Excursion to Mt. Popa
Trip Start
Nov 07, 2006
1
7
9
Trip End
Nov 18, 2006
Mt. Popa, Myanmar
Monday, November 20, 2006
Last night, after finishing my dinner, I walked over to a nearby table in the restaurant and started a conversation with two Japanese ladies. One of them is currently working in Rangoon for a Japanese development aid organization and the other was her friend who had come to visit her. They both spoke English quite well and we had an interesting chat. After that I walked them back to their hotel and they told me of their plans to visit Mt. Popa the next day (today). Since I had already had enough of the temples - and since Mt. Popa was also on my list of places that I wanted to see, I hoped that during our walk back to their hotel that they would have the good sense to invite me to join them on their excursion. (They had arranged for a taxi to pick them up at their hotel the next morning at 8 o'clock to take them to Mt. Popa for $20, I overheard.)
When no invitation was forthcoming, I returned to my hotel thinking "Why didn't I just ask them if I could join them?" And since I really wanted to go - and since I really didn't have anything else to do for the morning - I came up with a plan: I would arrive at their hotel just before 8 a.m
01-Mt. Popa from a distance
. and casually ask if I could join them. I debated whether this sort of "self-invitation" would put them in an awkward situation but in the end I concluded that they probably WANTED me to join them but were too shy to ask me - probably out of fear of being rejected. So in the end, you might even say that I did them a favor by inviting myself to join them. (Hey, I'm being sarcastic here. I really wanted to go on this excursion and I was desperate by this time so the situation called for bold action.) They didn't object (at least not in front of my face) to my joining them and after renegotiating the rate with the taxi driver (he was quick to pounce on the opportunity to charge a little more for three guests rather than two although by my thinking the charge was for the car and should have been the same no matter how many passengers were sharing it. We ended up agreeing on a total of $21 for the car, or seven dollars for each of the three passengers.), we headed off for Mt. Popa. This Mt. Popa is basically a 737 meter high peak of an extinct volcano with a complex of monasteries, stupas and shrines on top.On our drive to Popa, we stopped off for a chance to observe some local farmers making sugar, alcohol and candy from various parts of the palm trees. At the end of this was an opportunity to buy some of their manufactures, for which the taxi driver gets a kick-back. Once at the base of Mt. Popa, we needed to use the toilet so the taxi driver let us into the home of a friend of his there. When we were using the toilet, we didn't close the front door of the house and some local monkeys came into the house. At that moment the owner of the house came home and found these three foreigners using her toilet and a couple of monkeys wandering around the living room. The toilet itself defied description and in the end it was probably better that we couldn't communicate with the home owner as the whole situation was a bit awkward
02-Mt. Popa from a little closer
.We then climbed the mountain (as one does) and on the way up, we encountered two new ways for people to extract money from tourists: (1) Children would offer to assist elderly foreigners climb the steps for a small amount of money. I was a bit insulted that some children considered me to be in need of help and I just shooed them away. (2) Then there were lazy teenagers sitting with brooms in their hands at various locations on the steps on the way to the top of the mountain, asking for "donations for cleaning". The steps were very dirty and none of these "cleaners" was ever seen in motion. So every time I would pass one I would say "Clean first, donation after."
Anyway, eventually we made it to the top, where we were met with cool breezes and a nice view. Pictures of the mountain from a distance as well as the view from the mountain are attached.
We got back to town (Nyaung Oo) and I had lunch and a rest before heading off for my 3 p.m. appointment with a school teacher I had met the previous afternoon. Or rather, a school teacher who found ME. I was riding my bike back to Nyaung Oo from my temple tour and this elderly gentleman pulled up alongside me on his bicycle. He tried to start a conversation with me and I was a bit reluctant to engage him as such conversations usually end up with a request for financial assistance - particularly in the case of such non-accidental meetings. Anyway, after a bit of between-bicycle banter, he invited me to come to his home the next day (today) to meet his family and see him teaching private English lessons to neighborhood kids. So at the agreed upon time, I arrived at his home and sure enough, he had a room full of antsy young students repeating English sentences after him
03-Mt. Popa from closer yet
.He left the students alone for awhile to invite me in for tea and a chat in another room. During this time, he brought out a stack of school books to show me - which I found strange but I thought he might be proud of the books and wanted to show them off. He also explained to me that he teaches at school from 8 until 3 in the afternoon but that he also gives private lessons from 7 until 8 in the morning and again from 4 until 8 in the evening.
I then excused myself to go back to my hotel and get a Japanese-American girl whom I had met earlier and who I thought would enjoy this experience as well. I ended up going to watch the sunset at the temples with this girl and at about 18:15 we arrived at the school teacher's house by horse and buggy. And guess what? There was not a student to be seen anywhere - contrary to his earlier claim to teach from 4 until 8 every evening. He then let us take pictures of the house and his family and just generally tried to make us feel grateful to him. (I think you can see where this is going by now!) Anyway, just as we were about to leave, he tells us "Oh, by the way, if you'd like, you can make a donation to the school - you know, for school books and such. No pressure or anything, just help out however you like." At this point he presented us with what looked like a bill! It was a breakdown of number of school books needed, cost of each book, and a total amount of recommended donation. Aha! So that was the reason behind his whole charade!
It is human nature to want to pay back someone's hospitality. And it is also human nature to want to help out people who are less fortunate than ourselves
04-Mt. Popa from even closer
. But it goes totally against my nature to allow someone to take advantage of me. So I had no trouble whatsoever excusing myself and thanking him for his hospitality before leaving without making a donation. In hindsight some things seemed clear to me. For example, the students who were there earlier in the day seemed a bit edgy - as if they were being kept away from their usual playtime. I suppose that whole event was staged and that the teacher paid the kids a pittance to come and sit and pretend to study for a few minutes while the foreign devil looked on. They didn't expect that I would go away and then come back at some unknown time later in the evening, so he couldn't keep the kids there forever. Instead, he made up some excuse about them all being out celebrating at the town fair (which happened to be taking place at that time.) In any case, my feeling was that we had been invited to his place under false pretenses in the first place, so how could we trust this guy to use any money we might give him to actually buy school books for these poor students. And even so, at best he was asking me to give money to his students so that they could buy books to use for the private lessons for which HE was charging them. It seemed like everyone would be benefiting from this situation but ME!Anyway, the Japanese/America girl Jenna and I escaped the teacher without any harm being done (except to make us more wary of such offers in the future).
