Mingalabar!

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“Mingalabar” is the universal greeting heard across Myanmar, and one that I repeat many times a day at hotels, restaurants, shops and, most of all to the surprised, but welcoming villagers and children we pass by as we cycle through the fertile countryside.  In our cycle gear and helmets our appearance is probably as strange and exotic to them as theirs is to us. 

Our route through the West Shan hills with overnight stops in Kalaw and Pindaya before a Christmas Day 100km cycling marathon, culminates in the final 30km of downhill hairpin bends onto the flat plains of the Mandalay region.   These three days take us through some of the most beautiful and unchanged landscape of our journey through Burma.

 

There is a government directive to “warmly welcome and take care of tourists” – we see it on official signs and posters wherever we go.  We are warmly welcomed, and nothing but kindness is shown to us; but I think this is the true nature of the people rather than the result of an official command.

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For example, on Christmas Eve in Pindaya – an area not known for its Christian community  (though around 6% of the country’s inhabitants are) – our small hotel builds a warming charcoal fire in the courtyard, invites us for a pre-dinner drink of local plum wine and presents every guest with a gift wrapped in beautiful handmade paper, a handwoven scarf made by the Inle Lake weavers.  While we are escaping a western over-commercialised Christmas, our Buddhist hosts are anxious to help us celebrate our festival in their country.

On Christmas Day, I barely think of the family back home feasting on turkey and exchanging gifts.  I have the best gift in the world, cycling through this peaceful landscape, populated by shyly smiling children who wave their “minglabar” greeting as we pass, but run giggling into the safety of their houses if you stop to take their photo.  Their parents on their way to work in their fields on foot or on bullock carts are far more amenable, happy to pose and smile – as well as exchange “mingalabars”.

 

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It strikes me that little has changed here for hundreds of years.  While some houses are now being built with concrete bricks, the majority are still wood and bamboo. And while there are some diesel-engined vehicles and small motor-bikes, bullock carts are just as evident.  It’s charming.  I love being here and seeing life lived so simply.  But it will and must change.  I just hope they keep the essential element of simplicity, while increasing comfort and wealth.