Diesel and day-old jasmine garlands
The ride to Mingaladon Airport is probably one of the main benchmarks used in Burmese econometrics. Or rather, the length of it, as more and more Japanese second-hand cars cram Yangon’s throughfares: an endless, slower and slower procession of Proboxes and Wishes, like a resting crocodile with a million dusty white scales.
You had seen the taxi on Bogalay Zay, after visiting your friend’s new gallery. By 2012 standards, you were generously early — the empty roundabouts with the forlorn, garlishly gilded ice-cream cones playing at ‘monument’ — and by 2015 standards, you were in a mini-rush, maybe.
But it’s 2017 now, the second (or is it sixth?) year of the new Myanmar, and the roads are increasingly hemmed with plain condo racks, full of Wishes, BRT buses and pick-ups ferrying workers left to right. The occasional Crown Royal, Alphard or Benz with its blinded windows hint at the equality inherent to traffic jams: the exasperated businessman on the make rubbing shoulders with the street vendors along Kabar Aye Pagoda Road, a very egalitarian form of suffering.
But this shouldn’t be happening, not at two in the afternoon.
And then, your flight.
You heard the new Sule Square building downtown has a helipad.
With each passing minute — either standing still for Yangon’s interminable red lights or for cars merging from all directions — a helipad strikes you as less of an extravaganza.
When selecting a Yangon taxi, you learn to make snap decisions.
How many extra fares is the driver carrying — how dodgy are they?
Is there air-con and is he likely to turn it on? Does he look like the type to recklessly overcharge, or like a recreational speed user? This takes some measure of skill.
Your driver today is a Burmese Indian in his mid-40s, a man of few words. He notices you tensing up with each missed traffic light (each domino falling in the chain of events that will very likely make you miss your flight…).
But there’s nothing to be done.
Or is there?
You start feeling better after he buys you:
- A huge bottle of water
- Three cigarettes
- A cold Myanmar Beer he got a jasmine vendor to fetch for you
- A complimentary calendar
He then points out the Kabar Aye Pagoda complex. You’ve never visited, but read up on it: the Buddhist Synod it was built for, the extravagant 1950s architecture, a glimpse of a confident pre-coup Yangon on its last legs (a long weekend of teashop talk and glamorous cars). And so you step out of the taxi, leaving everything behind in the car: a strangely exhilarating feeling, something you’re explicitly told not to do — almost taboo, you sensible boy, you.
It’s a nice stroll through the compound, around the main shrine with a Buddha tooth relic. Inside, the actually rather tasteful mosaics shimmer in the fume-choked afternoon, reminding you of the pool you learned to swim in, of a half-remembered modernist parish library.
The horns restart outside, suggesting movement. You walk back to the still stationary taxi. Clearly there is some deeper understanding between the driver and you, or perhaps between you both and the road, as traffic falls away where the road forks off to Insein.
At the airport’s brand new terminal’s brand new check-in counter, the smell of new car, long-chain monomers, encapsulates you, muffling the duty manager’s admonishing — you mouth traffic silently, quite a lame excuse. She checks you in, it’s really something these days, those new buses are not helping.
You agree that it really is something. Later, in the lounge, you close your eyes to rediscover the sight of the pagoda’s tilework, the smell of diesel and day-old jasmine garlands the merest hint on your Yangon sweater.
