BURMA

This story first appeared in 'Tracks' magazine in 2004
CLICK HERE for photographs from this trip.

AUTHORS NOTE
: As soon as we started to think about a surf trip to Burma we knew that we would be leaving ourselves and any magazines that published this story open to criticism. Burma, or Myanmar, as their military government have re-christened it continues to rot under the repression of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which is today maybe the most brutal dictatorship in the world. In-prisoned Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and leader of the outlawed National League for Democracy (NLD) and winner of Burma’s nullified 1990 elections, Aung San Suu Kyi, has successfully called for international sanctions to be imposed on the country and has requested that tourists keep away from Burma. She has done this in the hope that international pressure can help to peacefully change the situation in her country, which has suffered under its military dictatorship for more than forty years. And in response to her requests most western governments advise their nationals not to visit Burma and for businesses not to invest in the country. So far though this policy has resulted in little real change and various members of the NLD have openly criticised her highly moral standpoint as being counter productive in that it effectively helps to keep the Burmese people destitute and therefore easier for the military to control.

We thought long and hard about the rights and wrongs of heading off on this surf trip and in the end decided that by telling this story we may be able to draw attention to the plight of the Burmese people to those of you who were unaware of the situation. We would like to state that neither the author/photographer, the surfers, the supporting companies nor this magazine encourage you to visit Burma. This story is written entirely as a vision of what could be.

A NOTE ON NAMES: It’s an unfortunate state of affairs when the names of all the people, bar one, in the following story have had to be changed or omitted, but this is the reality of modern Burma and it is essential that I do this in order to prevent serious problems for some of the people that we encountered. I have also been requested by the surfers that accompanied me to refrain from mentioning their names. It’s understandable that they should feel this way as by just writing this story I could be imprisoned by the Burmese authorities for up to twenty years. On the other hand however I have not changed the name of either the country or the towns and cities. In 1989 the military Junta changed the country’s name from Burma to Myanmar, the capital from Rangoon to Yangon and in 1997, on the advice of an American public relations firm, it’s own name to the SPDC. Though the UN and Amnesty International amongst others use the new official names, the NLD and many other groups continue to use the old names and I have chosen to do likewise.

These are dark times, there is a near constant state of war, repression has reached new levels, torture is common place, forced labour an everyday occurrence and any thought that is not the thought of The Party is met with prison or execution. The year is nineteen eighty-eight and you, like thousands of your fellow villagers, have become conscious. You know that a wrong is being committed and at last the day has come when you are doing something. A forced relocation has moved you off your ancestral farmlands and the rape and murder of your fourteen year old
daughter at the hands of The Party’s secret police has jerked you awake. You are conscious and now you and your countrymen are rebelling with a peaceful protest calling for change and democracy. The mood is jovial and there is a carnival atmosphere, as from all directions a rising tide of humanity, chanting and singing, heads for the city hall. The student leaders of the protest make stirring speeches about the new dawn that is coming, that the day of the second independence has arrived. And all the time the eyes of The Party are watching, taking notes, recording names and then finally giving the order.

The massacre began after dark, the tanks and the guns came from all sides, cutting a path straight through the soul of the crowd. The soldiers calmly stood up and began gunning people down as they tried to flee in terror. Everybody fell, there was no discrimination, men and women were hacked down with bayonets, Monks and children shot in the back as they ran. And in a pool of blood you lay dying with five thousand others, shot down by the Party who it is not enough too simply obey. You must love them. You must love Big Brother with all your heart, otherwise you will find yourself writhing in pain on the floor of a room without windows, beaten and broken, and only then will you learn to love Big Brother.

The days that followed the massacre were no easier for those who survived. The Party sent in the secret police with detailed lists and photographs of many of the protestors. Everybody knew someone who disappeared, taken in the blackness of night and tortured and interrogated. Fear became law and confessions of betrayal against the national cause were forced out of the innocent. But worse were the condemnations you had to make of those close to you, mothers disowned their children and husbands denounced their wives. To stay alive you had to abandon those whom you loved. You had no choice.

Throughout much of Asia the snake is a divine creature that symbolises the endless cycle of reincarnation as well as all passions and desires. And so when, towards the end of my Burmese trip, the snake bit me my first reaction was one of surprise, quickly followed by thoughts of what I might be reincarnated as. And this is how, an hour later, I find myself lying in a room without windows on a wooden slat bed issued by the Burmese prison department in a hospital where cockroaches are part of the furniture. I’m in a state of shock and probably a little confused, the conditions around me and the fact that some of the other occupants are writhing in pain, beaten and broken, makes me think that maybe I’ve finally been imprisoned by a military suspicious of my snooping about hidden corners of their country with cameras. It’s only the care and attention I’m receiving from the nurses that’s reassuring me that I’m not just another victim of The Party and that in the morning I will be one of the few in Burma who will be free, free to continue my search for waves. Or, if I chose I could run away, I could leave this place with all its horrors behind me. The Burmese people though can never run away, they can never escape from the watching eyes. And the bright red signs stating the slogans of The Party that are to be found across the land constantly remind the Burmese that smiling is just not enough.

‘Only when there is discipline will there be progress’

‘Anyone who is riotous, destructive and unruly is our enemy’

Or the painfully sad, ‘We shall never betray the national cause’.

However it’s the ‘Peoples Desire’ that is to be found heading most government documents that is probably the scariest. It reads.

‘Oppose those relying on external elements, acting as stooges and holding negative views.

‘Oppose those trying to jeopardise the stability of the state and progress of the nation.

‘Oppose foreign nations interfering in internal affairs of state.

‘Crush all internal and external destructive elements as the common enemy'.

Unfortunately for Burma the common enemy of The Party is the average Burmese person. The inner sanctum of The Party will purposefully keep the farmers, fishermen and factory workers poor and uneducated, deprive
them of their rights, suppress their desires and allow no freedom. Any dissent is met with death. Big Brother is fighting a war. It is a war on the poor, his own flesh and blood poor, but he is happy to do this to keep himself in power. War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength. In Burma the words of George Orwell are chillingly real.

When I’d first arrived in Burma I genuinely had no idea what to expect of the country. Would there be soldiers openly beating the suppressed masses as they cried out for change? Would I have secret police following my every move? Well no, of course it was nothing like that. All I saw were smiles and friendship, but surely the events of eighty-eight and the continuing repression, disappearances and torture must leave a scar? Surely the smiles were only skin-deep?

And the surf? Well, I had no idea what to expect of that either. Trips to India and Pakistan had taught me that the most unlikely of places can dish up waves worth travelling for and of course I’d seen the stories of the Andaman’s which sit just to the south of Burma. This knowledge led me to be confident that we’d find something, but on the other hand a conversation with a French surfer, who’d travelled by boat around Southeast Asia, told us that there were no waves to be found in Burma. Fortunately we forgot to listen to his advice. Studies of the weather charts showed ample monsoon generated swell hitting the coast between May and September, but it seemed to be accompanied by strong onshore winds. Whilst for the remainder of the year swells would be perfectly lined up but small and inconsistent. In the end we chose to go in September, just as the monsoon ended, because I figured that the rains would be stopping and the winds switching offshore, but the swells would still be active. And on the whole this is what we discovered, but Burma is a vast country with enormous possibilities and even knowing where to begin searching was daunting. And there was one aspect of the trip that I’d never even considered.

If adventure is based on the difficulty of movement then Burma came in high on the adventure stakes. Our maps showed minor roads coursing along the coastline to tempting looking bays and headlands and we thought that the travel conditions would be easy. The reality down on the ground though was very different and travelling through Burma turned into one of the most exciting adventures I’ve ever been involved with. Most of the roads on the maps simply failed to exist and where there was a road it was usually little more than a swampy track into which we frequently sunk into the mud. Our movement through the forest was for much of the time at no more than walking pace and there were many occasions when we’d be forced to push the van out of potholes and glutinous boggy ground. Sometimes we’d lurch along, full of expectations of the potential point break we were heading too and instead come to a blocking wall of heavy jungle trees and dangling vines and creepers. And then there were the countless earthy brown rivers, the real lifelines of the country, over the bigger and wider rivers chugged flotillas of cargo boats and canoes. These ones we’d cross on one of the multi layered and multi coloured ferries that plied gently over the waters. The smaller ones though were traversed on rickety wooden bridges, mostly these were no obstacle, but
occasionally we’d come to a bridge that had been damaged or even swept away by monsoon storms and heavy floodwaters. At these times the nearby villagers would construct temporary repairs or even whole bridges out of tree trunks, but it could mean a long wait whilst the rebuilding took place. These tiring travel conditions did have the advantage of making us hungrier for waves, sometimes we’d arrive at a beach with the sort of tiny, slow surf that on a normal surf trip would be ignored, but after a day stuck in an uncomfortable van we’d jump straight in the water. The villagers who lived around the waves that we rode would tell us that we were the first surfers that they’d ever seen and we’d surf with an enthralled audience who showed their appreciation for our many wipeouts with laughter and hoots.

Almost everything about this trip was based on guess work and luck, we couldn’t even access a swell forecast because to do so meant using a telephone and as Stalin once said “I can think of no better instrument of counter revolution than the telephone”. It’s advice that The Party have taken to heart and I don’t think that I have ever been to a country that has been as successful as Burma in hindering communications. To use the Internet involved completing forms stating your name, occupation, place of birth and residence and what you wanted to use the Internet for. When
finally I did get online I discovered that every website I wanted to check had been blocked by the censors of Big Brother. It’s forbidden to bring mobile phones into the country, as it would be too easy to communicate through text messages to the world beyond. Whilst to use a normal telephone is little easier and involved tedious questions and hour long waits to get a line on a wind up phone. But then nothing is efficient in Burma, except The Party, and they have the power to twist reality into whatever shape they choose. The country today is becoming little more than a colony of China, yet prior to the massacre of eighty-eight and Beijing’s own massacre the following year, the two countries had traditionally been enemies. After these terrible events the governments of the two countries became closely intertwined and Big Brothers Ministry of Truth ordered the history books to be rewritten so as to overlook the numerous wars that had taken place between Burma and China.

Despite the difficulties of communication we did find waves, maybe not quite the long point breaks that we were hoping for, but we did find waves worth travelling for. Mellow sandbars guarded by overgrown and decaying statues of The Buddha and fast, barrelling, turquoise blue shore breaks that had a quality similar to that of Hossegor. We also got to see how two very different types of swells affect this coast, the small, super clean long distance ground swells churned up somewhere deep in the Southern Ocean and the bigger, close up and fast moving swells generated by late season monsoon depressions sitting just a short way
out into the Bay of Bengal. Both types had there plus and minus points and both opened up completely different windows of opportunity. However, maybe the greatest potential was kept out of bounds to us. The problem with Big Brother is that he’s a little bit paranoid, its understandable really, I mean if you were the ever-watching eyes behind one of the most bloodthirsty dictatorships in the world you’d probably be a little uneasy about letting inquisitive foreigners traipse freely about your country. And so what does he do to prevent you seeing something that may cause him international embarrassment? Simple, he controls your every movement, listens to your every word and dictates where you can and cannot go. In fact on the entire surf blessed west coast there were actually only five towns in which we could legally stay. Sure, if we had chosen to stay elsewhere nothing was likely to happen to us, but the Burmese who helped us might have to pay the price. And of the places where we were allowed to sleep the majority of them were purpose built resorts constructed by Chinese and western ‘businessmen’ using black money generated by The Party in the jade mines and opium fields of northern Burma. It’s a nice little deal they’ve sorted out, dazed villagers kidnapped by The Party are made to dig the jade out of the ground, they’re then paid for their time with young girls forced to give up their bodies and a shot of heroin injected with shared needles. The heroin obviously comes from the opium fields, which in turn is grown by Big Brother. Somewhat predictably the golden handshake at the end of it all is AIDS. And if
rumours are to be believed then up to a million people are being forced to mine the stone that is now, gram for gram, worth more than both gold and diamonds. Meanwhile, the villagers back on the coast don’t have things much better. If The Party decides to build a resort on your beach then you have little choice but to pack up and leave. However, before you go you can knock down your hut and help to build a nice shiny new hotel that some western or Chinese investor has been paid in jade money to construct. One beach resort we went too had only been open to tourists for a little over a year and yet I counted somewhere in the region of thirty high quality hotels serving, well, no one but us. So, you may think that the best way for a surfer to both get around and avoid spending money on such dubious accommodation is to travel by boat. And that was exactly our thought, unfortunately though it was not the thought of Big Brother. We set our sights on a couple of islands sat a short way offshore and whose positioning and deeper surrounding waters almost certainly guaranteed them gathering up more swell than the mainland. Full of hope of what we might find and optimism that with some pleading we’d be granted permission to head out to the islands we set off on a long, hot and bumpy drive to the regional capital closest to the archipelago, from where we planned to find a ferry and some sympathetic officials. On arrival we
went to a teashop to wait for our meeting with the military and as we waited we fell into conversation with a couple of guys who were from one of the islands that we hoped to visit. I dug an old copy of a surf mag out of my bag and asked them if they’d ever seen waves similar to those depicted in the magazine. They slowly flicked through the pages, pausing at times to discuss what they were looking at, but they seemed unconvinced by any of it. Then they turned to a page with a photo of an unnamed but damn good ozzy point break on it and both looked at it and said, “Waves like that”. Our admiralty charts had also indicated a potential right point on the same island and their certainty was the confirmation that we needed. Unfortunately though Big Brother wasn’t so convinced and after making us wait for hours the verdict was returned, “No permission. It’s too dangerous for foreigners”. No negotiations possible, no going to another department, no paying off a corrupt official, no explanations to the dangers that we faced. The Party had spoken and The Party had said no. And that was it; the road for us had come to an end. All that lay ahead was a room without windows and the bite of a snake. Who knows what is to be found on the offshore islands? Maybe there’s nothing worth travelling for, maybe there’s a perfect wave. I’ll go with the latter because in a land with mountains made of jade, snakes that promise all desires and a government that can rewrite history and twist reality. Then a perfect wave in a place that you’ve never thought of looking is more than enough to make me smile.

There is much terror to be found in Burma but there is much beauty as well and it is this that is so sad. The country glows in greens and blues and everywhere you look are the golden poems of Buddhist Stupas. It is a country that contains immense richness with its mountains of jade and fields of oil and opium. It is a country that with its offshore islands and unknown points could one day be a surf explorers dream. And it is a
country of smiles, but as I found out on my final day they’re only skin-deep smiles of irony. Drinking coffee in a Rangoon bar I fell into conversation with Bogyoke Than, one of those elderly gentlemen whom you sometimes encounter in the old colonies of Britain’s Empire, men who seem more British than Victoria herself. Together we went for a stroll around the markets of the city and whilst we walked I told him how friendly I found the Burmese people. His reply, “We always smile on the outside, but on the inside we’re crying” and then he proceeded to launch into a tirade over The Party, he was the first Burmese person I’d met who’d been brave enough to openly speak out about the “Evil snake” that watches over his country. And the snake is an appropriate comparison, because the snake doesn’t just symbolise reincarnation and all passions and desires. It also symbolises all evil and Burma has been bitten by the most dangerous of snakes.

Currently the country is like me, bitten by a snake and lying in a room without windows, but there is a cure to this bite, Ann San Suu Kyi, wherever The Party have hidden her, could be the snake that symbolises Burma’s reincarnation. Maybe though it’s just wishful thinking, because if I have gained anything from this trip it was that somewhere in the story of Burma there is a vision of a future. It is a vision of what could be. And it is a vision of a nightmare world without choices, because Burma might be a world of the future. It’s easy to see, just reread this story, move it to a global scale, change the names of the players and think of The Project for a New American Century and the stated desires of an unchallengeable, military imposed US run world. Today Big Brother is watching over only Burma and we could get on a plane and leave. This is because I’m told we are free, I’m told we have a choice and as yet we
don’t smile. The Burmese, they never forget to smile, the global war on the poor continues, but they don’t think about it, they just smile and pretend to believe the lies. So just take a leaf out of their book and do as the Burmese do, shut your eyes to it, block your ears from it and say nothing. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Never stop smiling - it’s the best way to hide the tears. And remember to be a good citizen, believe the lies and forget that you ever had a choice. War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength. Big Brother is watching you and it is not enough to simply obey him, you must love him. Love Big George. Love America.

THANKS

We would like to thank the following companies for supporting a surf trip to such a controversial destination.

Oceansurf Publications www.oceansurfpublications.co.uk

Saltrock Surfwear www.saltrock.com

C-Skins Wetsuits http://www.c-skins.co.uk

Rhino Boardbags www.oaklandimports.com

In addition we’d like to thank this magazine for allowing us the opportunity to tell this story and, of course, we’d like to thank the Burmese people for their kindness and their smiles. Never loose your faith that the day will come when you can say the name of The Lady out loud.

For more information please see the following.

www.burmacampaign.org.uk

www.amnesty.org