Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

The road to Mandalay The railway through central Myanmar is a long bumpy ride into the past

The Norton bombsight was said to be so accurate that a WWII airplane could plop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 10,000 feet.
1451travel
Young Monks lining up for food

The Norton bombsight was said to be so accurate that a WWII airplane could plop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 10,000 feet. This outrageous claim crossed my mind as I braced myself against a wall and took another shot at the hole in the floor of the Mandalay express. But with the train lurching and bounding along its aging roadbed the hole in the squat-toilet was an elusive target that had clearly been missed by many others before me. Ignoring the collateral damage to my shoes I stepped carefully across the clattering coupling between cars and into the next coach. The metal plate that once bridged the gap had failed long ago, and like so many other worn out things in Burma, it has never been replaced. The rolling stock of the Mandalay express is about the same vintage as the Norton bombsight — aging coaches lurching back into the last century.

It was pitch dark when we boarded the train in Yangon at 4:30 in the morning and made our way by flashlight to our designated seats. The lights, we were told, are “temporarily out of service” — a minor inconvenience that didn’t really register until about five hours later when the temperature in our coach soared into the 30s. Not only the lights didn’t work, the ceiling fans hung motionless in the stale air and most of the windows refused to open. I made my way into the breezeway between coaches where the metal cover on a rusted out electrical panel flapped back and forth with each lurch of the train. Inside the box a snarl of wires crisscrossed the missing circuit breakers. No wonder the electricity failed. I leaned out the open window for a welcome blast of fresh air. The trip from Yangon to Mandalay takes 14 hours, but despite the humidity, heat, and jolting ride it was an experience I wouldn’t have missed for anything.

The rail line cuts through the rich agricultural land of central Myanmar where the rice harvest was in full swing. Small groups of men and women, protected from the sun by their traditional conical bamboo hats, attacked the vast expanse of paddies with tiny hand scythes and tied the stalks into bouquet-sized bundles. Many of the fields were still flooded from the recent monsoon and workers stood knee-deep in water. Two-wheeled carts, drawn by oxen or water buffalo, hauled the bundles to higher ground to dry before being fed, one by one, into small portable thrashing machines.

Clusters of thatched stilt houses were tucked into groves of trees between the vast fields of rice. Kids waved at us as we slowed down through their village. Beneath the houses and trees Brahman cattle, pigs, chickens, and water buffalo shared the village shade with their owners. Gold plated stupas popped up in the most unlikely places — wedged in among the dismal dwellings of a city slum, in the middle of a rice field, and on a scrub-covered hillside miles from nowhere.

We arrived in Mandalay with barely enough time to grab some take-out food and run for our hotel before the eight o’clock curfew kicked in. Although rumours of violence in Yangon were unsettling we were almost too tired to care. In the morning, except for an obvious police presence, life on the streets of Mandalay was back to normal. And normal on a Southeast Asia street means organized chaos.

Street sweepers wielding twig brooms worked around a woman cooking something over a bonfire on the curb. Cars, bicycles and motorbikes dodged push-karts and trishaws piled high with produce for the markets, and morning commuters crammed into the backs of pickup trucks. I counted 26 people in one Toyota, 14 on benches inside, five on top of the canopy, and seven clinging to the outside. Seemingly oblivious to the chaos shopkeepers and their customers relaxed on tiny stools and sipped their morning tea on the sidewalk while street vendors spread out their wares and sat on the curb hoping that someone would buy — a piece of fruit, some eggs, a fish, a fresh chapatti. Almost anything can be bought at the side of the road.

We spent three days in and around Mandalay and, except for the dawn-to-dusk curfew and a few detours around military roadblocks, the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations did not affect our coming and going. Soldiers stationed around the Maha Ganayon Kyaung, one of Myanmar’s largest monasteries, did not prevent us from going in and talking to the monks. We arrived as they were lining up for their morning meal. The food, donated and served by lay people, was ladled into their alms bowls from huge cauldrons of rice and vegetables. Except for his robe and alms bowl, almost everything a monk possesses — including his food — must be offered by the lay community. As we watched them, some merely children, file past with their alms bowls and shaved heads, Thahn Zin told us more about the monastic life.

Like most of his countrymen Thahn Zin had once been a monk. In Myanmar every Burmese male is expected to spend two periods of his life in a monastery, the first, usually between the ages of eight and 10 as a novice, and the second after the age of 20 as a fully ordained monk. He then has the option of adopting the strict religious discipline of monastic life or returning to the lay community.

From the monastery we crossed Taungthaman Lake, a backwater of the Ayeyarwaddy (Irrawaddy) River, on U Bein’s footbridge. At 1.2 km it’s the world’s longest teak span. The thousands of monks who live in Maha Ganayon use it daily along with fishermen, local villagers, and hoards of tourists. But despite being more than 200 years old its 1,060 teak posts are as sound as the day they went in. It is also a favorite haunt of young hawkers who pester you every step of the way. To avoid them we took a rowboat back to our bus and headed for Sagaing Hill.

Greater Mandalay, which includes Sagaing, is strung out along the Ayeyarwaddy River. Most of it is dead flat but Sagaing’s temple-studded hill rises high above the floodplain and from its top we had sweeping views of the city and river. For 133 years, until the British deposed and exiled the last of Myanmar’s kings in 1885, the country’s capital was located in the Mandalay area. But, as part of “British India”, Yangon was made the administrative centre and, until the country gained independence in 1948, Myanmar was under British rule.

Among the Raj “Burma”, as the British called it, was considered a hardship posting and their attempts to make Mandalay more like home are a legacy of the colonial era. We spent a day driving up to the hill-town of Pin U Lwin 70 km east of Mandalay. Many of Britain’s colonial officials chose to build their mansions there where the cool mountain air is a relief from the heat and humidity of the Ayeyarwaddy Valley. A short distance beyond the town the sweeping lawns and gardens of Kandawgyi have a surprisingly English look, as do the stately old colonial buildings along Pin U Lwin’s main street. But the town, like all of greater Mandalay, has become a melting pot of many other cultures. The British colonial mansions now house shops and restaurants run by immigrants from Nepal, India, and China as well as Burmese entrepreneurs. The Golden Triangle Café and Bakery, where we stopped for a snack, is run by an American and the horse outside is hitched to one of the town’s miniature Wells Fargo stagecoaches. It may no longer be the country’s capital but Greater Mandalay is a cultural and economic crossroad where Myanmar maintains its tenuous links to the rest of the world.