Burmese Days 20: The Golden Rock of Kyaiktiyo

One of the pilgrimage sites of profound importance to Buddhists is the Kyaiktiyo Pagoda (Burmese: ကျိုက်ထီးရိုးဘုရား) in Mon State of southeast Burma. Most westerners know it as the Golden Rock because the actual pagoda is a small structure perched on the top of a granite boulder. The boulder has been covered with layers of gold leaf over hundreds of years by devotees, and it glows gold in the setting sun. According to legends, the Golden Rock itself is perched on a strand of the Buddha's hair, and indeed, the rock is said to rock very slightly. Considering that Burma is in an earthquake zone, I can't understand why it has not rolled down from its precarious perch.

The lower photograph is half of a stereo frame from Wikimedia Commons, "Kyaitteyo Pagoda, miraculously balanced by a hair of Buddha, on Kelasa hills, Burma", Date: 1900, Author:  Underwood and Underwood (in the public domain).

The rock and the pagoda are at the top of Mt. Kyaiktiyo. To reach the mountain, you drive to the town of Kin Pun Sakhan and board a lorry which has been outfitted with benchseats in the bed. Then the lorry grinds up the Golden Rock Mountain Road in caravan with other lorries. Much of the road is single-lane, so the lorries wait at sidings for other trucks going the other way. Finally, you reach the plateau area and disembark. The first impression is not very auspicious - sheds for the trucks, vendors of food and souvenirs, trash. Hmmm...

The vendors sell some strange food. Centipedes? Fish and cakes of unknown grain(?) or protein(?).

The upper reaches are accessed by steps after you pay an entry fee. Two large lions guard the entrance to Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, and from here on, you must be barefoot, which was difficult for my wife.

Families camp up on the marble platform. We met some adorable children. They look healthy, intelligent, and alert.

Monks discuss and smoke.

Models pose for photographers. This is an interesting place; like the Swedagon in Rangoon, almost a merger of religious site and country fair.

At dawn, families wait for the sun to cast on the Golden Rock.

Pilgrams donate food and lay it out neatly along the railing next to the rock. It makes quite a mess, and I am not sure if the food is for monks or if it is cleaned up and discarded daily.

Looking north, you can see that the entire mountain top is covered with restaurants and guesthouses. I think these are mostly for Burmese visitors, while Western tourists stay in a couple of hotels on the south side. We stayed at the Mountain Top Hotel, which was decent and had rooms with private bath. The setting with view to the east was sublime.

Finally the ride back downhill in the lorry, squashed in with as many people as they can fit. Truly, the Golden Rock is unique, and if you visit Burma, take a side trip to Kyaiktiyo. It takes about 4 or 5 hours to drive from Rangoon, and you need to charter a car and driver and pay for hotel and food. But just do it.

Photographs taken with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera, Nexus 4 phone, and on Tri-X film with a Leica M2 camera.

Burmese Days 19: Rangoon's Pegu Club in Tri-X film

Back during the British colonial era, Rangoon's Pegu Club was the rambling teak clubhouse where soldiers, petty and major bureaucrats, writers, journalists, and soldiers of fortune gathered, gossiped, plotted, acted snooty, despised the locals, and drank (mostly the latter). At its peak, the Pegu was one of the most famous gentlemen's clubs in Asia. This went along with Burma, in its peak, being one of the Empire's richest colonies, with immense resources of oil, timber, minerals, and agricultural products. Rudyard Kipling stayed at the Pegu, listened to the tall tales, and wrote his famous poem Mandalay here. George Orwell and drank and wrote here. In world War II, Japanese officers whored here.

From the Myanmar Times, 

"As Rudyard Kipling recalled after his one visit to Rangoon in 1889 as a young newspaperman, the club was “full of men on their way up or down”. He had time for only two stops in the city: that “beautiful winking wonder” the Shwedagon Pagoda, and the Pegu Club. Both astounded him. “‘Try the mutton,’” he was told. “‘I assure you the Club is the only place in Rangoon where you get mutton.’” But what stood out most was the morbid chatter about “battle, murder, and sudden death”. Its casual nature (“‘that jungle-fighting is the deuce and all. More ice please’”) gave him his first glimpse of the wars colonialism waged beyond its walls."

I wrote about the Pegu Club before (please click the link), but I recently scanned some more Tri-X negatives from my 2014 trip and thought the film views were more appropriate for this crumbling clubhouse. The view above is the grand entry hall (I think). A "Boy" (one of those despised brown natives, of course) would have welcomed a visitor with a cool drink. The stairs were collapsing and I did not risk climbing to the second floor.

There were so many rooms, I really can't tell how some were used decades ago. This room was in the rear of the building. (This is a digital image taken with a Panasonic G3 camera.)

This handsome room on the second floor had a large space without pillars. Was it a smaller ballroom or dining hall?

This room had remnants of dark panelling. Was this a library or smoking room for the men? It certainly would not have been a smoking room for the women.

An inner courtyard must have once been a formal garden. Mildew was attacking the windows, but I was surprised that most were intact. There is much less graffiti or destruction than you would expect. But will the Yangon Heritage Trust ever be able to raise the funds to restore the building and grounds? And how would it be used? A 2014 article in the New York Times outlines some of the challenges in preserving Rangoon's fabulous architectural treasures.

We encountered a young lady from Hong Kong wandering around by herself. She had a film camera and asked how long I had been into film )the 1960s?).

I took Photographs 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 with a Leica M2 camera with a 35mm ƒ/2.0 Summicron lens. This is the 7-element type 4 Summicron from the late 1990s. I braced the camera on ledges or windowsills because of the long exposures. I used Kodak Tri-X 400 film, developed in Kodak HC110 developer, dilution B at 68° F, and then scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i film scanner. The negatives had some lint and spots, which I cleaned with Pixelmator software.

December 2016 update: A corespondent in Europe wrote that a friend had tried to visit the Pegu Club, but it was closed and a guard was posted. I'm glad my wife and I visited in 2014, when it was open.

Burmese Days 18: The Taunggyi Fire Balloon Festival in Tri-X

Taunggyi, a hill town in central Burma at 4,700 ft elevation, is the capital of Shan State. It was a garrison town during the British colonial era and is now a busy commercial and administrative center. But most tourists know it for the famous fire balloon festival, during which towns in the surrounding region pool their talents and skills to build amazing balloons. Although rooted in Buddhist and Hindu cosmology, the festival resembles a rock concert or state fair.

The balloons are made of paper (yes!) and carefully pasted together in the shape of animals. Once airborne, you see giant cows or sheep floating across the sky.

The balloons are filled with hot air from open fires. Needless to say, an occasional balloon catches fire, either on the ground or partially aloft, burning up the hopes of the town that sponsored the team. It is all in good fun. In the USA, a fire brigade would be present and spectators would be told to stand well back. Here everyone runs and avoids the falling shards of burning paper. But I am surprised that they do not use some form of enclosed (no exposed flame) heat source to do the initial filling of the balloons.

If the launch is successful, the village team goes into celebration mode.

The local tough guy teenagers were in really good spirits.

In town, we saw nuns or novices waiting in line for food. It might be donated by people in town.

We had lunch in a local cafeteria-style restaurant. The chicken was excellent. At a place like this, if you are a typical westerner, you better drink beer or bottled soft drinks and avoid any raw vegetables or fruits. But otherwise, the fare was very good.

Photographs taken with a Leica M2 camera, mostly with a 35mm f/2.0 Summicron lens. This is the 7-element type 4 Summicron from the late 1990s. I used Tri-X 400 film, developed in Kodak HC110 developer, dilution B at 68° F, and then scanned the negatives with a Plustek film scanner. The negatives had some lint and spots, which I cleaned with Pixelmator software.

Burmese Days 17: Pots of Nyaung-U

Dear Readers, I need to catch up and finish writing some notes on my last Asia trip, during which I used Tri-X film in my Leica M2 camera.

Nyaung-U is a town in Nyaung-U District in the Mandalay Region of central Burma. It is on the left bank (east side) of the Irrawaddy River about 4 km from historic Bagan. My group stopped for lunch at an outdoor restaurant, but I found the adjoining pottery manufacture to be more interesting than lunch.

The pots are fired and then decorated. I am not sure if they are fired a second time.

Some of them were being loaded into a lorry. Note the lack of steel toe boots, just flip flops.

Being near Bagan, there were pagodas and stupas in town, some intact, some crumbling.

Ancient Bagan (Burmese: ပုဂံ) is one of the architectural wonders of Asia. According to Wikipedia, "From the 9th to 13th centuries, the city was the capital of the Kingdom of Pagan, the first kingdom to unify the regions that would later constitute modern Myanmar. During the kingdom's height between the 11th and 13th centuries, over 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas and monasteries were constructed in the Bagan plains alone, of which the remains of over 2200 temples and pagodas still survive to the present day."

A 2002 article in Smithsonian, titled "Sacred and Profaned," outlines some of the  challenges with preserving the temples at Bagan. Many have been rebuilt with new bright brick or thick concrete, in shocking contrast to the ancient carved sandstone facades. A major problem with concrete, other than its lack of authenticity, is its rigidity. Bagan is in a seismically active area, and concrete makes the buildings rigid and less able withstand tremors.

We took an evening boat ride on there Irrawaddy. We were told that the lights on the far (west) bank  of the river were oil-drilling operations. Burma was one of the pioneering oil-producing areas in the 1800s, rivaling Pennsylvania and the Caspian Sea region. I do not know what the reserves are now, but it may help with the country's foreign trade as it modernizes.

I took these photographs with my Leica M2 camera with 35mm or 50mm Summicron lenses. The 35 is the 7-element type 4 Summicron from the late 1990s. I think black and white film suited the mood here perfectly. I exposed the Tri-X at EI (exposure index) 320 and developed it in Kodak HC110 developer at dilution B for 4:30 minutes and scanned the negatives with a Plustek 7600i film scanner. There were small flaws and scratches on some of the negatives, which I cleaned with Pixelmator software. I thank my travel companions for being patient while I took film photographs.

A Short Tour of Vicksburg with the Rolleiflex

I recently decided to buy another Rolleiflex camera to replace one that I should never have sold ten years ago. There was one listed on eBay with a possible focus problem, but after writing the seller, I concluded that a previous buyer simply did not know what he was doing. Anyway, the price was right and the unit came in a Priority Mail box. Nice camera! This is a 3.5E from about 1959. The Schneider Xenotar taking lens is pristine and the body overall is very nice. According to Schneider Optics, the Xenotar is a 5-element, 4-group design, giving a 60° angle of coverage. The 75mm focal length has adequate coverage for the 6 × 6 (or 2¼ × 2¼ inch) film size. Film in 120-size (not 120mm!!) is still readily available from major mail-order photo suppliers such as B&H in New York or Freestyle in Los Angeles. So many medium format cameras using 120 film are still in use, I am confident 120 film will continue to be packaged for a few more decades, especially if the film revival continues.

Two rolls of Kodak Tri-X 400 confirmed that the shutter was reasonably accurate, despite the camera probably having not been used for years. I used a tripod for all these tests. The American Queen was moored at the Vicksburg waterfront. The light was harsh, but the old Xenotar lens recorded impressive exposure range. Click any photograph to expand to 1600 pixels wide.

Some of the stop logs are still in place across Levee Street near the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Depot. The sky is dark in this photograph thanks to a polarizing filter. The stop logs are a barrier placed across the street to keep out flood waters from the Yazoo Canal. At this site, the railroad tracks must be cut and removed to place the vertical steel I-beams and the timbers.

Just up the hill at the corner of Washington and Grove Streets is the Highway 61 Coffeehouse. This is the best coffee shop in Vicksburg, and you can spend all afternoon playing chess if you want.

My charming friend Cammie makes me an espresso each time I visit. This was a 1-second exposure.

A block uphill, historic commercial buildings at 721 and 723 Grove Street are being restored. I wrote about these buildings in a 2012 post (click this link).

Walk north to 916 Walnut Street and you reach the old Fidelity Lodge. Part of the building is Victorian-era, but an ugly square section was added to the front much later. In 2015, the city placed a condemned sign on the property, but it is gone now. But I see no signs of renovation or maintenance. Some of the windows have lost their glass. The turret may have its original slate roof.

The Strand Theater at 717 Clay Street features foreign and art films as well as an occasional Hitchcock film and live theater. My friend Burhman stood for a ¼ sec exposure. I wrote about the Strand in 2011 when it was being restored (click the link).

There are two very unusual houses at 1229 and 1231 West Magnolia made of concrete blocks that were molded to resemble limestone. I have forgotten what this type of manufactured stone was called. These houses have been painted bright blue, which is hard to appreciate in these monochrome photographs.

Number 1235 W. Magnolia is a more traditional wood cottage or shotgun shack. I photographed more houses in this neighborhood many years ago, but many have been torn down since then.

Finally, here are two cottages on Pearl Street. This photograph is from a 6×9 Tri-X negative taken with my Fuji GW690II camera. This is a big beast of a camera. It is not as much fun to use as the Rolleiflex, but has similar optical quality. The modern, multi-coated lens is higher contrast, so you need to reduce development time 10 or 20 percent compared to Rolleiflex development time.

North Coast Photographic Services in Carlsbad, California, developed the Tri-X film. They process their black and white film in a Hostert Dip & Dunk system using Clayton F76+ developer. I found that the regular development is too contrasty, so I requested to pull one stop (or N-1). The negatives are still a bit hard but close enough. If in doubt, you want the development to be low-contrast or soft because you can add contrast with software adjustment later, but with a hard negative, you might have lost details in the shadows (totally black) or the highlights (totally white).

I still have a few rolls of the super fine-grain Ektar 25 color negative film in the freezer. When the Rolleiflex comes back from its cleaning and overhaul, the Ektar 25 can go on a tour of the Mississippi Delta. For more information about how a Rolleiflex works, see this older post.

Dear readers, borrow or buy a film camera and try traditional photography. The results might surprise you. You might find it more rewarding than the "spray and pray" and instant gratification of digital imaging, the taking of a thousand photographs over a weekend that you soon file and forget.