Since 1994 I’ve had the pleasure of contributing to KUOW’s Weekday while on the road via commentaries and interviews. For our latest trip, I sent in 24 sound clips that aired on the shows “sound of the day” segment. Here are clips 13-16.
Tar Barrels Boiling, Mt Popa, Myanmar
Road work in Burma is done mostly by hand … picks and shovels, even bare hands, in place of machinery. Tar is delivered to the side of the road in metal drums. A pit is dug and a wood fire is built to heat the tar up so it can be spread … bowlful by bowlful. We came upon this smoldering fire beneath several drums. The tar directly over the heat was popping as it approached boiling point, while the barrel above oozed tar, like a giant tube of black toothpaste.
Man-powered Sawmill
We were pedaling a back road outside the city of Miektala (a dirt track really)–bouncing and weaving our way along the rutted route–when we heard the sound of a hand saw. I glanced over through the trees and saw a man standing on top of an enormous log sawing away. The way he handled this huge saw, I thought he must have Herculean strength. A closer look revealed that he had a partner. They had dug a wide four foot deep ditch, which allowed a second person to pull down on the other end of the saw from below. This one cut would take these two men the better part of a day to complete. The family was as entertained by meeting two foreign cyclists, as we were at watching this human saw mill in action.
Chanting Marathon, Kalaw, Myanmar
We found a nice hotel room with a balcony in the mountain town of Kalaw. It was across the street from the Buddhist temple. The chanting was being broadcast in hyper-full volume. No worries. It would stop late in the evening. Or so we thought. It continued. Midnight. 2am. 4am. As the sun rose, the chanting still continued. We discovered at breakfast that the chanting wouldn’t stop … for three more days. We opted to pedal down the road.
Threshing Grain near Pindaya, Myanmar
The back roads around Pindaya wound through farmland; a patchwork of yellows, greens, and browns, contrasted with brilliant blue skies.
Off the road, we saw a group of men threshing grain. We’d seen it many times (both men and women performing the task), but never up close. Well. No time like the present. We pedaled over and parked our bikes. There were large piles of recently hand harvested rice laying about. I grabbed a pile, and just the sight of a westerner trudging across the field, sent the men into waves of laughter. I later got a lesson on how to thresh. I need a lot of work on my technique.
That pitsaw is pretty much an identical design to that used here in the US during colonial times (and to this day by reenactors and other crazy hand tool woodworking types.) Here’s a little piece about using a pitsaw at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts.
Very cool. No “reenactment” needed in Myanmar. Many of the techniques and tools used in construction/farming haven’t changed in centuries.