Recce-ing the new Off-beat Burma trip

Posted by Kat Hart 3rd November 2012
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As is so often the way with out of the way places, that have been left much to their own devices until some jarring and foreign element is foisted onto them, totally at odds with what existed before, and that which will probably exist long after;  an utterly bizarre cocktail of belief systems are at work here in Mindat, in the mountains of the Southern Chin State. Ideas you think ought to be completely incompatible are not just sitting alongside each other, but are actually assimilated into one another, seamlessly and apparently without question. Each adjusting itself slightly to make room for the other so both can continue to exist.

Over breakfast in a dark, smokey tea shop this morning, the TV (between bouts of the overloaded generator tripping out in a shower of sparks and having to be rebooted every few minutes) was playing DVDs of very locally made music videos, all cult like, doe- eyed teenagers singing Christian lamentations in their local, dying, Chin dialect, with every one of the videos cut with the bloodiest scenes from The Greatest Story Ever Told. The building, along with most on the street, has a rusting plaque above the door, declaring the families unfaltering dedication to the local Baptist church.

Immediately outside the tea shop is a huge low stone tablet, an altar for animal sacrifices - one of many on the street, the myriad of bones being buried underneath, and the blood spilled on the ground in a bid to win favour and prosperity from whichever God was thought to be listening. The house next door (and a good many others in Mindat) was groaning under the weight of the most gruesome collection of slowly decaying skulls, from huge buffalo to tiny birds, which looked absolutely ritualistic, and utterly macabre - all soot blackened, and strung together through still-fleshy eye sockets, cobwebbed and stinking like you can only imagine such a scene would. Totemic wooden posts topped with reverentially placed rotting eggs and matted (animal?) hair and feathers, are found almost discreetly throughout the town but become prolific in the outlying villages, where Christianity’s hold weakens the second the town's church is out of sight. The butcher’s stalls in the market sell bruised and bloated bigs heads, piled high on low bamboo platforms over the mud of the late monsoon rains; garlands of broken pigeons, and bags of clotting blood, which only adds to the unsettling effect.

Baptist nuns in sensible shoes and NHS glasses pass women from the Muun and Makaan tribes, in from the far outlying villages, every inch of their faces tattooed, earlobes stretched to their shoulders to accommodate tea cup sized clay plugs adorned with fresh flowers, weighed down under hundreds of strings of their heirloom amber and bead necklaces, barefoot and smoking foot-long pipes.

But then in the same scene, I find the Burma I recognise... Just above the town, the Buddhist stupa stands with a procession of crude concrete monks leading the way to the temple, the loud speaker on the main street shaking itself off its mountings in broadcasting the scriptures from inside. Along the roadside, housed in little wooden dolls-houses are collections of miniatures representing ancestral spirits (nats) that are worshipped and blessed each day with offerings of flowers, incense, money and candles.

From the summit of Mount Victoria, a steep climb through rhododendron and bamboo forests and wizened, old moss- bearded oak trees, we can see for miles down the valleys, following the rivers' path through the haze, into stricken Rahkine State. The traces of military aircraft dispatched there still hanging in the sky and from sunrise, the decrepit mountain roads buzzing with army trucks urgently relocating vast military forces to protect Chin states' borders from its neighbours' escalating disaster of human rights.

All of this feels a million miles away from the resorts and hot air balloon joy rides of Bagan, but tomorrow, our battered old jeep will slowly descend the cloud forest clad highlands, (landslides and collapsed bridges allowing), back down to the heat of the plains, for a final evening amongst the dust and the ruins.


Ed - Kat was recce-ing our new Off-beat Burma trip

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