An awfully long way back - with many detours.
Bhamo can be reached by all possible means of transport, but only one meets my needs. Of course I might take the boat again, either all the way to Mandalay or at least to Katha and from there by train as on the way up.
Not a good idea. By plane? There's just one next friday ..
The bus to Mandalay
However, it should be noted that the direct, i.e. shorter way leads through the rebel area, which might not be very intelligent at the moment.
In consequence, the bus has to take a massive detour and not only that: the only available road is mostly unpaved, dusty, a riverbed. Kind of familiar to me. Sahara light, so to speak, but what the heck, let's do it. 15 hours are announced, give or take a few.
A last walk through the small town that has somehow grown on me, a last coffee mixed, some food for the long way (there is actually a bakery that offers all kinds of tempting things). The bus driver already starts the engine a few minutes before four o'clock, Fast and Furious in Bhamo, then, as if he hadn't been able to wait for the starting signal, he rushes off two minutes to four.
Eating dust
It is going to be a memorable, albeit much more pleasant trip than expected. Of course we are eating dust crunching between the teeth, of course we don't have enough space and our feet fall asleep, of course we are tossed back and forth, but that is just cold coffee compared to the train ride. And the driver knows his job. He drives the course as if it were a matter of winning the Paris-Dakar rally.
And so the day goes by. I look out of the window as long as there is something to see, poor huts by the river, a few cows and water buffalos, then the river again. Who lives here? Sometimes a ghostly shadow emerges – a man, a child? – a few seconds, barely visible, quickly disappearing, as if they didn't want to show themselves.
This is poverty that we can't imagine. We are voyeurs, we observe without being part of this world, we are spies from abroad. We watch, shiver inwardly a little about what we see … and go on.
That is our world.
We follow the Irrawaddy for a long time, recognize the ravines and slopes and hills and ask ourselves once again why this river is so horribly polluted.
I mean, the Mekong isn't t clean either, nobody baths in it for the pleasure of clean water, but this? What the hell is floating on the surface? Is that what I think it is? Faeces? Is the river the septic tank for the whole north of Burma? Dear God ...
And so the journey goes on, I doze a little, get out at every stop, to stretch my legs, make myself comfortable again. We move west for a long time until the bus turns south after a few hours.
Eventually the night falls over the world
People come, people go, bags of garlic are unloaded, replaced with countless 50-kg bags with the devil knows what's inside. My seat neighbor disappears, I won't miss her, she had a rather idiosyncratic idea of fair space distribution.
My head falls forward, but sleep does not want to come, so I look for something to eat in the darkness, I chew, look out into the night, at the few lights. Who lives there? A farmer's family, gathered around an oil lamp (electric is scarce out here)? I don't know.
Or the huge abandoned building - a former factory? - where a single light is burning? Who's there? Questions after questions, each unimportant in itself, but thinking about them means passing time. And it makes you sleepy, and so I glide into a deep slumber completely unexpectedly, sometimes waking up with swollen eyes, but we're not there yet, not by a long shot.
A stopover
Sometime a longer stop, midnight is long gone. I bite into something sandwich-like from the bakery, but the view of a small white dog lying apathetically on the floor drives away my hunger. I don't know if it's the sandwich or if he's really feeling so bad, but in any case he spurns my offer. I stroke him a little, maybe the first, maybe the last time ...
Arrived
And then, in an indefinable place with no name or description, we arrive in Mandalay. I say goodbye to Ivo, who drives directly on, and I take a moped taxi to the hotel. It's half past five and the journey has taken a little over 13.5 hours.
P.S. Matching Song: Eagles - Long Road out of Eden (Live)
And here the journey continues ...
