On the day that we visited the untouched village where no Westerners had ever set foot, we also visited another larger village that was not quite so innocent but still primitive in its lifestyle and manufacturing facilities. This village, called Yandabo, produced nothing but clay pots and was quite large compared to others we’d seen, about 2,000 people I think. The people weren’t quite so thrilled with our presence as the first group had been, but were pleasant nonetheless and demonstrated the various steps in pot-making, all of them back- breaking labor-intensive chores done with the constant rhythm born of millions of repetitions. One little girl latched on to me from the start and at first she wouldn’t let me take her picture but eventually she acquiesced. Her name was Eh Neh which I’m spelling phonetically, ten years old, and she spoke a little English which she was learning in school. She said she wanted to learn to make the pots because that would prepare her for owning her own shop in the larger village of Yandabo. She was very shy but she had a way of looking at me with such intelligence that I was curious to know what was going on in her mind. Was she thinking that she’d like to go to America? I don’t think she knows enough to think that. Was she thinking who the hell were we to march into her space asking questions and examining everything? I don’t think so because there was no rancor or resentment in her demeanor. She could have been wondering why we looked so funny with our light skin and blond/red/light brown hair, but that’s not likely since she had seen the likes of us before. I don’t know what she was thinking but she walked next to me throughout our visit and when we returned to the boat she was the last one on the beach watching as we pulled out. Tom and I stood and waved from the deck. She waved once and then turned and slowly walked back into the jungle.
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I don’t think I mentioned that the RV Pandaw 1947 was cruising down the muddy Irrawaddy River from Mandalay to Bagan, which is the crown jewel of Myanmar, since it is the site of approximately 3,500 pagodas. And these are just the ones that have survived from the golden age of the 16th century when some say there were four million pagodas in the area. While this number is grossly inflated, there were surely many many more then than there are now.
As we cruised closer to Bagan, we began to see the pagodas dotting the shoreline, co-existing with tiny villages of thatched roofed huts on stilts. The stilts keep the huts from washing away when the river floods during the rainy season. The highlight of the cruise was when we watched a flotilla of boats pass by in solemn procession, overflowing with monks and with music blaring from loudspeakers. The lead boat was adorned with flags but the others had no adornment at all. There were some “civilians” but mostly the boats were full of saffron robed monks. After much discussion among the crew, with Nu Nu determined to discover the meaning of the procession, we learned that this was a celebration of the fifteenth anniversary of the death of the holy monk who had memorized the entire Buddhist canon of 178 marble steles (or whatever it was) that we had visited a few days before. I took lots of pictures and when I zoomed in on the better ones, I noticed that the monks didn’t look so solemn after all, but seemed to be enjoying themselves, many of them hanging over the sides of the boats, laughing and lounging on the upper decks. Quite the cut-ups, those monks.
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