Hold That Ferry!

We had a bit of an adventure catching our ferry up the Irrawaddy.  Sadly we were so busy dealing with it all that we didn’t take any photos.  So this blog post is long on words and short on photos but it was one of our craziest travel experiences to date.  We had asked our hotel manager at the Shwe Poe Eain 2 Hotel to book us tickets on a ferry up the Irrawaddy to Mandalay.  We were told check-in time was 5.30 am.  The manager, Mr Saw Wisdom, had booked a taxi to pick us up at 5 am to go to the ferry jetty to the north of Old Bagan.  We had expected another mattress in the back of a pick-up truck taxi but a shiny new Toyota sedan awaited us.

I should digress here for a moment to talk about driving in Myanmar.  In Myanmar people drive on the right hand side of the road, like in Europe or America.  However all the cars and trucks are imported from Japan and Thailand where they drive on the left hand side of the road and cars have the steering wheel on the right side of the car (starboard).  It is very confusing driving and dangerous.

Whenever the driver wants to pass (and this is all the time on the narrow roads with motorbikes, slow trucks, tractors and the odd bullock cart sharing the roads) the driver must go halfway into the oncoming lane before he can see if it is safe to pass.

So off we go into the dark in the luxury model Toyota from our hotel at the southern end of New Bagan.  About 200 metres from the hotel we turn off the road onto a dirt track.  ‘What ho?’ we think.  Apparently we were picking up the hotel manager who was going to accompany us to the ferry terminal to make sure everything went smoothly.  This should have raised the alarm bells that perhaps there was a problem with the ferry booking.  The driver stops at one house and toots his horn.  No response from the house so out comes the ubiquitous mobile phone.  There is lots of chatter then we take a turn or two further along the dirt road, stop to ask directions from an early riser and then we see Mr Saw Wisdom waiting for us outside his house with his wife nearby.

I should digress here once again to describe Mr Saw Wisdom, the hotel manager.  Mr Saw Wisdom is a good looking man of about 30 years who is obviously well-educated, bright and extremely hard working.  He is the only one of the hotel staff that has a good command of English so all requests and tasks need to go through him to the well-meaning, polite and helpful staff.

One of the things that makes Mr Saw Wisdom so extraordinary is that he just had surgery on his right foot as a consequence of a motorcycle accident.  He was obviously in a lot of pain and hobbling around on crutches, keeping his foot elevated as much as possible, all the while apologizing for not getting up to attend to our every need.  There is no sick leave or relief staff for these hard working Burmese.

So Mr Saw Wisdom limps into the passenger seat with his crutches and starts directing the driver through the town.  We come to the city wall of Old Bagan which is blocked off to all but motorcycle traffic.  We had gone through this passage several times on our electric scooter.  Apparently heavy vehicles are prohibited as a way to preserve and protect the 11^th Century structure from vehicular vibrations.  The blockade seemed to puzzle the hotel manager and driver and they turned off onto a dirt track weaving among the temples, asking directions from early risers sweeping the dirt outside their thatched huts.  We finally got onto the main road.  Why we did not take this main road directly from our hotel is a mystery.  I can only imagine the men never drive a car around town so had just gone the usual motorcycle route, not realizing cars couldn’t go that way.

We finally arrive at the ferry jetty – well actually just a clearing on the banks of the Irrawaddy with a few bamboo poles sticking up to mark a path to the water.  The whole area is dark and near deserted.  The manager gets out of the car to find out what is going on but can’t manage the steep sandy bank down to one of the boats that had a single light shinning.  So the driver and Bob go down the bank and across the rickety gang plank onto the boat to find out what they can.

The banks of the Irrawaddy at Bagan

Long story short; after much discussion and many phone calls, it turned out that the ferry had left a few minutes before.  5.30 am was the departure time, not check-in time.  Bob and I then just assumed we would have our ticket money reimbursed and get a bus to Mandalay later in the day – disappointing but we are lucky that we can be flexible.  But no, the Burmese are determined to make good their commitments.  After a lot more phone calls, some to the ferry company and others to the ferry captain enroute, it was decided we could catch up with the ferry in the next town up the river, Nyang-U.

Meanwhile the driver had tried to turn the car around and got totally bogged in the soft sand.  Out come the shovels and wooden planks and with lots of burning rubber, pushing, digging, more burning rubber, more wooden planks, more pushing, about 20 minutes later the car was free.

Meanwhile an older man came along and the hotel manager asked him for directions to the ferry jetty north of Nyang-U.  It was decided that the older man should come with us to show the way.  This seemed like a good idea as the hotel manager and driver managed to get lost in their own town.

So the three of us pile in to the back seat; the hotel manager in the front passenger seat with his crutches and the driver driving the car very cautiously over the bumpy narrow roads.  After about 15 minutes Mr Saw Wisdom tells the driver to pull over and he crawls into the driver seat to drive.  This is a man who recently had surgery on his right foot; the foot that is used for the accelerator and brake and now he is driving us down narrow rutted country roads shared by motorcycles, bullock carts, trucks and buses.  Off we go at double the speed.  We go through several toll gates and end up hurdling across the long (about 5km) Pakokku Bridge over the Irrawaddy going about 100 km/hr.  Directly after the bridge we turn onto a dirt track.  We weave around these tracks past thatched huts with pigs wallowing in the mud, chickens scratching in the dirt and dogs lying in the middle of the track totally nonchalant about the oncoming car.  We stop to ask directions several times but nowhere can we see anything that looks like a ferry jetty.

Finally we flag down a young man on a motorcycle with his mother riding pillion side saddle carrying a big basket of fresh cut vegetables on her lap.  The young man agrees to show us the way and Mr Saw Wisdom turns the car around; no mean feat on a rutted dirt track no wider than the car.  Our guide has us stop at a muddy path about half a metre wide that goes off across a rice paddy to a small collection of thatched huts.  He insists this is the way to the ferry.

Out we come with our luggage, negotiate the mud track, through the kampong, along an even narrower track where the ferry has just pulled up.  One of the deck hands jumps off the ferry into the mud up to his knees to tie a line to a bamboo pole on the bank, the only sign of a ‘wharf’.  All the while the ferry is keeping its engine running against the current.  A wooden plank is laid across the mud and water.  We carefully climb down crude steps carved into the steep river bank and get on board our ferry.  Loyal, hard working Mr Saw Wisdom was there on the bank with his crutches to wave us goodbye.  The other passengers were all lined up along the deck watching this spectacle and wondering who we were and what was going on.

Mr Saw Wisdom, driver and navigator seeing us off

We found out that our fellow passengers were convinced we were aid workers coming in from some remote village.  We were sorry to disillusion them.  It would have been great fun to have gone along with that story, embellishing it so that we had just come from stopping a cholera epidemic or perhaps, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, we were really CIA operatives.  Oh the possibilities!

Scenes along the Irrawaddy: