The Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady)
We left Bagan by boat heading for Mandalay. It took 14 hours against the current.
The travel guide had described the boat as 'nice'. It was certainly preferable to 12 hours in a bus. It was possible to roam about and there was a sort of tea room on board with a free breakfast. But to call it 'nice' suggests a vessel that is ship-shape and well maintained. That it was not. The consolation was that it hadn't far to sink.
The river is monotonous, the only excitement being the really shallow spots where two crew members went forward and poled for the bottom, calling the depth, often less than two metres. Commercial traffic consists of barges and low draft tugs and these are led by a small boat checking the depth ahead in the shallow reaches. Several times our boat took advantage of this path finding.
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On the boat: above: two views of the morning coastline
below: seeking the bottom; and why is there a bowl of
dead vegetable-matter on the binnacle, good luck charm?
The river fisher-folk use quite sophisticated long symmetrical boats, built of planks with a distinctive stern and brow post. They are traditionally poled or paddled but, in this modern world, a proportion have been fitted with a small petrol motor on the stern with a long propeller shaft that drives them along quite quickly.
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Riverside encampments and fishing boats
There were occasional riverside encampments for fishers but the true banks are way off in the distance. It was reminiscent of the Nile.
A highlight was the Pakokku Bridge, an enormously long (3.5 km) combined road and rail bridge that was opened with great fanfare in January 2012. It has a nominal clearance of 16 metres but the maximum river height is clearly evident on the concrete pylons which, I guess, reduces the clearance to around eleven metres, still ample for most river traffic. It’s a conventional riveted steel truss bridge that might have been built in the 1930’s. Riveting is very labour intensive.
Conventional and labour intensive or not, it is obviously of considerable future economic significance as it provides one of the few modern crossings of this river. The Irrawaddy together with its tributaries historically defined Burma, as a distinct from the communities of the other great river systems, the Ganges and Mekong, separated by mountainous regions to the West, North and East.
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Pakokku Bridge - road and rail - the longest in Myanmar