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Irrawaddy Steamers 2010, Part 3 |
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This is part of our 2010 Burma Crusade. In contrast to Pathein, we like Maungmya. It's a neat, tidy medium sized town perched on one of the side branches of the Irrawaddy, where dirt roads outside are replaced by sealed roads within the town. From the new bridge north of the town, smoking chimneys stretch along both sides of the river, there's money here and much of it is in the hands of Burmese Chinese families. Many of the buildings in town are old and well looked after. When we stayed in Myaungmya in 2005, there was intermittent electricity (of course), we were in a wooden shack which doubled as a brothel, the 'rooms' were cubicles where you didn't dare to cough for fear of disturbing the couple next door and you had to sit outside the room to read or work on the laptop. Yuehong asked how I knew of its other role, I could have answered 'experience', except that the young lady in the room opposite seemed to have an awful lot of male friends come to see her. This time, someone knew we were coming, there was a new guest house with air conditioned rooms available which had opened its doors just 10 days before our arrival. Everything was clean and sparkling, they rarely needed the back up generator and the only thing I spotted which didn't work perfectly was the system which refilled the beers in the fridge by reception. The owner clearly has a 'hit', not with the foreign tourists - we were not surprisingly his first - but with middle class locals who were here by the family load. Of course, it was more expensive than before but in terms of quality much better value, there was even an internet cafe round the corner, but its speed was best described as variable. This is where we stayed (left below) and by way of contrast, the local police station, of a type that George Orwell would no doubt have been familiar:
Burma is still something of a hardship posting, but nothing like before and having an extremely comfortable base more than compensates for being quite a few years older (and feeling it) than when I first started serious gricing here in 1996. We had just a couple of hours available on first arrival and we consciously tried to retrace exactly our steps in 2005. The first mill produced the same Douglas and Grant engine as before (left below, follow the link for the roster shot), as did the third mill with its large Marshall 13" (right below).
In between we had previously found a superb Ruston, Lincoln engine but it was now sidelined and alongside it and working was a huge 16" Robey engine, #43249 on an otherwise illegible re-order plate. It was almost impossible to photograph as it was raised up and there was no good vantage point available in the gloomy light. Outside, rice husks were being shipped out - the original paddy will have come in the same way.
Next door were two mills which had not been there in 2005, both owned by the same Chinese family who had (fortunately) relocated from just north of Labutta in early 2007. They had brought a Marshall engine and its boiler with them, the latter was clearly from a Burma Railways steam locomotive. The engine was stripped down as a rod had broken, in this case it would be driving a generator to power new Chinese machinery. The other mill had a Tangye (#12260) which was under test when we arrived. The young man who was supervising it addressed me in perfect English, he had spent 5 years in London studying for a diploma in computer science while doing a 'Mac Job' simultaneously to pay back his family who had funded the course initially. Later his younger brother who had followed the same route joined us - both had returned home without hesitation when called back by their mother to run the rice mills, their father being a full time doctor. Yuehong and I, given the choice between a fairly comfortable life in Burma and a less certain future staying on in the UK, might have made a different decision. Despite being a Tangye fan, I have to say that their original Marshall looks to be a far better engine.
We had a long day in prospect ahead visiting Labutta, so at this point I called it a day even though we were close to town and there was daylight left. |
