"Railway
equipment is decrepit; fatal rail crashes occur, although they may not always
be reported."
(Foreign and Commonwealth
Office website description of Burma Railways)
We arrived at Rangoon’s (Yangon’s) fine
railway station at 6.15am without a ticket, but followed the blue signs saying
‘Warmly welcome and take care of tourists’
in Burmese and English: exhortations that have largely replaced the traditional
patriotic slogans.
A very friendly man obeyed the instructions and took us into his shambolic office and laboriously wrote us out a
ticket, this being the land of chits and ledgers. We paid in brand new US dollars, reluctantly
supporting a government enterprise.
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| Our return ticket: Mawlamyine to Yangon |
The platform was full of traders with baskets of bananas and watermelons or rows of cheap watches. A goat wandered around, trying to snatch bits of produce, and a few families were waking up after a night on the platform. We found our allocated ‘Upper Class’ carriage, with reclining aircraft-style seats. In fact they were ‘reclined seats’, as the mechanism had collapsed years previously. The carriages were utterly shabby but the seats were covered and comfortable, especially as the whole journey was spent almost lying down.
With a fanfare of whistles, horns and much
flag waving we set off on time at 7.15, at around 20 mph, with initially a
fairly gentle rocking. As the state of
the line declined, then the rocking got worse requiring a steady grip on the
armrest. Then, like an ocean liner in a storm, a
different form of motion started, this time violently up-and-down so that we
almost left our seats. I had never
thought that seat-belts might be necessary in a train. We talked later to a hardier traveller who
was in hard class, and he said that when the vertical turbulence started
everyone just stood up as it hurt so much landing on the wooden seats.
At our gentle pace, and large glass-less
windows, we had a fine view of rural Burma continuing as it has done for
centuries: planting out rice in the paddy fields, buffalo wallowing in the mud,
children playing by the track. Meanwhile
women selling food continued to walk up and down the train with their trays on
their heads, perfectly timing their movements as the carriages lurched in opposite
directions, threatening to send them out through the wide-open doors. Some of them had half a kitchen on their
heads, and with all the pots and pans to produce a whole meal on a banana leaf,
but we stuck to the wonderful corncobs.
We threw the remnants out of the window, while the locals threw
everything out including plastic bottles, adding to the ubiquitous litter that
only we westerners seem to notice.
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| Bits are missing |
Things seemed to be going rather well and
the tales of delays and disaster seemed exaggerated, but then suddenly there
was a huge crash right below our seats.
I genuinely thought we had derailed, but we cruised to a gentle stop:
this took some time as when everyone piled out to take a look it was clear that
the whole brake mechanism from our carriage had fallen off.
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| Putting the bits back |
6 hours for around 110 miles is not
something that First Capital Connect would be proud of, but any faster would
(a) have been unsafe because of the terrible state of track and rolling stock,
(b) not have allowed the extraordinary view of the beautiful countryside and
people.
* I will call the country Burma rather than
Myanmar as (a) it’s the name given to it by the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, and so I assume it is the English name for the country (and I don’t refer
to Germany as Deutschland) (b) Aung San Suu Kyi calls it Burma.
