Bike-Skiing

Some people find freedom through meditation, others through medication. One person defines it as a day spent skiing, another person as a day spent reading.

As of yesterday, I’m gonna say that perfect freedom comes from riding a brand-new bicycle across Myanmar hills on a cloudless January day.

It was meditative on the flats, then better than drugs when we came to the hills. I was in a groove, like you can get while you’re on the ski slopes, or in the midst of a great novel.

My mountain bike was a Christmas present to myself. It’s fast becoming a trusted friend, as we get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

The highlights of the ride built slowly. A group of us turned off the pavement and onto a single track, about an hour outside Yangon. Our beginning pace was pretty tame—one woman struggled on the hills. I had ridden this loop before, so I hung back to offer some moral support.

Cycling unhurriedly through shady orchards and along grassy ridges was an antidote to a week spent in the city. The sun obliged, never baking nor blinding us. Sometimes we got down off our trusty steeds to avoid crashing on the tricky bits.

Finally we reached a spot near the end where everybody usually stops for a rest. The struggler by then was pretty through with the whole biking concept. She kept smiling for her husband, but you could tell she wished she was home with a book.

Somebody suggested that a few of us might want to go back over the rugged section rather than finish the circuit along the paved road. I volunteered before you could say “mountain bike heaven.” Soon I was at the front of the pack, bouncing through moguls and spinning around blind corners.

It was like driving the family car for the first time as a 16-year-old. I became the poster child for that old bicycling maxim, “If everything is under control, you’re obviously not going fast enough.” You couldn’t wipe the wild grin off my face.

Somehow I never made a wrong turn, even though the trail didn’t always look familiar in reverse. Everything is colored brown at this time of year in central Myanmar. The country hasn’t seen rain for several weeks. Dust clouds kicked up behind me like snow sprays.

I swear the new bike has turbochargers. The others who chose to retrace never drew near. They looked at me like, “How did you know which way to go?” I just knew. Impossible to lose my way. Nothin’ left to lose.

Powerless

Roughly once a day here in Yangon, the power goes out for a short time, often less than 10 minutes. I’m not complaining—only a quarter of the country’s population has any electricity at all.

Many unfortunate consequences flow from these frequent outages. Fires break out in homes when people walk away from electric stoves and then forget to check them later. Other appliances suffer from dips and surges in the power supply. Air conditioners and refrigerators, for example, must be connected to separate compressor protectors to prevent them from “early retirement.”

Maybe weirdest of all are the human-powered Ferris wheels. After the customers are all seated, daredevils climb to the tops of the wheels and swing there to start the momentum. Then they jump before they hit the ground, only to grab on again to repeat the cycle.

Calendar Confusion

Over the past couple weeks, in the markets and at busy intersections, vendors have been walking up and down hawking new calendars. Fair enough. It’s time to replace the old ones hanging in kitchens and tea shops all over the country. But wait…

These calendars are laid out sideways. The Sundays boxes travel across the top of the sheet, not down the left edge like I’m used to. The next row contains all the Monday dates, and so on until the bottom row—only Saturdays. To make it look correct to my eye, you would have to rotate it to the right 90 degrees, and then flip it horizontally.

I bought one. Slowly I’m adjusting. When in Rome, and all that. But now that I have a chance to study it every day, new weirdness is emerging. For instance, in Burmese, the year is written as 1375, not 2014.

At first I thought, I get it—they’re using a starting point other than the Common Era’s, just like next door in Thailand, where this year is 2557. Thais say it was that many years ago that Buddha reached enlightenment, and thereby got released from the cycles of birth and death.

But then I Googled a little bit and my brain started to spin. I was coming across concepts like the Indian Chulasakarat System from the 7th Century, and lunisolar years, and Metonic cycles. I mean, what the hell is an intercalary month, anyway? And why would you want to add one now and then to make the year 384 days long?

I gave up pretty quickly trying to understand all this stuff. Now I just tilt my head whenever I look at the Burmese calendar, and I figure out what day it is quickly and easily. Somebody else can worry about when the Sun is scheduled to enter Aries. If you feel like messing around with all the stuff, be my guest. Here’s a link.