Train

I didn’t get to leave Yangon after all, that’ll take a bit longer than I thought. Getting authorisation to travel around the country is getting more and more difficult as the country welcomes more foreigners (such as me) and yet remains struggling with the same resources as before.

So, to pass the time in Yangon I decided to catch a train, as you do.

Much like the circle line on London’s underground network, Yangon’s own circle line goes round the edge of the city and back to the beginning, stopping off at various places but, unlike London, it provides a view of the city, some pleasant and others not so. The fact that it’s the only train going round in a circle makes it easy to gesture what train you want to the guards at the station without speaking Myanmar (draw a circle in the air with your index finger). No small talk necessary.

The station itself is, from the outside, a very attractive piece of architecture and on the inside is your usual train station. Except that passengers wander willy-nilly from platform to platform in front of moving trains and mothers watch unconcerned as their young children climb onto the tracks.

A Woman In Black moment...

One man tried to convince us to cross platforms with him. I couldn’t tell if this was from genuine concern that we were about to catch the slow train to Mandalay, or whether he was trying to kidnap us, like an alternative train-spotter. He was quite charming and shook our hands, but we stayed firm and thanked him. I still can’t imagine what he wanted from us and he only came back to try kidnapping us again twice.

When we finally got on the train, my colleague and I sat on a wooden bench next to a young family, whose father was cradling his baby to sleep. But a man in a uniform tapped me on the shoulder and moved us both behind a roped-off section, where the train police sat. The benefit of this was that we got a seat to ourselves the whole time, opposite 2 very polite, knife-wielding men, but the downside was that we became like 2 pandas in a zoo, and the subject of many stares. To be fair, we were also staring back at everyone else and as the journey got underway I saw a number of people coming and going, some of whom smiled and waved at us, and others who probably held the same disdain for us as a Londoner would of people standing on the left of escalators. Thankfully, I was reassured this wasn’t London when I heard Celine Dion blaring from a teenager’s mobile phone.

 

A man bravely performs a Stand By Me homage

For the whole journey, the train moved at a snail’s pace and I had it in my head the train was being pulled by a contender in Myanmar’s equivalent of the world’s strongest man competition, edging the carriages along one inch at a time. It took 3 hours to get round the city in the end. Along the way I saw people throwing tables through windows, children selling cups of water for about 4p, a few people openly defecating beside the tracks, and people drinking from river water contaminated with piles of waste. The open defecation thing is a real concern across many parts of the country and has largely to do with the lack of education about how such habits can cause health problems, and I can’t say drinking contaminated river water is any better.

Homes caught between the railway and a dirty lake

When I wasn’t noticing those things, the relaxed atmosphere of the train meant I could stick my head out the window any time I wanted, or even hang precariously from the place where the door should have been, and not even the police would stop me. The train was moving far too slow for me to get my head lobbed off by another passing train.

Street food

Workers up to their waists in water

By the time the journey was over, and the various groups of foreigners got off (who must, by the way, seem extraordinarily daft to the locals, getting on and off at the same stop and not doing anything), we made a dash for the side exit, not wanting to run into the kidnapping train-spotter again.

Back at the station with Percy