Pathein
Pathein
I don’t know how we lucked out but our room on the 7th floor of The First Hotel overlooked the harbor on the Pathein River, which is actually an offshoot of the Irrawaddy River which starts well north of Hinthada. It is a beautiful hotel with a great buffet breakfast included which takes place on the 9th floor, which is the top. Amazing views while eating breakfast! The cooks were pretty good and the restaurant offered meals anytime.
We felt like we were being treated like we were two of the very first to ever stay there but that couldn’t be true since the hotel has been there for two years. However, there are very few tourists in Pathein. In fact, I got the impression there are never more than a handful of tourists in Pathein. It’s more of a rest stop on the way to the coast mostly for Burmese tourists who live in Yangon. Apparently they flock to two separate beaches on the weekends and the road to the coast skirts Pathein.
Pathein is instead a very down and dirty, bustling Burmese working town and being on a major river that empties into the Andaman Sea it’s an historic port city. I’m sure it was quite important to the British and Portuguese for spices and much more a tropical paradise can produce. By the way, Pathein receives 113 inches, (287cm) of rain per year making it very steamy and tropical. I’ve never seen so many bananas!
Looking down on all the boat activity I imagined spice boats from Sri Lanka, India and maybe even Arabia making port here starting in 1826 when the British took it by force. Now the main import/export seems to be 55 gallon drums within Myanmar and I saw no ship that suggested it left for the high seas but I’m sure there are some. 55-gallon drums - we heard them being rolled down the street and on wooden gang planks onto or off large grungy, oily boats all day long and a bit into the night.
The 55 gallon drum is ubiquitous to Myanmar mostly used in their pathetic road building/maintaining in which they transport crude oil which Myanmar produces. I’m sure oil drum activity makes up the majority of the action on the waterfront. It was not an obnoxious sound for us on the 7th floor, just sort of sad that an intelligent and industrious people are subjugated to remain in the dark ages in so many ways. We looked down at the docks and shook our heads in disgust.
Road maintenance is possibly the worst of the government’s treatment of its citizens, besides imprisoning people for their political views. Road workers are basically slave laborers. They break large rocks into smaller rocks using hammers, no eye protection, no dust masks, no hearing protection, no protection from the glaring sun. Then they mix the rocks with thick crude oil and sand to make asphalt and I’ve often seen older women pushing the molten mess into holes in the road with their bare hands. Often I’ve seen this! I’ll say it again. This is very common!
We were once told that the government requires every citizen to do road work for some period of time every year but in reality that doesn’t happen. Anyone with a tiny bit of money can pay someone off so they don’t have to do the work. That leaves the poorest of the poor who have no money to pay anyone off to do the awful road work in searing temperatures for what we were told was a paltry 30 cents per day wage. Where is Human Rights Watch on this one?
Anyway, Pathein. Besides getting mad at the government every now and then (normal for me wherever I am in the country) we really liked Pathein. I was kind of shocked how un-touristy it was. I was always under the impression that tourists flocked here to see the umbrella/parasol industry and go home with a colorful souvenir. In fact, the only thing I ever heard or read about Pathein was in reference to its famous umbrellas. Well, that must have gone with the spice trade because we only found a couple families making them and it was really appallingly sad.
There was no smiling or friendliness. The father was rubbing lacquer on umbrellas with his bare hands and the mother was cutting the edges with a scissors for the 4 millionth time. The son was playing a battle game on his phone the entire time we were there taking photos of bright happy looking umbrellas and breathing toxic fumes. That entire time we heard, “The enemy has been slain……The enemy has been slain………The enemy has been slain.” It was surreal. No one talked to us and it was apparent that brain damage from the lacquer fumes had set in. There was no protection from it whatsoever.
After hearing that, “The enemy has been slain.” for the thirtieth time we got out of there. I pronounce the Pathein umbrella industry to have been slain. I think the tourists already knew this because we didn’t see any.
It’s rare to find a city of Pathein’s size preserved as purely Burmese. It was in a constant bustle everywhere we went and the city was seemingly thriving without the help of tourists. We met the owner of our hotel by chance down the waterfront street and he, too, was a hard working person at a completely different profession than hotel management.
He owned what looked like a very successful company making and packaging fermented tea leaves; laphet thoke. Laphet thoke, along with mohinga (fish noodle soup) is part of Myanmar’s culinary identity. The entire time we talked with him his workers were swirling around us packaging the tea leaves as fast as they could, then boxing the packages and carrying the boxes to trucks. I felt guilty taking any of his time because his workers were nearly in a frenzy around us. The entire port is bustling like this all the time as well.
We happened to walk by this man’s business many hours later, after dark, and he was still working. I think he has family or connections in Singapore and that is how the hotel was financed. He was the nicest man. He wanted to know what we would suggest he do differently with the hotel - always a good sign of a conscientious owner. The hotel was so perfect we had few suggestions for him and he beamed hearing that because he could tell we were being honest with him.
Other than walking the streets and making believe we were in the 19th century we didn’t do a whole lot more in Pathein. We rode our bikes all over town including around Royal Lake near the University where every bench around the lake that we passed had at least two students reciting aloud something they had to memorize. We passed dozens of these students hard at memorization.
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4 years ago
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The highlight for us was going to visit the biggest temple - the Shwe Moke Htaw Pagoda. It had rained in the night (torrential rain) and the standing water on the vast areas of granite provided some interesting refections to photograph. It’s fun to see an important temple/pagoda during normal everyday times when a festival is not happening and few people are visiting. Temples or as the Burmese normally call them, Pagodas, are very peaceful places to just sit and observe, think, meditate, relax. I have always enjoyed going to temples for these reasons. Temples are always photogenic as well.
At our final breakfast at our hotel, there was a nice Frenchman, Yves, who joined us at our table. He had lived and worked in Yangon from 1992 to 2002 and then has come back for a visit every year since. He was as enthused about Pathein as we were; that it was off the map as far as tourists were concerned.
We had a lovely time talking with Yves and not because we hadn’t talked to anyone who spoke English in nearly two weeks. Yves had a special insight on Myanmar which meant we could have a deeper conversation. But mostly we talked about how wonderful the Myanmar people are and how refreshing that is when the world sometimes seems to have gone sideways.
He was very excited about going across the river by ferry with a rental bicycle. There was a small village over there but from our perch on the 9th floor mostly all we could see was lush greenery - lots of big shady trees. So close to the city of Pathein but so rural and I’m sure the villagers would treat him the same way we have been treated in all the small villages we have passed through. It’s hard to describe how profound the joy is that we get from visiting with the local people but Yves understood.
We saw him again in the big hotel garage. He was checking out his rental bicycle and we were about to leave. His enthusiasm sent us on our way. I only hoped his bicycle would not cause him problems. But I knew if it did it would be an opportunity for someone to help a foreigner. One never needs to worry about that in Myanmar, someone will always be generous of spirit.
lovebruce
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(Sorry, couldn't resist)
5 years ago