We’ve been away from the United States for fourteen months now. By this point in the trip, one of the most frequently asked questions we get is, “What do you miss most from home?” My answer to this is always simple. Peanut Butter. I miss peanut butter.

Creamy. Crunchy. Salted. Unsalted. Any kind will do, really.

Now look, I know what you’re probably thinking. What a shallow guy. (Or perhaps, what a fat ass). But before you write me off for skipping over my parents, my sister, my friends, or my black Labrador retriever; allow me to present my case. Peanut butter is the one object I can think of that represents all these things and more:

It’s the image of my mom cutting off bread crusts, and spreading PB with honey on toast for my kindergarten lunches.

It’s the memory of my dog Jack, licking peanut butter incessantly out of the top hole in his chew toy.

It’s a representation of different personalities in the people I care about – like how my Dad is old school and snobby, and goes for the all natural stuff like Laura Scudders, while my sister tells him to get with the times and buy Skippy.

It’s my friends sending me off on my journey, by including a surprise package of Reese’s in my luggage. My favorite candy.

It’s an object, so I’ve realized, that is tied up with many personal memories. But perhaps even beyond that, Peanut Butter acts as the ultimate cultural reminder of home. It’s like America in a jar.

Even a quick look at the numbers tells us that Americans consume nearly 857 million pounds of the stuff annually, which comes out to about 3.36 pounds of peanut butter per person. That’s a whole lot of PB. And, well, it starts to make sense when you think about it. Since the 1920’s, PB has become the all-American, Jimmy Carter product everyone can relate to; both the poor college students’ staple, and a taste enjoyed by those at the highest income levels. That you can expect to find PB in any US grocery store is more than a given.

For me, that is why the fact that peanut butter is so hard to find in many other countries (or is so inferior in quality) will always serve as a subtle reminder I am away from home. It is why “Where can I find peanut butter?” was the second FAQ listed in my study abroad orientation packet in Argentina, and why a group of Ex-Pats I met in Istanbul were so jealous I had recently received a care package of Trader Joes Valencia peanut butter from the States.

You see, peanut butter isn’t merely a delicious balance of fats, salts, and sweets (coincidentally, a snack perfect for bicycle touring). It’s the one item I can carry with me on my bike that reminds me most of home.

So please, won’t you send us some peanut butter?  

In Thailand’s rural villages, it happens all the time, where child boxers and gambling are among the oldest traditions of Muay Thai fighting.

NPR has just published our latest feature story on the lives, ethics, and economics behind one of Thailand’s most controversial sports. Head on over to their website to read about the daily routine of a nine-year old fighter named Chai, and the pressures he faces as his village puts its money on him.

Click here

Two sixteen year olds in Nakhon Ratchasima Morgan managed to pick up using some four question magic.

Ask any seasoned traveler how long it takes to understand a foreign country and you’ll likely receive many different answers. Some will say you need to live in a country for a few years. Some will say it can be done in six months. Others believe they can get the gist of things in a few weeks.

Personally, I lean towards the “you have to live there a while” school of thought. I think it takes time to pick up on the nuances of language, or the subtle little ways that people of different genders, or socioeconomic backgrounds, or political ideologies interact in their cultures. Only then can you really start putting yourself in a local’s mindset.

We can’t really do that on this trip. Mostly, it’s because we don’t have the time. The restraint can be especially problematic for our journalism. The issue is: how can we understand what our characters are thinking and feeling when we’ve only been in their country for – what, a matter of weeks?

We’ve thought a lot about that question, and to combat the challenge, we developed four introductory questions to help us understand individuals’ values and beliefs in places we’re traveling through. They are:

• What is your dream job?
• What is the happiest you’ve ever been?
• What makes you proud to be (insert nationality)?
• Is there anything you would change about your country?

Now these are by no means scientific, but the beauty is that anyone can answer them. You can even try them on friends from your own country. Sometimes they reveal surprising things about people. I’ll use an anecdote to demonstrate:

About a month and a half ago, Morgan and I were sitting in the living room of a farm house in Isaan, one of Thailand’s poorest regions. We were excited because it was our first real opportunity to spend time with a Thai family. We had been invited there by a couchsurfer named Joy, and were eager to learn what her life in rural Thailand was like.

Midway through dinner it became evident we weren’t getting an accurate picture. The problem was that no one acted naturally because we were there. Most of the focus seemed to be on making sure our plates never emptied while they served a thanksgiving-sized feast prepared specially for our visit. (Which we were more than happy to dig into, by the way. We just wished our hosts would relax).

Then we sprung the questions on them, and it caught our hosts off-guard.

“What is your dream job?” I asked the table at large. “Keep in mind it can be anything at all. Astronaut, movie star, business exec – you name it.”

Joy, who was sitting next to me, laughed and translated the question into Thai for her relatives. Her younger sister immediately perked up and chimed in.

Joy translated back for us. “She wants to live in this house and raise four children. Two boys and two girls. That exact ratio.”

“And what about you?” I asked.

Joy thought about it a moment.

“I guess I’d want to become a professional traveler, going around and seeing the world…”

Her voice trailed off a couple of seconds before she added quietly,

“I mean — I want to be doing something like what you guys are…”

I smiled at her and looked down into my plate. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond.

Last week Morgan and I got into a pretty bad tumble on the way from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh – one of those types of crashes you wish was filmed because it would have looked awesome in slow motion. There have been more than a handful of those since we left Paris, and it got us thinking; what are the most dramatic bicycle crashes we’ve had? With the help of science and stuff, we determined the five best.

#5: Dijon, France

Victim: Chris

Culprit: Railroad Tracks

The Set-up: It’s day 5 of the Postulate One trip and Chris kicks things off by letting a front wheel slip into the diagonal railroad tracks crossing the intersection. He quickly learns his bike is not a train.

Style Points: Superman projection over the handlebars, front bags thrown off, blocking traffic: 7 points.

Damage: skinned elbow, bent brake lever.  6 points.

Avg. Score: 6.5 points

#4: Madhra Pradesh, India

Victim: Morgan

The culprit: boy on bicycle

The Set-up: It started with the cow.  Morgan was minding his own business, cruising fast through the village in the middle of the road.  A boy cycling next to him swerved to avoid the cow, and t-boned Morgan in the front wheel.

Style Points: Having an entire village of onlookers surround the crash site, the scared kid grabbing his bike and running away before he could get scolded. 8 points

Damage: busted shoulder, snapped gear lever. 7 points.

Avg. Score: 7.5 points

#3: Pontic Mountains, Turkey

Victim: Morgan

The culprit: Big Rig Truck

The Set-up: Riding through one of Turkey’s 4 kilometer long tunnels along the Black Sea, Morgan gets a little too close to the curb when a big rig truck passes by him.

Style Points: Causing the next approaching truck to slam on its brakes and avoid crushing Morgan’s head by a matter of feet.  10 points!

Damage: cracked helmet, deep psychological fear of tunnels for the rest of the trip. 7 points

Avg. Score:8.5 points

#2: Siem Reap, Cambodia

Victim: Chris and Morgan

The culprit: Pothole

The Set-up: Cambodia’s national highway 6 is perfectly paved except for its jagged edges, a fine scenario up until the ride leader starts daydreaming.

Style Points: Morgan reverse McTwisty sideways tumble, taking out Chris who was following right behind, and making the kids in front of an elementary school laugh. 9 points

Damage: bruised hips and shoulders, Morgan’s front wheel badly bent. Two very bummed bicycle tourists. 9 points

Avg. Score: 9 points 

#1: Basil, Switzerland

Victim: Morgan

The Culprit: Dumpster

The set-up: So there was an empty road in Switzerland, and then there was this dumpster off to one side…

Style Points: beautifully executed, full speed rendezvous with a large stationary object. 10 points

Damage: Bicycle frame completely bent in two, and maybe Morgan’s pride. 10 points

Avg. Score: 10 points

The cover photo of our upcoming feature story, on Child Muay Thai boxing

Every time we do a feature story, we take a leap of faith.  It starts with just a topic.  In Thailand, we decided to write a story about Muay Thai boxing.  That’s all we really knew; the underworld of boxing was a total mystery to us.  We chose the topic because it was sensational, and because an American audience would at least have heard the name “Muay Thai” before, and might be just curious enough to click through a headline.

The challenge is that we’ve only got one shot to get it right because of time constraints. It normally takes a week just to set up a story, arranging the right interviews and following the reference trail to find the people we want to write about. If we dive into an underworld and find out there’s nothing there, or there are no fresh angles to cover, we’re out of luck—we won’t have enough time to start over with a fresh topic. It’s in the nature of this trip that we have to keep moving.

We try and beat the odds by forming hypotheses about where the story might come from.  We start running a NECER analyses before we’ve got any facts. That is — what is the News, Emotion, Conflict, Entertainment, and Relatability?  We use that to start building the story in our heads.  In Thailand we thought: They have kids boxing.  That’s sensational… they must be getting used for something. What’s the betting like on the kids?  Are the trainers raising the kids like they raise dogs for a pitbull fight, so they can bet on them? Yes — that’s got to be the story!  The kids are raised for combat so they can be bet on.  Let’s try and find the boy hero that’s being forced into the ring.

These hypotheses are good, because they give us a place to start.  But they can also close our minds to other clues that might lead to the real story.

As we biked to Isaan, where we would do our investigations, we came up with a few unsupported predictions: that Muay thai boxing isn’t a way out of poverty, because there is too much other economic development in the region, that a fighter didn’t make money until he went pro, and that the trainers were inherently self-interested.  We were wrong on all counts.  The only thing we had right was that the story was about kid boxing.

The story ended up being about kids who box to support their families. They can make as much money in a night of fighting as their parents make in a season of rice farming.  It was about the pressure a 9 year old boy faced as he was tasked with winning to bring his family a better life.  The children loved the fraternity of the gym.  The trainers were kind and charitable.  They bet on the fighters like everyone else, but they trained them as a service to the community, and as a way for children to learn discipline and respect.  Chan, the trainer we ended up reporting on, would take anyone who came and was willing to work.  He sheltered and fed the fighters out of his own pocket.

It took us weeks to find that story. We spent days arguing about what kind of cash flow Chan was hiding, what his interests were, how we could pry them out.  We poked hard enough we offended him and almost compromised the story.

As a reporter, it’s often a struggle to drop the juicy story in your head and tell it how it really is. One has to learn to drop hypotheses in a minute, redevelop them multiple times in the course of an interview.  Mostly, we as writers have to learn to show the story, not tell it; it maintains the discipline of truth and helps eliminate what is imagined.

We have had to learn that a good story cannot be fabricated.  It must be built with what is there. In some ways, it is similar to photography. A good photographer knows exactly how to adjust the settings on their camera and position themselves for good composition. They have the eye, and they can see the photo before they take it. But the photo has to be there before they can bring it out.

It is the same thing with good journalism. Our job is not to write stories. It is to find them, to develop an eye for them.  Good technique and writing only serve to make the raw stuff of a good story more alive and accessible.

The piece was recently selected as the cover story of Little India’s April magazine. Go check it out on their website!

Part 9: Master Tai Wen

Master Tai Wen

Master Tai Wen is a Senior Assistant Teacher of English in Kalemyo, High School #2. We met him at a tea shop in Kalewa, 25 miles west of the city, where he used to work before he beat the odds and got the transfer two years ago to the metropolis. Now he has a chance to really make a living.  It has been a slow march up.  12 years ago, he was teaching in a farming village, raising his family of six children on the thin wages of the government, making ends meet by farming the land for peanuts and rice with his wife.

In a stroke of fortune, the central government education bureau in Mandalay moved him to Kalewa, a river shipping port of 10,000, where goods from the cities are traded for the produce of the lush northern farming lands.  He took it eagerly, even though he had to leave his family. Wages were not enough to support the whole clan in town.

It wasn’t that the salary from the government school changed. That has always been the same everywhere: 64,000 kyat ($75) a month, until two years ago, when Thein Sein’s government bumped it to 92,000 ($106) a month.  It’s that in the towns you can make money as a private school tutor, and in the cities you can make even more.  The wages from the private schools, which teach the kids how to beat the government tests and get into the best government universities, far outstrip the wages of the public high school.  Some teachers augment their salaries by 300,000 kyat a month with the work, though Tai Wen is still far from those heights.

A burmese classroom in Yenanguan

The private schools are a critical service in an overburdened education system.  Master Tai Wen’s classes at the public school have at least 70 students to one teacher.  His largest class has 83.  Besides, the education system boils down to a single key metric: your grades in the last two years of high school.  Those numbers decide who gets to go to which university, who obtains the vaunted positions at the Universities of Rangoon and Mandalay. Those grades, in turn, are decided by three tests a year, in six subjects, and those tests are the same for every student in Myanmar. They are written by the central government.  The teacher’s job is only to instruct and to grade.  It is after school, at the private schools, that the kids learn how to beat the test.

Master Tai Wen provides those services happily, as an opportunity to bring his family together again.  His wife is still in the village, farming rice and peanuts, as he left her twelve years ago.  He visits her less than once a month, because the voyage is a day-long each way, and it requires him to take leave from school. When he can’t go, he sends her 70,000 kyat a month in an envelope with his friends on the river shipping boats. His family has dispersed while he was away, his children trying to find their own living. The eldest daughter has married and moved to the south of Myanmar.  Three others work along the Chintu river, trading goods they bought wholesale from Monywa in the villages along the banks. When the profits aren’t enough, they pan for gold in the river’s silt. It has been many years since Tai Wen has seen them all together, because the cost of petrol is so high.

Soon though, the parting may end. Tai Wen is starting to earn enough money to bring his wife and two school aged daughters to live with him in Kalemyo.  “I hope it will be two years,” he said. It depends on how many after school lessons he can find.

Part 10: “She’s Just a Poster”

Before we arrived in Myanmar, we were told to be careful when it came to discussing politics. Even though the government had recently passed laws guaranteeing freedom of press, its power still rests in the hands of the military junta; there was no telling what could happen if we didn’t watch ourselves. Among the suggestions we heard were: No taking pictures of policemen or military installations. No mentioning of the fact we work as journalists. And especially no talking about Aung San Suu Kyi.

Aung San Suu Kyi is Myanmar’s most recognized figure. The daughter of Burma’s founding father, she is the main democratic opposition leader to the military government, and internationally famous for her 20 year house arrest and winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. She’s also extremely controversial. We’d read about Burmese citizens who’d been jailed just for mentioning her name. For us, talking about Suu Kyi seemed a sure fire way to make trouble with authorities.

Yet no sooner had we arrived in Yangon when we started seeing her posters everywhere.

Tea shops, car repair garages, restaurants, hotels – they were all over the place. They ranged in every shape and size, from small, framed photographs to huge, blown-up banners. They weren’t restricted to large cities either; during our bike tour we continually came across Suu Kyi posters even in the smallest rural villages. There was one poster in particular that seemed to be most popular, a split image featuring a colored photograph of Suu Kyi on one side, and a black and white portrait of her father Aung San on the other. We were completely taken aback. We had thought Suu Kyi was a taboo subject.

As it turned out, our surprise wasn’t completely unfounded. Most of the posters have only been pinned up since a year and a half ago.

This was according to Mr. Slim, an animated man we met in Mandalay’s wholesale market who runs a tribal handicrafts store. When our conversation had turned to politics and Aung San Suu Kyi, he got excited.

“She is the only real leader we have” he said fondly.

He explained that Burmese people resonate with Suu Kyi because she’s highly educated and cares for the country, not just her personal welfare. “She’s also sacrified a lot” he added. During Suu Kyi’s house arrest, she wasn’t allowed to be with her husband or son, who were both exiled from the country. The posters, he said, are people’s way of showing solidarity with her struggle for democracy.

But Mr. Slim quickly added a caveat. “Believe me –these posters,” he said, waving towards one in the adjoining stall, “people are ready to tear them down at a moment’s notice.”

Mr. Slim is afraid to put up his own because he is a Muslim, and of Indian descent – a quick target for the police if things every returned to how they were. “Burmese prison is the closest thing on earth to hell,” he said, recounting the stories of friends who had disappeared in the past. He has no interest in joining them. As much as Mr. Slim supports Suu Kyi, he said the posters are not worth the risk.

Like much of his country, he hopes Suu Kyi and her political party, the National League of Democracy, will win the next election in 2015. It appears likely. What remains to be seen, he said, is if this time the military government is willing to cede its power, or if they hold on like they did in 1990’s corrupted election.

Mr. Slim says he’s making no predictions. “Suu Kyi is our symbol of hope, and I want her to lead the country.”

“But until then she’s just a poster.”

Part 7: Chasing the Sunset

Sunrise over some small temples in Bagan

Bagan is a valley with 2500 temples strewn across it, most ancient, some new, a vast complex of Buddha statues and enormous shining shrines and crumbling brick pagodas, a few well preserved, most not big enough to earn government repair money.  The town adjacent, Nuang Oo, is a chief destination for any foreign visitor, and is quickly becoming a staple of those on the South East Asian backpacking circuit. It is a place tourists come from all over the world to watch the sun cross the horizon.

Every day, one hour before sunset and sunrise, all the tour buses start their engines in unison, and the hotels empty out to fill them and head out to the twice daily show. The most popular place to watch is the Shwe San Daw Phaya temple, where you can sit higher than any other.  It is also has a bus parking lot. Thirty minutes before showtime, the temple’s three Western (or Eastern) balconies are packed with tourists, who perch shoulder to shoulder like crows with DSLR lens beaks, each jostling for the best position to take a photo hundreds of others took yesterday, and the day before, and could easily be downloaded from Google images.  The hundreds of temples below, being photographed, stand mostly empty, but for a few adventurous souls who walked.  When the sun sets, the place clears out. The beer stations back in Nuang Oo are full before it’s completely dark.

The rhythm of Bagan is indicative of how tourism has changed Myanmar since the trickle broke into a flood after the country opened up.  We tourists are clearly overwhelming the infrastructure.  In major stops like Yangon and Bagan, the hotels are booked full almost every night. Tales abound of travelers who were left stranded because there was a not a single room in town.  The government has not helped the situation: getting a license to host foreigners is a lengthy bit of bureaucracy that normally involves remodeling and high taxes, and few owners have that kind of capital.  The shortage is evident in the rooms’ skyrocketing prices.  We paid an average of over twenty dollars a night for our hotel rooms, over twice what it costs in neighbors Thailand and India.

But just as the tourists of Bagan stuck to the same temples, they seem to stick to a fairly standard itinerary.  Almost everyone we talked to was going to the same places, “the big four”: Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan, and Inle Lake, with the fifth option being to visit some of the Western beach resorts.  It seemed as if most who visited Myanmar were still meek to set out and explore the places where Lonely Planet had not yet reached.  Thirty kilometers south of Nagpali Beach, one of the largest of the resort towns, we were among the first foreigners to visit a small fishing village on the coast.

Crowds of tourists await sunset on one of the more popular temples.

There is some good reason for this. Internet in Myanmar continues to be as reliable as congressional campaign promises, and feeble English in rural communities makes communication difficult.  Furthermore, the roads away from ‘the big four’ are atrocious, and travel difficult. Even short journeys tend to involve sleepless nights on buses that try and distract passengers from the jostling with bad Burmese soap operas.  The visa is also short, just 28 days, and few really want to test the Burmese government’s policy of allowing overstays with a fee of 3 dollars a day.  Finally, the police questioning is as omnipresent as the free glass of orange juice at hotel check in—while there are always smiles, the intimidation of a uniform is often enough to keep people on the safe routes.

Mostly though, people just don’t know where to go, or feel that the big four are good enough.  Tourism is new enough in Myanmar that even the most trod-upon destinations keep their exotic flair; they still feel like Burmese towns that are being visited rather than foreign colonies. Even in Bagan, you can follow the locals to the best restaurants in the center of town, and pay the same thing they do.

This will change quickly.  Not just because Myanmar will become better documented, and the tourists will blaze more trails outside the big four. The rest of Myanmar, with its forgotten pagodas and ancient ruins and untouched beaches, will not be able to ignore the call of so lucrative a business.

Part 8: Playing Cat and Mouse with Burmese Immigration

Myanmar may be opening up its borders, but it is still very strict about keeping tabs on the foreign tourists within them. Entire regions of the country are blocked to foreign visitors because of rebel activity, and the government requires tourists to stay in approved guest houses every night of their 28 day visa.

We were bending the rules. After we learned the visa overstay fees were only $3 dollars a day, we moved our flight out of the country to two weeks later. We also were stealth camping throughout our bike tour; being neither able to cycle to, or afford the government approved guesthouses every night, we often took by tent to the woods and fields, hiding out of sight from the road so no one could find us and report us to authorities. Sometimes we’d get discovered by quizzical farmers in the morning.

In Monywa, we decided to stretch the limits further. Our draw was the massive India-Myanmar highway project and beautiful scenery in the Northwest. We wanted to check them out by cycling through the Alaung Daw Kattapa National Park and staying in a city called Kalemyo, but then we heard rumors that we needed a permit to go there because it was on the border with Chin State – one of the restricted regions.

Boys play around a pagoda north of Monywa

We decided to visit the police station in Monywa to find out. We thought it would be easy –a yes or no question.

It was a circus.

“What is your problem??” “What is your problem??”Chairs were drawn up and mineral waters poured. Four officers dropped what they were doing and took seats around us at a conference table, like some kind of business meeting. None of them spoke English. The word “Kalemyo” raised some eyebrows though. More scurrying. We were ushered between three buildings, where different police officers at the station popped their heads through the door to look at us while frantic calls were made to locate a translator.

Finally he arrived, a university student. “What is your problem??”

No problem, no problem — we just want to go to Kalemyo, we said. Will that require a permit?

A second translator, an ex-tour guide, showed up.  More phone calls, more scurrying. Finally, an answer: “The immigration office is ready to receive you.”

They didn’t know.

However, we knew spending half the day at the immigration office was a bad idea when our visa was two days away from expiring.  Besides, it seemed as if the immigration office in Myanmar is always ready to receive you; it is their job to record visa numbers on sight.  Sometimes police officers do it just because they’re bored. So without getting a straight answer on the Kalemyo question, we made our gamble: we decided to go for it anyway. If we had to deal with immigration, we’d do it on the road.

The next morning we set off on our bicycles. It wasn’t long before we started reaching check points. We stuck to our usual policy of blowing through the road blocks. While we could always see the red and white striped traffic gates approaching, it’s hard to tell until you’re up close if it’s a toll booth or immigration check. Either way, we’d rather not deal with the hassle of passport checks and questioning if we didn’t have to. A couple times in Rakhine State that meant being intercepted down the road by immigration officers on motorcycles. They said we were supposed to stop, but we always played the dumb tourist.

After so many times pulling off the stunt, we knew there was a pending confrontation with the immigration officers in the Northwest. It finally went down in Kalewa, a junction town at the mouth of the Chinwe River where we stopped for lunch. We weren’t in town ten minutes before two immigration officers swooped in on us. “Immigration!” they yelled, as if we couldn’t tell.

Officer Tun Tun and his assistant took us to a local tea shop. They wanted to know if we had a permit, so we pointed at our bikes and said “yeah, bicycles” with big smiles and then gave them our passports. While they copied down the information, we nervously fished through our papers, and readied a copy of our flight itinerary, as well as a translation a friend wrote for us explaining in Burmese that we knew our visas were expired, and would pay the overstay fees at the Mandalay airport.

We bit our lips. This was the moment of truth – no permit and an expired visa. Our fate was in Officer Tun Tun’s hands. We watched the officer frown, furrow his brow, tap his pen hesitantly, and then…he handed back our passports.

“Thank you…Is there anyway else I can help you?”

“Actually yeah –“ we said. “What’s your favorite restaurant in town?”

We all laughed.

A farmer in his fields during dry season, northwest of Mandalay

Part 5: Win

Teens play Chinlon, Burma's national sport. It's like volleyball, but done with a hollow ball of straw that cannot be touched with the hands

We met Win at his family’s autoparts dealership, a small storefront cluttered with hanging metal clamps, brackets, and bungee cords that obscured deep rows of semi-organized shelves.   I was trying to find a replacement bracket for the luggage rack on my bike, as the original one had snapped, and Win stepped out to help me as the only English speaker.  His English struck me for his quality and colloquialism– good speakers of the language are difficult to find in Myanmar.  We immediately invited him to dinner, hungry for some insight on the country and his story.

He told it over mutton curry and huge piles of white rice at a local eatery, across a table as loaded with Canon DSLRs, smartphones, and his Ipad as delicious food.  His electronics had been brought back from his days studying engineering and working in a semi-conductor factory in Singapore, where much of Burma’s elite goes to get educated.  He came back to help run his family business, but he brought back more than fancy gadgets.  In Singapore he had developed a passion for filmmaking.

When he’s not at the autoshop, Win sits in his room right on top of it, putting together a rough cut of his first feature length documentary.   He’s been teaching himself how to make movies on the internet since 2005, when he was one of the city’s only users of a dial up connection.  The process has gotten a lot easier in the last year, when the price of an internet connection dropped 15 fold– to 50,000 Kyat ($60)—and he could get one installed in his home.

Win’s film is about a giant Buddha statue in Pyay, and the efforts that go into taking its relics around every street of the city once a year so that those who cannot go to the temple can pray from their homes.  When he’s done with the project, Win wants to move on to directing scripted films. Myanmar’s first film festivals are happening in Mandalay this year, and he wants to be among his country’s first well known film makers.  As he proudly flipped through a collection of his photography on his iPad, he also talked about his dream of attending film school, to which he is applying.  The prospects, however, look tough; his chances for a scholarship are slim. The best option seems to be Art School in Singapore.  It’s his choice of last resort. He thinks the strict rules of the city state make it a horrible place to be a creative.

There’s another drawback on his dream.   His family desperately needs him at the spare auto parts business.  The number of cars in Burma has exploded in recent years, as has their variety and complexity.  Win is the only one who really understands what it takes to fix computerized engines, and how to control a digital inventory of parts.   It’s his job to train the business’ seven employees—four of which are brand new—in how to handle the new engines and source the parts.

We asked Win whether the increase in cars had grown his business, he replied “I guess the increase in cars is better, but the cars also last a lot longer.  Burmese cars break constantly.”

Win and Chris chat over dinner

The business looks as if it is here to stay.  Win thinks getting major car dealerships in Pyay is still more than a decade away.  “Nobody would be able to afford the new cars right now,” he said.

Likewise, Win cannot afford the tuitions of the American and Austrialian film schools he so wants to attend, or the time it would take for the Burmese film industry to grow.  Caught between the demands of his families and his dreams, he is in a catch-22.  He does not believe that staying in Myanmar gives him the chance of a promising career as a young creative, but he cannot leave without endangering his family’s business.  If his scholarship applications come through, it may be time to have a serious talk with his parents.  Until then, he’ll have to keep fixing imported products rather than leaving the country to produce them.

Part 6: Lucky’s Bar

Morgan was trying to photograph this monkey when it attacked him on Mt. Popa

If you want to have a beer in Yananguan, a blue collar town floating on the salaries of a government oil operation, you go to Lucky’s.    It’s a simple corner of the world, with the bar’s name in fading capitals on a huge sign dominated by a roaring lion and the word Dagon, one of Myanmar’s local brews.   Inside, you’ll find a small courtyard with four tables crowded with men, and a longer of row of empty settings under an open metal awning.  Just outside the bar and past a row of scooters, you can catch a ride back into downtown with a horse and buggy, the only cabs available.

The ruler of the house is Yin Htwe Minn, who works in the engineering department for the local oil rigs when she isn’t barmaiding.  At 46, she is plump and loud and bursting with character, the only woman in town who will break into the conversations of men at her bar.  Around her scurry her young children, and her husband, who manage the errands of delivering more liquor and snacks when customers make the gesture.

A group of women laughing, just a few hundred meters up the street from Lucky's

The customers are mostly civil servants: petrochemical engineers, professors, policemen and immigration officials. Employees of the service sector can rarely afford the venue. The men come as much to drink as to discuss, and they take the business seriously.  At many of the tables, each congregant has their own flask of Grand Royal whiskey (ingredients:  water, imported whiskey concentrate, ethyl alcohol) or Mandalay brand rum, which they mix in generous quantities with the local water.  Only the most leisurely drink beer.  At 500 kyat (60 cents) a glass, it is by far the least efficient way to socialize.

Even the government officials are stretching their budget. The geography teacher of the local elementary school gets “almost” 100,000 kyat a month, which means she makes roughly 100 dollars. The salary seems typical of civil servants—the sergeant of a fire squadron in Pyay quoted me the same figure.  Lucky’s owner, Yin, said she must combine the incomes of her government job, her bar and guesthouse, and her husband’s three rental properties to make ends meet.

Still, Lucky’s fills in each night with regulars who come as soon as the government offices close at 5:00 and they have gone home to eat the dinner their wives have prepared.  Over the course of the first half of the flasks, they talk about work and the youth or they gossip about their wives.  As with all waterholes, the conversation occasionally reaches politics, but Lucky’s is no forum for debate. “They talk about what they’ve read in the papers, or what they’ve heard, but almost nobody presents opinions. Yenanguan is a brown zone, and you have to be careful what you say here,” Yin told us.  She confided that local expressions of discontent with the government might lead to a police intervention, a particularly scary prospect at Lucky’s, where there is almost surely a policeman at the table next to you.  Yin herself got nervous and dropped her voice when we asked her about her discontent with the high taxes she must pay on her restaurant.

An engineering student from the local college, Htoo Sett Linn, who Yin brought to Lucky’s so he could practice his English with us, confirmed the hesitancy to speak up.  While he referenced “change” and “greater human opportunity” and a “love” of Thein Sein’s leadership, he admitted that he never spoke about politics with his friends or family. “We don’t understand such things,” Htoo said.  The engineer was pretty smart; his tone suggested he didn’t feel it his duty to try.

Lucky’s, it seems, is a venue of relaxation for the privileged.  But even in the comfortable haze of Grand Royal, everyone watches their step.

Part 3: Off-Roading on Burmese Highways

We left Yangon through its industrial zone, on a smoothly paved two lane highway.  We were cycling West, to reach the Southern pass over the Arakan Mountains. Our plan was to meet up with the coast and cycle until we reached Nagpali Beach, a resort area where we intended to lie on some white sand and buy a drink with an umbrella in it.

The net distance was 380 kilometers.  We thought we’d get it done in four days.  It ended up taking us seven, the result of roads so atrocious that we both longed for the mountain bikes we’d left in California.  The coast we found, sheltered from the rest of the country by the rugged mountains, was a world apart from the more developed Irrawaddy Valley we passed to get there.  Making it over the mountains felt like stepping back in time.  The trumpeted change sweeping Burma has come only to those communities with the roads to transport it.

Our journey over the pass made it evident why.  We began this cycling trip a year ago in Paris, and have logged over 13,000 kilometers of riding since.  None have been as challenging as the 58 we rode from one side of the Arrakan mountains to the other, and things did not improve much along the coast.

We started our crossing from where we camped, on a small hill at the base of the range.  The road quality had started to deteriorate about 100km out of Yangon, alternating between roughly paved and an asphalt variety of swiss cheese. The first hills were paved, but steep.  It felt like the engineers had decided switchbacks were too expensive, and so just sent the road barreling up at 8 percent grades.  It was steep enough we couldn’t sit in our saddles, and we had to put our navels on our handlebars and fight for each push on the pedals.

As the road continued, it got more and more worn down.  Often there was almost no asphalt left, just potholes and a layer of huge rocks that had been used to lay the foundations of the road.  It was brutal on our stiff bikes, which had no shocks and weighed 50 kilos with all the baggage on them.  On the downhills, the rocks and potholes got so bad we descended at the same speed we climbed.  Anyone could have beat us at a trot.  At some points, the roads became pure sand, and more than once we dismounted to push our bikes up the grades of silt.

It wasn’t that the roads were neglected.  Anything but.  Road crews were everywhere, working every ten kilometers or so to repave a stretch of road.  Their methods were labor intensive and slow, reflective of a country where manpower is still far cheaper than machines.  Along the sides of the roads were piles of rocks of various sizes.  The youngest and fittest men on the crew broke the big rocks into slightly smaller ones with sledgehammers, and then another group of men and women broke those into even smaller ones with the same instrument.  A bed of large rocks was laid, topped off with layers of progressively smaller ones.  Tar was manufactured on the side of the road in gutted oil barrels, where old motorcycle tires were melted down over wooden fires, and the tar would be hand poured over the rock piles.  Then the steamroller would come over, the only part of the process that was mechanized, and the tar and asphalt would be applied.

The result was roads that were so unevenly paved even the new ones felt bumpy.  More importantly, they were roads that washed away in a few years of rain and abuse by trucks, leaving only the rocky foundation underneath.  By the time the crews had finished a road, they needed to start over again.

The 58 kilometers  over the Arakan mountains took us 8 hours.  The roads shredded a back tire, broke off a rack, and so abused our wheels we had to stop to true them.

In the valley, close to Yangon, we had noodles in stands by paved roads, where the cooks applauded Barack Obama’s recent visit. On the other side, we were brought breakfast by a man who did not know who Thein Sein was.

Chris pushes his bike past a work crew in the Arakan mountains

Part 4: Chowmein Chowdown

“Play it!” the kid said, shoving a cheap acoustic guitar towards us. There were now about 60 people surrounding us on the beach, and they all hushed and looked at us expectantly. As Americans, surely we must be rock virtuosos. A little Freebird, anyone?

But unfortunately for our eager audience, we are not Lynyrd Skynyrd; there would be no coastal concert on this Burmese beach. “I’m sorry” we said lamely “…but we don’t know how.”

After finally convincing them that we didn’t know a D chord from a C chord, the villagers acquiesced.  Eyes then followed us curiously as we pulled six bags of greasy chowmein out of our bicycle bags. That was, after all, why we were there — we had stopped in the village to buy food, and because we expected it would be a good spot to sit on the beach and eat lunch as we cycled up the coast. What we hadn’t expected was that half the village would join us.

Even though it was 50 miles south of Ngapali beach, a major tourist destination in Western Myanmar with four star resorts and day spas, the unnamed fishing village felt like a relic from a different era. Fishermen and their families lived in Bamboo-thatched huts built on stilts, and the two general stores in town doubled as the owner’s homes, as well as the centers of village social life. When we cycled the dirt paths meandering through ferns and palm trees to the beach, children and elderly peered at us from the shadows of their huts. It was a group of teenaged boys who first gathered the courage to approach the two, strange white men in spandex shorts sitting on their beach. Once the other villagers saw that we welcomed their company, we were surrounded in minutes.

Chris ponders the sunrise on a beach south of the village.

Many were drawn towards our bikes – with their shiny gear clusters, electronic trip computers, and saddle bags. The boy with the acoustic guitar, an 18 year old who spoke some English and grew up on a nearby island, was especially interested in our gear. After inspecting our bikes, he proudly showed us some of his own prizes: a Samsung smart phone, a Honda scooter, and a belt buckle with detachable brass knuckles.

Others were simply amazed we were there, excited that we would visit their village. Their village! When they saw that we were eating our chowmein out of plastic bags, a group of women rushed to fetch ceramic bowls. Another man gifted us with more dried fish than we were able to carry, as well as two fresh coconuts which he cut up on the spot. It was wonderful.

If we were not the first foreigners to ever visit the village, we were among them. There was none of that jadedness which you experience in places overrun by tourists, which was telling, considering we were sitting on a tropical beach that could have served as the postcard of a five star resort. The village was its own isolated, self-sufficient world. People recognized the word “America” but when we mentioned Barack Obama, we drew blank stares.

Of course, things won’t remain that way for long. The village’s very interest in us reminded us that we, ourselves, are a big part of the changes occurring in Burma. Five years ago, few Westerners would cycle into a remote village on the Burmese coast. But based on our experience, and the increasing influx of tourists in Myanmar, it made us wonder, how long until the next foreigners come by? What ideas will they exchange?

A fishing boat paddles out to sea on the west coast of Burma