Building Patience on the Public Transport in Myanmar
They should make t-shirts that say 'I survived the transport system in Myanmar'. I would wear it with such pride in Australia, a country hardly known for an effective transport scheme, but one that feels like heaven in comparison. Yet for the fifty two million people that live in Myanmar, the bizarrely convoluted system of getting around is completely normal. No one questions why its necessary to ride on the rooftops of pickup trucks amongst a 40kg load of watermelons, or why riding the wooden benches of a train carriage feels like riding a horse when the train almost derails on every track. No one questions why the truck driver speeds around corners causing an inebriated passenger to projectile vomit on my back. Nor do they question why there is a 1:1 ratio of people to chickens on the boat, bus, train or motorbike. It is simple. It doesn't matter because it gets the people where they need to go.
Being warned about ‘local’ style buses and told to wait another day for the next 'luxury' one from the hotel manager was an even greater incentive to leave immediately as a test. The hotel manager had obviously not experienced the ordeal of an expensive luxury bus that always ended with 3AM arrivals, sleeping on the pavement outside an empty hotel, a sub-Antarctic air conditioner leaking and love songs boomed through a muffled speaker right next to an ear drum. Only an hour late of schedule, the vintage 1970’s local bus arrived. Bags were thrown to the roof and I smiled at the bus driver taking the initial strides onto the bus. Then I saw it; the empty seat towards the end of the bus. On any other vehicle it would be a simple walk down the aisle. However, this bus had been hollowed out to fit hundreds of kilograms of wooden logs, chopped down from forests outside of Pakokku and on its way to the capital of Yangon to sell at market. The bark from the thin logs, known as thanaka, is used as a cosmetic for women as protection from the sun and general aging. There it was, a simple beauty product now obstructing the entire aisle, the underneath of every seat, in overhanging baggage compartments, on people’s legs, arms and bodies. The seat was made for two people and I could barely fit in it except in a horizontal position where my back was pressed against a stack of thanaka and my knees touched my chest. When someone told me that two people must fit in the seat, I questioned ‘How?’ but soon realised that this is Asia; people fit like Tetris cubes in every crevice to maximise car pooling strategies.
The six hour journey turned to nine by the time the bus reached Pyay. Stopping for people to buy food in the market, change a spare tire that blew most likely from carrying 400kg excess weight from wooden logs and merely playing the 'waiting game' on the sides of roads for ID checkpoints, vendors and unloading sacks of rice. Meanwhile, bags of fried noodles and Burmese newspapers were past around and shared. Women casually applied thanaka makeup paste to their faces. Men snored loudly with their head bobbling around like it was unattached. Caged chickens and roosters vocally exhibited impatience while stacked under piles of logs in the seats behind. Most people on the bus found it entertaining to watch me wince every time I got pins and needles in my legs but couldn't physically move. I didn't even know if I had legs anymore, my neck felt like it had been hit by a baseball bat and my back was actually bleeding from jolting against the wood for the entire nine hour journey. Commuters had made all sorts of comfortable arrangements throughout the journey, some still reclining on the wooden piles with a sack of rice as a pillow. Sleeping. Or laughing. Or just sitting, completely relaxed and oblivious to the fact a 300km journey took three times the amount it should have and under painfully uncomfortable circumstances.
Yet this is the public transport system in Myanmar in a nutshell; unpredictable, timeless and character building to say the very least. Really, the only group of people that could possibly tolerate such a system are the Burmese, a nation that has long suffered political oppression and being 'closed off' to the rest of the world. Now, something as trivial as a day spent in transit seems miniscule. Laughable. So that is what they do. Find a comfortable position, accept the fact that anything could potentially go wrong and phase out.
