Myanmar

Myanmar, known more commonly around the world as Burma, is a country that has for long seemed fairly inaccessble, off the beaten path and ruled by an oppressive regime. In the last few years, however, democracy has replaced military rule and it has started opening up more and more to legions of foreign visitors that are keen to visit the spectacular sights of Shwedagon Pagoda, Bagan, Inle Lake and Kyaiktiyo Pagoda.

It's certainly an intriguing country, having been shut off from the worst of the Western's world's excessive consumerism, such that visits to local country markets provide you with scenes that have probably been unchanged in hundreds of years.

Myanmar features in the chapter "The Golden Rock" in my book "Goodbye, Mr. Descartes." The protagonist, Carter, visits the country so that he can ultimately set eyes upon Kyaiktiyo Pagoda. This pagoda, perched on a gigantic boulder, balanced incongruously on the side of a cliff on top of a mountain, is completely adorned with gold - the gift of thousands of Buddhist pilgrims who come to this site in silent devotion. Carter is in search of answers himself and he feels that by travelling to places such as these, he can get to the core of who we are as a collective species - what our motivations are and the things we do to give our life meaning.

Here is an excerpt from The Golden Rock:

Well, this is it. This was the one thing in that book, high up on that shelf of many years ago that I wanted to see more than any other. Why it piqued my interest so much I’m none too sure, but I know that I used to stare at it and wonder what it actually looked like in real life. It just looked so impossibly incongruous and inaccessible – the ultimate folly, balancing by the hair of a god on the top of a mountain. How it got here, no one could really say. A scientist would say a glacier deposited it and that would be their absolute truth. A mystic would say that an unknown miracle had placed it there and that would be their absolute truth. As for myself and how I thought it got there? Well, that would be a truth that only I would know.

And maybe the real fascination with it, was the potential that was bound up inside. For it could have been quite possible to just touch the rock lightly, or even breath on it, and all of sudden, all of that bound-up potential, that apparently immobile rock of absolute truth, ‘ein stein’ as the Deutsche would say, would start to gain momentum. Slowly at first, of course, but you knew that once it starting rolling, once that momentum decided that it didn’t want to be potential anymore, the very moment that change occurred, there was absolutely no going back to the world that existed before.