Oh dear, poor Myanmar. That was a massive earthquake for Mandalay on Friday, 7.7 - our 2011 one in Christchurch was 6.2 and that was a forever spike in the city’s history. As if Myanmar hasn’t had it bad enough, with a civil war that’s been rumbling on for so, so long.
When, in 1980, we dipped into Burma as it then was, we were told as we approached that we shouldn’t take photos from our Thai Airways plane, because of military restrictions. We had so many forms to fill in that we hardly had time to look out of the windows anyway, recording all our financial assets on top of the usual immigration stuff; and then, once landed, had to write out duplicates before our bags were searched. Then we were driven into Rangoon/Yangon in a Vauxhall Velox so old that rust fell onto us with every bump we went over. And there were plenty of them. The city looked quite run-down, but had clearly been grand in its colonial days, and it was still colourful and lively, and the people were friendly.
The next day we were taken to a workshop where small girls were hunched over looms, weaving silk thread into elaborate cloth, another where young boys hacked at blocks of wood held between their feet, bought some mosquito coils at a market that turned out to be a major production, and even watched a wedding in the hotel, very colourful and traditional, where the guests wandered in and out as the priest droned on. I had several offers during the day to buy my very ordinary watch. And then we headed off through the warm dark to the Irrawaddy River for the next stage of our Burma experience.
All that was, gasp, 45 years ago now, so presumably the city grew, getting taller and more crowded, full of buildings that are now, at best, full of cracks and, at worst, reduced to rubble. The death toll is currently 1700 but will inevitably rise. It’s just awful. Poor, poor Mandalay. (But not forgetting Bangkok either - where, apparently, most of the workers in the under-construction skyscraper that collapsed were actually Burmese. Sigh.)