A Pottery Village Extroidinaire

In the middle of our stay in Mandaly we took a side trip with our friend Soe Soe a little further north. Remember the barge on the river in Yangon that was unloading ceramics? Well I did a little research and we went to the village that made a lot of it. There were actually four villages that all produced pottery. In the one village alone there were hundreds of workers and the village had a proserous air unlike many villages in Burma.
We had to take a bus about four hours north and then spend the night. There are only limited numbers of guesthouses licensed to have foreign guests so there was little choice. It was the worst one for value that we stayed in the whole trip to Burma.The next day we got a local open truck type bus to another village 15 km away. From there we walked to the Han Win Saw Pottery in Nwe Nyien village. Along the way the river bank was covered with pottery waiting to be shipped, like a moving baazar on a southward journey.
When we got to the pottery it was actually closed for a four day, full moon festival. We found one lone potter and his family and a group of other workers, who were probably supposed to be minding the place, drinking the local spirits. They wanted their picture taken with their brother 'Philip'.
The potter was actually a 'thrower' and his wife turned his wheel using her hands. It was built into the ground and was flush with the floor where they both sat or squatted to work. It was fantastic because Soe Soe could translate for us and the potter realized we had a lot in common with him and that we understood what he was doing.
He used much softer clay than we do and he said it took 45 minutes to prepare the clay and make the planter you see him working on. For this he and his wife received 300 kyats which is the equivalent to about 40 cents. He said they worked about 10 hours a day and made 3,000 kyats. In the end we gave him about the equivalent of a days pay hoping he could now take the day off to go to the festival. He was 41 years old and had learned from his father.
As you can see the kids followed us around until they were asked to stop, we couldn't see anything because they were crowding around us. There is one picture of he and his daughter. It may have been a mixed blessing that it was closed because maybe nobody could have spared the time to show us how it worked otherwise.
He told us that he only generally knew the other processes because he was a thrower only. We would have loved to see the decoraters at work. There were ten kilns, each the size of a large long room. Rice husks were put between the pots if they were stacked in the kiln and they were wood fired. The only small items we saw were about 8 inch high vases and the pots the woman is making in the pictures, other than those everything was really big, waist high to me.
When we reached the guys the word that we had given money to the thrower preceded us and one drunken guy dragged us to another building to see his wife throw. We were onto him though and devised a plan to leave the building with him afterwards and then I slipped back and gave her money and some hairclips for she and her daughter, who was spinning the wheel with her foot. We didn't want the money to go to him.
After a meal in the heart of the village and tea in a teahouse we got a shared truck home. It had to stop every few miles to pour water over the engine to keep it from overheating but it was a lot of fun as it was full of locals and we all got along well with Soe Soe putting in the odd word for us between the smiles and gesturing.
We are determined to return to document these villages and their potteries before the winds of change pass through. It is probably the same today as it was hundreds of years ago.I have lots of pictures to go with this blog but I'm on an island with iffy internet and it won't upload.......

Bagan Myanmar

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This is one of the places we visited in Myanmar which from now on I'm going to call Burma. After a long straight boring bus ride to Mandalay on a road built by the Chinese to privide access to Yangon it's port, we arreved in Mandalay. Our friend Soe Soe was at the hotel looking for us with his trishaw which had 'welcome Angela and Philip' printed right on the pillows of it! After a tearful reunion we made plans to meet the following morning. We spent 8 days with Soe Soe and I'll blog about that later. We eventually left for Bagan, a Unesco World Heritage site about 8 hours away.
Since the road to Mandaly was so good, divided highway and all that, we thought that people who warned us about roads were mistaken. Well the bus started off on a divided highway and about ten minutes later turned off onto a side road that was virtually one lane with large rock/dirt shoulders. We thought it was a pee break or food stop but the bus continued along and we eventually realized this was the road! It pretty quickly became just rock or dusty dirt. The roads here are a man's fist size rocks as a base with dirt layed over them. Soon enough the dirt washes away and your left with a very bumpy road.
We made several 'pee' breaks on the side of the road, leaving the female passengers with full bladders. I couldn't bring myself to try to find a bush to get behind because I imagined walking through a minefield of poop and pee spots because it seemed like the buses always stopped in places where other buses had stopped. Along the way we did make a food stop but all the foreigners on the bus were timid about eating as the driver picked a dubious spot. The ladies were desperately trying to sell the foods atop their heads but with very few takers. We saw one boy with a tray on his head drop one of the dumplings he had and rinse it off in a bucket of dirty water and pop it back on his tray! We usually carry some small gifts for people so I started giving hair clips to the women and girls. they took so much pleasure in it and traded back and forth to get the colors they wanted. Soon all of the vendors were around us and the other tourists were deserted. They used the opportunity to at times quite rudely take pictures leading us to refrain from taking many.......
We had already decided to stay in the small town of Nyaungshwe rather than old or new Bagan because it was more of a real town. The government forcibly removed people from old Bagan years ago and built new Bagan. Now old Bagan is full of huge resorts where you can pay hundreds of dollars for rooms.
The historic site of 'Bagan' covers an area about the size of Manhattan and has around 2,500 structures. I'm sorry but my pictures uploaded like a shuffled deck of cards so they're in no kind of order. We had booked ahead and even though we weren't entirely satisfied with our hotel we had to stay as everything was full. There are not so many independent travelers in Burma, mostly it's tours of older people,, some looking too frail to endure some of the primitive conditions you find here. I haven't seen so many older travelers in all my travels in Asia. The governement here is trying to avoid the backpacker scene like in Thailand so they dictate the price of accommodatiion leading to high prices. We found that the bang for your buck in Burma with lodging falls far below anywhere's else we've been. Most include breakfast though and our hotel had an open rooftop dining room which we loved.
The first day of touring the temples we hired a wagon for the day and spent the day with a lovely young man the age of our son. He is the oldest child in his family and as such has the responsibility of helping his parents and siblings go to university. He has dreams of higher education as well but for the time being cannot pursue them. He bore absolutely no resentment about this it was just an accepted family value.
We trotted from place to place getting an overview of the entire area so that when we rented bikes we would have the lay of the land. The structures date from the 11th century when the King of the era decided that their religion was in need of change partly because the monks got to sleep with brides before the husbands! He introduced Bhuddism and built the temples. The people were so happy with the change that they built many of the stupas. You are able to climb up only a select few of the temples, sometimes from the interior or sometimes from outside. It was a perfectly enjoyable day and a feast for the eyes. For the next several days we cycled around the countryside enjoyng the freedom and the sites. a huge During a huge earthquake in 1975 most of the temples were damaged, many severely. A lot of the beautiful plaster work crumbled from the underlying brick structures and left huge cracks and devastation behind. Over time some restoration work has been done. The amazing thing is that many of them are still used by the people leading to the repainting of many of the Bhuddas.
The picture of me stitting on the stairs was taken on a temple which bus loads of tourists watch the sunset from. It was the only one which has a metal rail to help you climb up. It was so steep that Philip didn't climb up, worried he might reactivate the vertigo he experienced in Nepal on our last trip. We're planning another trek next month in Nepal and he didn't want to cause problems with doing it.
The first two pictures were of the food stop on the bus and some of the vendors, one of them examining the hair clips. The women here wear the ground up bark of a tree on their skin in various different ways. The picture of me with a woman with lines through her thainika (sp?) was taken after I had removed my earrings to give to her. Isn't she beautiful? The picture of me in a longi was taken at the market where I bought it. The picture of the table full of food is a typical Burmese meal. You order a curry ( not at all spicy) and everthing else comes with it!
The whole site was overwhelmingly beautiful and equal to Ankor Wat in many ways. I'm usre there is a million more things I could say about it but I've got to pack for a trip to some islands in the Andaman Sea side of Thailand. We've been back a few days and head out tonight. Hope I haven't made too many typos and spelling mistakes!