November 23, 2014
The State of Roads in Myanmar
This is my eighth time in Myanmar since 1999 and I'm reporting that the condition of the roads has not changed. There are lots of big newish buses and trucks and lots of new cars and many more motorbikes which means the roads are much more heavily used now but their condition has not changed and possibly is worse. There is a new major highway from Mandalay through the flat center of the country to Yangon but we didn't see it. I've heard that it was made by hand, like all the roads, and the boards they used to level the cement made it into such a bad washboard that most people still use the old highway. But this is unconfirmed - believable for sure, but unconfirmed.
What's unbelievable is that the Myanmar government does nothing to improve the roads. They presumably use them themselves so why wouldn't they allocate money for improvements? If they feel they don't have the technical skill to build a road they certainly could hire the Chinese, Thai or Americans to build beautiful roads. But nothing changes. I think certain government officials are making so much money from government controlled enterprises such as oil and gas that they don't want anything to change. It's expensive to build roads and they simply don't want to go there. Greed has set in hard in Myanmar.
One thing has changed in regard to the roads. There have been huge toll booths erected on ALL of them. You can be struggling along on what would be regarded as one of the worst one-lane roads in America and suddenly it widens to eight lanes of smooth asphalt and an enormous toll booth looms ahead. I'm not exaggerating.
We, on bikes, don't have to pay anything but every motorized vehicle does. After the gates swing up you are back on the crappiest one-lane road you can imagine and wondering why you were just bilked. Well, the people of Myanmar don't wonder at all. The've come to expect this sort of extortion from their government. They probably think, 'Hey, if this keeps the creeps off our backs I'm fine with being a little bit poorer.' And such is the way of life in Myanmar.
I've had people explain to me that the toll money will be used to improve the roads. I don't think anyone believes this, they're just repeating what they've been told. It's just another way the government squeezes every kyat they can from the common people. I could make quite a list but this one wrangles me more because it is so egregious to have to pay to drive on roads in such sorry states of repair whereas a few years ago no one had to pay anything. The way a trail can widen to eight beautiful lanes of smooth asphalt is a major slap in the peoples' faces. As if there will ever be a multiple lane road there! Obviously they are capable of building a beautiful eight lane smooth surface road but only to collect money I guess. It's unbelievable the amount of gall the government has.
Years ago there was one road that the Myanmar government did contract to the Chinese to rebuild. It was the road from Tacheleik, on the border with Mae Sai, Thailand, to Kyaing (pronounced Chiang) Tong, 165 kilometers inside of Myanmar. Kyaing Tong is a very unusual town cut off from the world in many ways - a town deep inside the Shan state, where the warring faction of the Shan live. The government felt it needed to control the Shan people more effectively so a better road was needed. It's also the heart of the second largest opium growing region in the world as well as home to large government meth labs. Myanmar has the largest government sponsored meth production in the world. A good road protected by Burmese soldiers was essential in getting the drugs to Thailand safely without attack from the Shan.
The Chinese road building company agreed to build the road but also to collect tolls for thirty years. They erected several huge toll booths, which, in effect, taught the Burmese government how to deal with roads. Typical of the government though, they have now built toll booths all over the country but, oops, they forgot to improve the roads first! Oh well, why bother now? The toll booths are good enough. Let the people think something is going to happen someday. The people of Myanmar are smarter than that and have seen this sort of tactic often but are helpless to do anything about it. Power is where all the money is.
While at Inle Lake we went to see an old friend of mine. He speaks English perfectly (self-taught) and was one of the first computer tech guys I knew of in Myanmar, again self-taught - no small feat in a country that actively discouraged the internet back then. Our friend became so knowledgeable of computers that Tay Zar, the biggest government crony thug and richest person in Myanmar, hired him to work on his computers. It was a tricky maneuver for our friend to sidestep Tay Zar's desire to have him work for him full time but knowledge is power also and our friend was able to make a compromise with Tay Zar to only do some work for him. Our friend wanted to open a private computer school for kids from Inle Lake who would otherwise never have such an opportunity.
He did open his school in Nyaungshwe and after a few years he expanded and opened computer and English classes in Taunggyi, a much larger town forty-five minutes away. When we reconnected he told us about the big Shan New Year's celebration that was happening at the moment and this year Taunggyi was the town chosen for the biggest celebrations. He offered to take us all the way to Taunggyi and back because he thought it was something special and something we needed to see. We weren't planning to have such an exciting day but of course we took him up on his generous offer.
On the way to Taunggyi I asked our friend if things were really better in Myanmar. He has always been quite outspoken and honest with me and after quite a pause he said, "No, not really. The government is maybe ten percent transparent now instead of zero percent. We have freedom of speech I guess. But we still have to find our own way, you know."
After more than two weeks in Myanmar I had been coming to the same conclusion. Things were maybe slightly better but the average person still had a tough time succeeding with so much power and money in so few hands. As we went through a toll booth I asked our friend about his new Nissan car, something unheard of just a couple of years ago because of the exorbitant tax (100% of the cost of the car) on importing a new vehicle.
He said that the tax had been eased but the cost of the license plate was now the killer. He told us his car cost only $9,000 but the license plate cost $26,000.!! All of the fee was going to a string of corrupt officials. He said people avoid the fee and make their own license plates but if they are caught by the police they have to pay them a bribe and once word it out that you have a fake license you could be hit up for bribes many times.
Obviously the economy has picked up to where people can actually pay outrageously high fees just to get the authorities off their backs. But just think if that money was used in the right way. The government would have the money to fix old roads and build new ones in no time at all. And the people would see that at least their high fees were doing something good - making their lives easier. Instead the resentment must simmer all the time. The roads never improve and the common people have their hard-earned money essentially stolen from them making the rich richer, the corrupt more corrupt.
The other thing this corrupt government does is to require each citizen to work on the roads one day per month for pay. But the pay is thirty cents a day! It's another way the government gets itself out of paying for road building or even road maintenance. Of course in such a corrupt country anyone who can pay officials the thirty cents per day can be free of the obligation. The poorest of the poor are the only people who cannot pay and therefore are the only ones who do the work of road maintenance, road widening and even building new roads in rural places.
The road crews we've seen for years consist mostly of older women. They hammer large stones into smaller ones and then arrange them on the ground with their bare hands. Sharp stones, bending over all day, blazing sun, bare hands and thirty cents a day. But that isn't even the bad part. While they are breaking and arranging stones some guys, or women, are boiling tar in large beat up old barrels over blazing fires made from logs they find in the area. They dip pails into the hot smoking tar and carry it to their arranged stones. They dump it over the stones and then fill baskets with sand which they fling over the stones. If there is an irregularity the women reposition the tar-covered stones around, again with their bare hands.
Time and time again I've seen this exact procedure for building or repairing roads all across the country. The road crews are the only people I've ever encountered in Burma who usually do not smile back at me. It's slave labor, plain and simple.
Numerous large, expensive resorts have sprung up all around Inle Lake in the last six years. They are all owned by government officials or their cronies. I'm certain that the roads leading to the resorts have been made the same way, with slave labor. And I suspect that a lot of the work in building the resorts has also been done by the poor for next to no pay. I also suspect that people who have committed petty crimes are forced to work instead of be imprisoned but this is only speculation on my part. When seeing so much corruption all the time I must admit I start wondering about a lot of things.
There is one resort under construction overlooking Inle Lake which is going to be absolutely enormous. I'll bet Tay Zar owns it. We saw the scar on the landscape from way across the lake when we entered the area and then a few days later we rode right next to it. The land and rock has been scraped away from the hillside looking more like an environmental disaster in the making than a resort. The roads which are being built are four beautiful lanes wide, smooth as can be. For private projects such as this one they seem to have found some actual heavy road building equipment, mostly large rollers to press the stones flat. Still, most of the work is done by hand.
The gouges into the soil and rock stretches for miles along the steep hillside. People who lived in the area have been displaced. But we noticed that Buddhist flags fly over the new road and a temple has been built next to the complex which is their way of letting everyone know that everything is all right. The owners of the new resort have thrown a pittance towards Buddhism which makes everything they do blessed. Devout as the common ordinary person is in Myanmar they see right through this using of their religion by corrupt officials. But, again, they're powerless.
Road repair or widening in Myanmar is unbelievably piecemeal and haphazard. Every road we've biked on has had sections of piecemeal and sections of haphazard resulting in mostly HAZARD. Often there are piles of rocks dumped along stretches of road ready to be sledge hammered into smaller stones. The piles might sit there in the way for years before they are used.
Most of the roads we biked on were one lane roads meaning that if two large vehicles met they each had to come to nearly a full stop and then slowly slip one set of wheels off the pavement onto the eroded shoulder which eroded it further each time. We were in constant fear of falling the four to twelve inches off the pavement. Eventually large stones are added to the sides of the road widening it by a foot or two but still not making it a two lane road. Plus, the stones are large and not fully covered with tar or sand which makes that section basically unrideable for us. Often we commented that if they hadn't attempted to build a road with stones a dirt road would have been much preferable for biking. But we are here in the dry season and I know how slick the clay is in the wet season.
Biking on roads in Myanmar is a matter of shaking loose fillings or crowns and causing helmets to bump against eyeglasses wildly and making me wonder if my torn retina will return to tear some more. The only thing biking on these roads has going for it is that for now, at least, the people of Myanmar are incredibly courteous to foreigners. Large, scary trucks always gave us plenty of room. The only people who buzzed us too close or drove too fast were in expensive dark colored SUVs with tinted windows. I suspect they were of a kind, the ones who, at least for now, rule the country.
Lovebruce
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