The Golden Land (33 page)

‘What is that? I mean, it's an old car, but . . .' Words failed her.

‘It's a 1935 Austin. May Lin's father adored it. Shame it's been left to deteriorate.'

Around the yard were mudbrick and rotting bamboo shacks, rusting kilns and stacks of well-weathered wood. Natalie could see that the paraphernalia associated with glass blowing – old iron pipes and moulds and clay samples – looked as though they hadn't been touched in decades.

The undergrowth thinned and they came to a garden, surrounded by a large open-sided building filled with tables and beautiful carved and lacquered Chinese furniture. The high shelves and glass cabinets could have graced the most formal of wealthy homes but the lovely antiques stood on a pounded mud floor, and every surface of the beautiful furniture had been covered in pieces of glass. To one side there was a small, open brick fireplace where a blackened kettle steamed and tea things were set on a shaky side table. Hanging incongruously from the ceiling tinkled several chandeliers, their glass catching the light as they moved in the slight breeze.

A young woman stood at a table wrapping up glasses in newspaper while another sat beside her, writing in a ledger. Through the trees Natalie could see two skinny dogs loping ahead of a slim, smiling woman, possibly in her sixties, who lifted an arm in greeting.

‘Natalie, this is May Lin. Her father started the Rangoon Glass Factory and she and her brother have carried it on,' said Connie.

May Lin spoke beautiful English and offered to take Natalie on a tour around the workshops. She explained how they made their glass from special sand which came from a mountain near the Chinese border and that they made their own colours and glazes too. Natalie tried to absorb the information about their traditional glassmaking methods but she couldn't stop staring.

She could see that someone had created a glass garden amid the jungle undergrowth at the rear of one of the workshops. Psychedelic mushrooms, animals and flowers in Dali-esque shapes sprouted around trees and undergrowth. There was also a complete gingerbread cottage, big enough for a child to play inside, made of coloured glass.

‘What a wonderland for children,' she said, thinking how Charlotte would love all this. Quickly she took a photograph.

As May Lin moved ahead of them, Connie whispered to Natalie, ‘Neither May Lin nor her brother married, so there are no children to carry on this business.'

‘That's sad. What will happen to this place? What will they do?'

‘They'll live very well when they retire. They are waiting, like everyone else, for the day The Lady is released and takes up her role as leader and change begins in Yangon. May Lin and her brother can see the day when investors will come and build hotels and banks and other business buildings. This quaint place is actually four acres of land, hidden in the middle of the city. It will be worth a lot of money.'

Natalie gazed around, thinking how sad that this whimsical family factory would disappear beneath the cement feet of a modern structure because there was no-one to carry on its traditions. ‘I'd love to buy something.'

She chose three little glass ornaments: a blue rabbit for Adam, a tiny green bud vase for Charlotte and for Andrew a red elephant.

Back at the Peacock Studio, Win gave her some bubblewrap for her glass gifts. ‘I think you should leave these here until you are ready to go home, in case they get broken. I knew you would enjoy the glass factory,' he said. ‘It's eccentric and charming, like so much of Burma is.'

‘One more thing, a souvenir for you.' Connie handed her the lotus-stem shawl.

‘I couldn't possibly take this,' began Natalie.

‘It will be useful in the hills, it can get cool up there. When you wear it at home, think of us.'

‘Thank you. I will,' said Natalie.

When they set out together for Bagan the next day, Natalie appreciated how well Mr P had organised everything, how he'd arranged a taxi to take them both to the airport and advised her to bring a book to read while they waited for their plane. He kept charge of her documents, tickets, travel papers and passport, and said he would pay any fees as they were needed. As soon as they arrived at Yangon airport for the flight to Bagan, he whisked her bag away to check it in, arranged their aircraft seats, and brought her a bottle of water and some moist tissues to wipe her face and hands. He sat near her and didn't interrupt her reading until the flight was ready to board. On the plane he sat several seats behind her. Mr P had arranged for her to have a window seat, but Natalie was disappointed because it was cloudy and she couldn't see very much.

Mr P had suggested that he pay for whatever they needed each day – food, fares and fees – in the local currency and every few days he'd work out what they'd spent in US dollars and Natalie could reimburse him. There was no official foreign exchange, though a black market operated in larger cities, so it seemed to Natalie that Mr P's system was far simpler for her.

After the plane had landed in Bagan and they had disembarked, Mr P told her, ‘Bagan is usually very dry, but now there is still quite a lot of water lying around. Your shoes will get muddy.'

‘I can wash them. It's a shame I couldn't see much while we were flying except some paddyfields and a few villages in the breaks in the clouds.'

‘Then Bagan will be more of a surprise!' he said with a smile. ‘There is no modern city here, just hotels. People come from all over the world to see the wonders of this place.'

From the plane they walked across the wet tarmac to a bright modern terminal with an ornate gold-painted roof. Inside, monks sat patiently and families with excited children waited for their flight. Mr P collected their luggage and then they walked towards the exit, looking for their driver.

For the first time Mr P looked ruffled, even annoyed. He asked Natalie to wait with their bags for a moment while he went to talk to a man holding up a sign with Natalie's name on it.

When he returned he said to Natalie, ‘That isn't a driver I know. Something has happened to the man I usually use. But it'll be all right. Let's go.' He swung his backpack onto his shoulder, and took Natalie's bag and wheeled it to the elderly car, where the driver held open the boot. As Mr P placed the bags in the boot, the driver reached for Natalie's shoulder bag to do the same, but she shook her head and climbed into the back seat.

The road was slippery with a slick of orange mud but Natalie was glued to the window of the taxi as the bright green acacia trees and patches of raw red earth slid past. Suddenly, on either side of the road appeared domes of mossy stone and ancient red-brick stupas.

‘That's called a bu stupa,' said Mr P, pointing to one of them. ‘Bu means gourd, and that stupa's shaped rather like one.'

Natalie nodded, looking at an old building surrounded by tiered terraces. In the distance she could see huge complexes of temples whose spires rose like fairytale castles; closer to the road were well-preserved, simple, one-roomed stupas.

They drove on and passed a goatherd following his bouncing charges as they reared up to eat leaves from high branches of trees by the roadside, as well as the occasional man on a bicycle, and a family in a horse-drawn cart decorated with flowers. They passed several small villages and Mr P told her that people used to live among all the stupas and monuments, but now that the region had been recognised as an important archaeological area by UNESCO, they had been moved away into new villages.

‘So, we will stay in new Pagan and visit some of the best temples in old Bagan. There are thousands of them, so we will only have time to visit a few,' said Mr P.

Natalie thought the landscape was amazing, a bit like she imagined outback Australia would look, with massive termite mounds scattered across its dry plains, except these mounds were temples. ‘How long has it been like this?' she asked.

‘Myths say that Bagan started in the second century. It became the capital of Burma in the eleventh century and that's when over ten thousand monuments, stupas for religious relics, temples and monasteries, were built. Some of them were built from simple clay, others were very elaborate with great carvings and artwork,' explained Mr P.

‘It's amazing.'

‘Everyone who comes here should see the Ananda Temple, but I have found that people like different monuments for different reasons. Perhaps it is the artwork, or the architecture, maybe it's the religious significance or the carvings and the Buddha images, or for the views they offer. There is something for everyone.'

‘I'm so glad you suggested coming here,' said Natalie, shaking her head in wonder.

Mr P had booked Natalie into a low-rise, older-style hotel set in attractive gardens that faced the Irrawaddy River.

‘I will stay in the town in a guesthouse,' said Mr P. ‘In one hour I will come back here and we can begin our tour of Bagan.'

Their driver, keen to make a good impression, tried to take Natalie's suitcase into the hotel but he was shooed away by the hotel staff. Mr P had told Natalie that there was no tipping in Burma but it seemed that in the tourist hotels it was not an unknown custom and it seemed that their driver had tried to earn one.

Her room had two hard single beds, a small bathroom (do not drink the water, Natalie reminded herself), a wardrobe and a small set of drawers. She carefully unpacked her few belongings and then went to explore the hotel. She wandered to the dining area and sat on the verandah that overlooked the wide expanse of the Irrawaddy River. Barges, low in the water, were ferrying teak logs.

There were several other tourists at the hotel. Most of them seemed to be middle-aged Europeans. She continued to watch the river traffic until Mr P arrived, this time in a small, gaily painted horse-drawn carriage with a smiling driver.

‘I thought you might enjoy this. We can take this carriage off the road and go to some places few visitors go,' explained Mr P.

‘This is wonderful,' said Natalie as the driver helped her up into the carriage. His teeth were stained reddish brown from chewing betel nut, his hair was slicked down with a pungent oil and he wore a longyi and a dusty shirt. His thongs were ingeniously cut from a rubber tyre.

He introduced himself as Kyaw Kyaw.

‘Now we travel old style to long-ago Bagan,' announced Mr P.

The horse clipped smartly along the unpaved road, a small plastic Buddha swinging merrily from the canvas roof of the cart. Natalie waved to the smiling children as they passed through villages and into the countryside of rice paddies, where water buffalo wallowed. Women, walking from the village wells, balanced tin jugs of water on their heads while carrying urns of water on their hips with poise and barefoot grace. In the stillness, monks walked slowly back to their monastery, carrying their alms bowls. The blue smoke of wood fires curled into the air and the smell of snacks cooking over charcoal at roadside stalls was tantalising.

Wherever Natalie looked she felt a sense of time having passed this place by. She took a photo of a lichencovered, crumbling stone wall of a brick stupa, its base overgrown save for a narrow path made by grazing goats. In the distance were thousands of ancient stone temples, their domes a reminder of an extravagant frenzy of building as the countless edifices spread from the banks of the meandering Irrawaddy River and across the plain.

‘It must look amazing from the air,' she said to Mr P. ‘It's like a lost world. Where did everyone go?'

‘Growth in Bagan started to slow when the capital moved away in the fourteenth century, but it remained a sacred city. It is true that the bats and owls and goats and cows moved in, but perhaps they were less destructive than the earthquakes and the more recent poor attempts at restoration. Here we are in the twelfth century,' Mr P announced as the small horse trotted along the track and the magnificent spread of the Ananda Temple rose before them.

*

When she got back to the hotel, Natalie wrote down in her little notebook her experiences of that day, taking time to describe her impressions of what she had seen.

I felt I really did rush back in time. So little has changed here. Village life continues in its simplicity, and the people seem connected to these ancient monuments, but you can't help wondering about the people who built these magnificent religious buildings. Were they just simple folk living in humble houses, eking out their living much as they do today, or rich donors hoping for merit?

Some temples have stalls inside their covered walkways or courtyards. Some have artists outside them, busy working on their sand paintings, copying versions of the old murals and wall paintings in the temples. They use a local technique and paint in brilliant acrylics on canvases covered with a thick sandy surface. Their pictures flutter across the grass to dry like illuminated leaves.

Inside the temples it is serene. Women pray and bring offerings while the men gild the patient faces of the giant Buddha figures. (Mr P told me that women aren't allowed onto the higher platforms!) Some figures are so covered in gold leaf they have lost all detail and are huge solid gold lumps.

You walk through narrow passages like dungeons where stone archways give a glimpse of the sunny world outside. All is dim. But it's very calming. Winding underground, Mr P had a torch to show me the outlines and faded colours of murals and the jatakas, the illustrated stories of Buddhist folklore. Every surface is carved. You could stand and study a small area of stone for an hour and still miss tiny details. But one showed scars from where some Germans cut out murals, which are now in storage in Hamburg.

I climbed a narrow dark tower where the stone steps are so worn that they dip in the middle, and stepped outside. It is beyond words seeing, spread across the 200 square kilometres plain all the buildings, small and large, scattered and without a plan but somehow one coherent giant jigsaw puzzle. And slowly curling beside this amazing spectacle is the immense Irrawaddy River. Secluded monasteries and old pagodas are dotted along the tall cliffs that tower over the opposite side of the river. It's a breathtaking sight as they stand, seemingly ageless, glowing in the sun. Apart from the occasional bicycle, and the very occasional car, there is no sign of modern life.