lead cars have to push through the greenery. I still vividly recall the smell of crushed mint and the tree branches swatting me in the face when I sat at an open window facing the direction of travel.
Keep it coming...
5 years ago
5 years ago
Glad you guys made it.
5 years ago
Glad you survived and that there weren't any mice running around to add to the excitement. A frightened bird was probably enough ..
5 years ago
I had a first-class ticket for that ride and the seats were spring-upholstered. Everybody bounced with the movement of the train. Snacks were sold through the windows at each station but small-bird-on-a-stick wasn't very appealing.
From Inle Lake I took another "bus" to Pagan and then a couple of days later I bussed back from Pagan to that same rail station in a small village to catch a train back to Rangoon. There wasn't a train option from Pagan or I would have taken it.
This time, I rode third class on a hard bench and it seemed like a very long ride.
5 years ago
5 years ago
Your trip back then must have been quite grueling. Burma will kick you in the butt every time. Even now. But in the end I somehow don't remember how hard it was, just how exotic and wonderful it was.
5 years ago
You could have done a Singing Cycling Cowboy on a Maniacal Train video!
5 years ago
4 years ago
4 years ago
3 years ago
Since I - and you - were there, the country's political predicament has gone from bad to worse. I'd hoped to ride in the far north one day, but that doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon.
3 years ago
3 years ago