Birthday in Scotland

You can’t win them all, I realize. My latest consultancy, for a consortium of UN branches and NGOs, wasn’t quite as stimulating as my previous job. Luckily, it lasted only half a month. And when it was completed I could look forward to a long-planned bicycle trip with some Thai friends to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.

While riding more than 250 km along the beaches, inlets, and seriously steep mountain tracks of these seven islands on the edge of Europe (closer to Iceland than London), we have enjoyed the distinct culture here a great deal. 

Road signs are written in Scottish Gaelic first, with English translations below. Each night we’ve sampled a different brand of peaty whisky, some so local that they’re not available on the next island to the north. At a community center supper on Scalpay, we ate seafood that was swimming only hours before.

And the aura doesn’t get much better anywhere than the one we took in around sunset tonight at the 5,000-year-old Callanish Standing Stones. Didn’t hurt that it was my birthday.

Let us just say that I haven’t given much thought here to the recommendations for Myanmar disaster risk reduction that I was crafting for the UN just two weeks ago. Perhaps I might have focused a bit more yesterday on my own risk, however. My bike hit a patch of gravel during a downhill and I came off, snapping a collarbone in the process. Ah, well. Can’t win them all.

Investment Opportunity

You want to invest in a growth industry? Consider putting your money into vehicle mirror replacement in Myanmar!

Wider and wider trucks and cars here try to squeeze past each other on roads built for bicycles, more than a century ago. Plus, for long-story reasons,* the vast majority of these vehicles have wrong-side steering wheels. Drivers are trying to guess how much room they have to pass without really being able to see around the car in front of them. Left turns are accidents waiting to happen. Mirrors get snapped off all the time.

In fairness, things could be worse. Not so many years back in Myanmar, most cars had much bigger problems than their mirrors or their steering wheels. Like, say, holes in the floor big enough to see the road through. Or non-existent exhaust systems. By government decree, an entire generation of cars was completely replaced, and at the same time import restrictions were loosened. Now, Myanmar has more and wider cars, most of them gently used models brought in from Japan or Singapore, where traffic travels on the left.

Many of the buses on this country’s roads likewise come from those two countries. To avoid passengers stepping into traffic, new doors are cut into the right side. Interior signs, however, remain written in languages few people here can read. (Some buses still look like they are driving the streets of Japan, sporting announcements that implore passengers to "Preserve the Nature of Mt. Fuji.")

*When cars first came to Burma, drivers used the left-hand side of the road. One night in 1970, apparently on the advice of a fortune teller, the lead general ordered the move to the right, effective immediately.