Pyin Oo Lwin

Pyin Oo Lwin was established as a hill resort by the British in 1896, to provide a much needed escape from the sun.  Not that it isn't still sunny here, but the higher altitude of the place offers some respite, so it is cooler than other places.  There are still a number of old colonial buildings around, though they are a little dilapidated now, and there are still some old boarding schools that the British would send their children to, and which are now used as military academies.

We were bush camping in an area used for the annual hot air balloon festival, and as we arrived into town we were greeted by the tourist police.  They wanted a photo.  So we all piled off the truck for them to take their snap and then carried on to the camp area.

But we weren't alone.  As well as our usual escort, we had now picked up a ten man police escort, which was as going to be guarding us during our night of camping.

 I'm not sure whether the purpose was to keep an eye on us or, as they said, for our protection.  During our time in Myanmar the only thing we encountered from people was curiosity and friendliness, so it seems doubtful that we were in any danger, and the only likely risk would have been that we attracted a crowd of onlookers.  As it was, we had our escorts taking photos of us putting up our tents!

The site itself was nothing special, but it did have a great view across the hill to the monastery. I did poke my head out of the tent around sunrise, but decided it wasn't worth getting up for and got a bit more sleep instead.

In the morning, we headed into town to take a wander around the market.  As well as an incredible array of lovely fresh fruit and vegetables, and the slightly dodgy looking meat and dried fish, there were some interesting looking things that we weren't sure what they were.

We took a fairly confident guess at the crystallised fruits and decided to check this out and buy some melon.  It was very good.

We were less confident about a slimy looking ball of brown stuff - which turned out to be bean curd - and we were intrigued about some beautifully arranged leaves.


We asked Myo about these and it turns out they are the Betel leaf, which is used to make the Betel nut packages that many of the men and some of the women chew.

He took us along to a stall to show us how the Betel nut is prepared.  They take a Betel leaf and spread on some lime wash (a supposedly edible version of what they use to lime wash houses), then add bits of Betel nut, tobacco leaf, tobacco juice and, if you wish, some bits of coconut.

Then the leaf is folded into a little package, which you chew on, spitting out the bright red juices, which you can see staining the pavements across the country.  Later in the trip Duncan tried the Betel nut; he wasn't impressed.

After the market, we passed by the old Purcell Tower that has mixed reports of when and why it was made, but the most likely seems to be that the clock was made in the UK in 1934 by Gillette and Johnson, to commemorate King George V's silver jubilee which was in 1935. It reportedly has the same chimes as Big Ben, but we weren't there long enough to hear whether that is true.

We decided not to take up the option of the little horse and carts, as the ponies didn't look that well cared for, so we didn't want to encourage their use.  Instead we just took the truck to our next stop of the National Kandawgyi Gardens.

Because of its climate, Pyin Oo Lwin is a good place for growing fruits and flowers, so the gardens here are something they take pride in.  The British influence is evident in the design, if not in the types of planting.

As well as seeing some toucans and peacocks, many beautiful orchids and a good lookout view across the city, we also discovered an animal that none of us had ever heard of before, and that sadly is heading towards extinction.

It is called a takin, and it looks a bit like a cross between a donkey and a small cow. They were quite friendly, especially when the keeper gave us a bunch of little bananas to feed to them.

Our final stop was at a Chinese temple.  some of our group had probably had enough of these when they were in China. Before we joined, but it was still a bit of a novelty to us.

One thing we quickly noticed was the difference in the Buddha image.  This wasn't the usual tall and slim Buddha, but instead a short, bald, rotund and immensely happy figure.  In fact he is not Buddha at all, but rather he is Budai.  Budai was a Chinese Chan monk in the 10th century AD. His image is used as a sign of contentment, and it us supposed to be lucky to rub his stomach.

There is a link to Buddha though, as some believe he may have been an just incarnation of Maitreya, who is a future Buddha yet to arrive.

One fun aspect to this temple, for those of you who remember the old programme Monkey, which had Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy protecting a monk on his journeys, was that they had sculptures of these characters. Obviously they were representing the original folklore, rather than the TV programme, but that isn't important.

From there we went for some late lunch at a restaurant that looked entirely too fancy for a truckload of 'still unwashed from a night of camping' scruffs like us, and then set off for Mandalay.

"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

The other significance of the 4 February in Montgomery was that it would have been Rosa Parks' 100th birthday, which made it an interesting day to be visiting the Civil Rights places here.

But first we need to set the scene of the poor state of civil rights in 1955 Montgomery, Alabama.  As I mentioned in the Martin Luther King posting, segregation was still very much a part of the life of an African American back then.  Workplaces, schools, shops, restaurants, bars, toilets - everything was segregated.

Black people were banned entirely from some places that white people went, and where they were allowed, they were segregated to particular areas, which you could be certain would be the most undesirable section.  People even had to use different water fountains.

And then there was segregation on the buses.  In 1955 the US Supreme Court and then the Interstate Commerce Commission had recently ruled bus segregation as unconstitutional and banned it on all buses travelling between states. But this did not apply to buses  that were purely within a state, as the US system of legislation allows individual States to set their own rules.

In Montgomery this meant that Jim Crow (a commonly used perjorative term for negro generally used to describe segregation legislation) rules of bus segregation were applied.  These stated that the front of the bus was reserved for white people, and blacks were never allowed to sit there.

Black people, who were by far the majority of the bus users, were expected to fill up the bus from the back and if only seats at the front remained, they had to stand rather than sit in them.  But if a white person got on, and there was no seat available at the front, then those people in the first black row were required to give up their seats and stand.  Generally black people followed the rules, but occasionally someone would refuse, and they would be arrested.

On 1 December 1955, a black woman named Rosa Parks got the bus home from her job as a seamstress, and was sat in the front row of the black section.  The bus was full,  so when some white people got on, the black people in the front were told to move. They all moved except for Rosa, who refused.  When she continued to refuse, the driver, James Blake, called the police and she was arrested.

Now when this story is told, it is often assumed that Rosa Parks was just a normal woman, tired after the end of her work day, who just decided there and then that she would not stand when asked.  But that is not the case.  In fact, when you look at the facts, it seems quite likely that this was a planned protest.

In 1955 Rosa Parks was 42 years old and, alongside her normal job, she worked as a secretary in the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and investigated cases for them.  She had recently been on a course for civil rights activists, learning about non violent protest.

And this was not her first brush with the driver, Blake.  Some drivers would make a black passenger pay at the front, then make them get off and reboard at the back door.  This had happened to  Rosa and the driver, Blake, had then driven off before she could reboard.  She had vowed never to use a bus that he was driving again.  And yet on this day she did.

 

In her own words, she said of the incident "The only tired I was, was tired of giving in." So when you look at all of this together, it does rather seem that Rosa, probably acting as part of a plan by  Edgar Nixon, President of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, was looking for an opportunity to make her protest.  Mr Nixon wanted a test case to challenge the segregation legislation, and he needed a person of good character to be that test case.

Of course the fact that this may have been a planned protest does not make it any less valid.  It was not a manufactured situation - she was arrested for failing to comply with segregation laws.

This wasn't the first time someone had been arrested, but this time, the black community decided to do something about it.  Jo Ann Robinson, a member of the Women's Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery, put out a leaflet to all of the black community calling for them to boycott the buses on Monday 5 December, when Rosa's case was to be heard.

 

The trial went ahead, and she was found guilty, but appealed.  In the meantime, black people stayed off the buses.  And not just for the one day.  They cycled, hitchhiked, organised car pools, organised a car service for the price of the bus fare, used mules, walked long distances, and some were given lifts by their white employers, but they did not take the bus.

The newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), led by the new Baptist minister in town, one Dr Martin Luther King Junior, was demanding a compromise for the buses.  It did not ask for its preferred solution of a complete end to segregation, but instead sought a simple division of the bus, so that whilst a black person may still have to stand if their section was full, even if the white section was empty, they would never again have to give up their seat for a white person.

The state and bus company fought back of course.  They tried to make car pooling impossible by getting insurance companies to refuse to insure the vehicles, but the black community found a company prepared to help them - Lloyds of London.  They tried to ban the car service as an illegal taxi service, resulting in some people, including Martin Luther King being arrested and spending time in jail.  It just gave the boycott more attention.

And alongside all of this, the legal action continued.  They did not in fact pursue Rosa Parks' case, as that would have been through the Alabama courts and so doomed to failure.  Instead, they took out a civil case in the federal courts, where they could hope for a better outcome.

The Browder v Gayle case was decided on 13 June 1956, when the federal courts ruled the segregation on Alabama buses as unconstitutional.  The State appealed, but on 17 December 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the decision, and three days later, ordered the desegregation of Alabama buses.

The boycott ended on the same day.