Nomad Codes

hard years in prison after the massive democracy demonstrations of the 1980s, but seemed more sad than bitter. He was good folk.
    On the way out of Yangon, we drove by Shwedagon Paya, the holiest pagoda in Burma, an enormous golden Hershey’s kiss topped with a tinkling finial peppered with sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. As we passed the paya, the Driver lifted both his hands off the wheel and offered a short and somewhat alarming bow. A creeping feeling of uncanniness grew inside me. Was it the billboard advertisements for Dagon beer, an alarm for any Lovecraft fan? Or could it be the garish yellow pancake makeup, derived from the thanaka tree, that Burmese women applied in sometimes fantastic designs across their faces? Then I realized that what had unnerved me was the total absence of multinational branding, as if the crumbling city lay in some parallel dimension not yet colonized by Coke and VISA and McDonalds.
    We headed north towards Mandalay through leagues of rice patties, stopping for the night at Mother’s House hotel, where we watched Burmese music videos, including a delirious homage to a tractor factory that featured pom-pom wielding cheerleaders. Go team! The next day we turned east, climbing up terrible roads into the mountains that cradle Inle Lake, probably the most popular destination for domestic tourists in Burma. Before arriving at the lake, we stayed a night in Kalaw, a lush mountain town of pine trees and bougainvillea gardens and military training facilities. After disturbing dreams, I awoke early in the morning and took a walk. The glass shards that covered the bell-shaped pagoda in the center of town sparkled in the rising sun, its square base decorated with four elven-eared devas that represented the heavenly strain of nats. Across the street, nestled in the trunk of a sprawling banyan tree, a coarse and far more earthly nat stood within a locked shrine.

    As I turned from this rough idol and made for the mosque on the south side of town, I was greeted by two grizzled characters lounging against a wall, the sort of folks we called “tuddies” in high school. One guy was large and fleshy, and made a stark contrast to his scrawny buddy, who sported an Islamic beard and a long thin early riser cheroot. The mouths of both men were a crimson holocaust of betel rot. The big fellow was drunk, and was dead set on letting me know, in no uncertain terms, just how fucked up his country was. “We are under the boot, like Germany, like Gestapo,” he growled as his mute and grinning friend enthusiastically bobbed his head in agreement. “They have taken away our human rights. You should tell the BBC.” So for a moment, dear reader, please pretend that you yourself are the BBC.
    Inle Lake is a long and luxurious body of water nestled between two soft mountain ranges. The area was gorgeous, and, more to the point, relaxed. The traffic in the main town was still largely restricted to bicycles and scooters, and there was enough of a tourist infrastructure to produce a decent Italian restaurant but not so much that it spoiled the scene or the goodwill of the folks who lived and modestly prospered there. The lake itself was peppered with floating gardens, villages on stilts, and fisherman who steer their boats with their feet—an image that serves as the icon of the region, like gondoliers in Venice. One inevitable but worthwhile stop was the Jumping Cat Monastery, a gingerbread teak compound that hovers over the lake atop rust-red stilts and houses felines that smug and vaguely disdainful monks have trained to leap through hoops on command.
    Lion had a good friend in Inle town named Linn, who served as a freelance trekking guide while also waiting tables at the Italian joint. One morning, after we visited a village market overflowing with pickled tea, jackfruit tar, and pornographically flayed fish, Linn took us into the mountains. He sported floppy Converse trainers he had scored from a European client, and a baseball cap that evoked a runty Tiger Woods. Like Lion, his good humor was leavened with a sad and somewhat traumatized air. At one point during our muggy hike through fields of turmeric and tobacco, we passed a young peasant couple and their small grubby child. After they were behind us, Linn stopped, his eyes brimming with tears. He came from a poor village himself, and though he tried to educate the villagers about medicine and birth control, he knew there was little hope of