Shan state of mind

Nyaungshwe :: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Nyuangshwe (Lake Inle).

Coolest thing I did: Spend Christmas Day trekking through the hills on the way up to Lake Inle.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Kayan Lahwi ethnic women wear brass coils around their necks that cause their necks to appear really long, but apparently it's just a visual trick.

The reason you go to Kalaw in the first place is to replace the last couple of hours on the bus to get to Lake Inle with two days of walking to do the same thing. They call it a trek but it's pretty easy going - mostly you're walking on roads or well defined paths used by the local farmers. You see modern day trial types going about their work, growing stuff and living in woven bamboo huts and trying hard not to have their oxen ram you as you wander past. The first day is mostly rural scenes, which would be a bit of a letdown on their own,  but the valleys you pass through are surrounded by some picturesque (but in no way dramatic) mountains and cliffs. This first day was also Christmas Day so there was some joviality about the shed where they park the various groups of walkers overnight, well at least up until the 9pm curfew where everyone gets told to shut up shop and go to bed. Myanmar certain lives up to it’s reputation of non-existent nightlife at every turn. Tourists amusing each other with beer until the locals make them go to bed probably describes the whole thing. We had two young guides with us, Nye Nye who was kind of the responsible adult and her sidekick, whose name I forgot but that was probably because he had too many Christmas beers and ended up not being able to leave with our group and coming with the very last group a couple of hours later.

Nye Nye was an interesting young woman with passable but highly confusing English. I get the feeling she was much better at speaking English than listening to it, because you could ask her any question but the chances are you would get a long, but completely unrelated answer. I thought the point where here answer to the question of whether there were fish in the lake veering off into a barely understandable thesis on the future use of hydroelectricity in the area was one of her better efforts.

The last day starts in the morning fog but it doesn't take long to climb out of the valley above it into the sun and get a distant glimpse of Lake Inle. Despite it again being fairly flat and easy going the lack of good, solid meals due to the state of my stomach made it really push me and I was shattered by the time we got down to the shores for lunch. That made it nice to spend a couple of hours then running along the canals through towns on stilts that line them to make our way into Lake Inle proper. It is as stunning as you were led to believe and there are fishermen with nets and conical hats who have escaped a postcard right there waiting for you. That and a flotilla of other long-tailed boats ferrying tourists about to take pictures of things. Being the other major draw after Bagan you expect everyone who comes to one to also see the other, so it’s nice to have had a couple of quieter days to prepare by walking up.

My stomach took a particular turn for the worst during dinner on that first night in Nyuangshwe and I went back to the hotel room to recover. Sounds like I missed as big a night as it gets in Burma because Mark had apparently met the Dutch girls, a Swiss guy from our trek and this English couple somewhere and started heavily drinking with them. I know this because he comes back at about 10pm (which is when the last bar closed and they had to leave) in order to exchange antibiotics he'd been given by the English guy (an off duty Army medic) for the two half bottles of duty free we had left and then was off again until apparently they'd been angrily been ejected from the Dutch girls' hotel about midnight by the other guests. I was given 4 250mg tablets of two different substances with names ending in -cin and told that if the first two didn't fix it in 24 hours then I was to consider the other two as the nuclear option. It never came to that for me but as Mark's stomach also went wrong the day after he thought he'd give them a go, and his description of his stomach about an hour later was "dead" as in completely lacking feeling or even numbness.

My theory on why the nightlife will never take off in Myanmar under current conditions is the fact it's so expensive to keep places open after dark due to the completely unreliable electricity grid. Whether you're in downtown Yangon or rural Shan State if you have a business that caters to tourists you have your own generator and there has to be a point of diminishing returns on keeping your place open if the grid has gone out and you're customer's beer consumption is not keeping up with the price of diesel. One of the stranger things about the big cities like Yangon and Manadalay is simply how completely used to not having power at night everyone is.

So Lake Inle was as close as we (and most tourists) got to the ethnic enclaves that the central government in has been trying to keep in line since independence from the British over half a century ago. Like most British post-colonial nations the borders of Burma did not fall at all along neat ethnic lines and the first act on gaining their independence was for the various warlords and factions to rebel against the new central government and start a decades long bloody insurgency. This has left groups who straddle both sides of the Thai border and people who have been living as stateless people for nearly 50 years inside Thailand itself. This wasn't helped by this being some of the more rugged and hard to reach parts of the country, however in the last decade or so the Myanmar government has come to terms of some autonomy with most groups in the eastern half of the country, however they are still touchy about tourists visiting so much of it is off limits.

This may also have something to do with the fact the security situation was not at all helped by the fact the uncontrolled ethic enclaves were for a lot of the 70s, 80s and 90s the largest opium producing area on earth, part of the infamous Golden Triangle with northern Thailand and Laos. During the heroin peak of the 1970s a half Chinese/Shan warlord called Khun Sa was widely considered to be producing most of the heroin being consumed in the western world. At the end of the Chinese civil war the nationalist KMT troops who didn't get the privilege of fleeing the mainland for Taiwan with their leadership retreated into northern Burma, Laos and Vietnam and set up camp with the hope of regrouping and retaking China from Mao's communists. They needed money so took control of the existing opium trade and it was to one of these KMT troops and a Shan woman that Khun Sa was born. During the Vietnam war the Shan warlords found a new market for highly refined heroin with the American GIs, who promptly took the habit back to the States with them and setup the pipelines required to smuggle large quantities of the drug into the US. As time went on the original KMT troops got old and never took China from the communists, but the ethnic warlords had a ready source of funds to help arm themselves against the Burmese army. However, much like the narco-insurgencies of Colombia or Central America the cause tended to get taken over by the criminal element who liked the almost unlimited funds that come with selling drugs by the metric ton more. 

So our first act upon arriving for a hour and a half stop over in Bangkok airport en route to Cambodia was to destroy a couple of Burger King meals after two weeks of studiously avoiding any food that looked too Burmese. I don't know if that helped or hurt our cause but I've possibly never enjoyed a bacon double cheese burger so much. 

I'm not entirely sure if I'd recommend Myanmar to everyone as a travel destination, despite it's highly friendly people and some unique sights that are not yet feeling the full forces of tourism. If you hadn't been to somewhere like Thailand or Malayasia first then I'd be far more likely to say spend some time there as Burma is hard work, mostly due to the lack of tourist infrastructure. The idea of getting off the beaten track is all well and good, but two weeks of if can be quite a grind if you're also sick much of the time. My guess is that Myanmar will develop completely differently to other recently open to backpacker nations in South East Asia based completely on the fact we met only a handful of tourists younger than us. The average tourist was in their 50s, German and in a tour group, and even the independent, backpacker types we met were generally South East Asia veterans in their late 30s or early 40s looking for something completely different. It's unlikely to ever really get the 20 somethings while there is no nightlife to speak of and the vast majority of the key sights are Buddha related. This may change as the beaches open up (this is mostly limited by the still ongoing insurgency in Rakhine state in the country's west) and there is more trekking or outdoor sports allowed. I suspect they won't be serving Mekong buckets while you float around in inner tubes here any time soon. 

Crocodile hat for Xmas

Kalaw :: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Nyaung U (Bagan) & Kalaw.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the sun rise over the Bagan plain from the top of Shwesandaw Paya in yet another crack of dawn photography moment on this trip.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The British installed a whole town of Indians (from India) in the Burmese hills and the result is quite good Nepalese food.

Bagan is probably the site most visited in Myanmar and this is the best view of what the future holds for mass tourism in the country. For the first time I felt myself hassled by hawkers and handing over what seemed like obscene amounts of money for things in a country so poor. Of course, you can’t get away with that without having something special, and Bagan more than lives up to the hype. Around the time the Crusades were happening on the other side of the world the local king had a conversion from a Hindu to a Buddhist and he and his descendants celebrated by going on a 200 year, 4000 plus temple building bender on the plain of Bagan. The biggest and most impressive have, or are being restored, but there’s still lots of little ruins dotting the landscape as far as the eye can see.

We hired bikes and did a massive day of riding between temples over Bagan’s mercifully flat terrain. All the primo temples are within easy riding distance of one another, there’s plenty of places to stop and have a bite to eat or drink along the way so you can pace it out however you want. The only downside is having to wear shoes, which means constantly having to take your shoes and socks off every time you stop and go into a temple, because Buddhists aren’t down with shoes. By about the 18^th time you’ve done it for the day you’re kind of over it.

The end of the day was spent on one of the very few temples you can climb that isn’t on the main road, which involved trudging your bike through a fair bit of thick sand. However compared to the main viewing spot where they ram whole busses full of Korean tourists onto it’s pain-to-get-to factor keeps the numbers well down. We had a fair bit of time to wait so I amused myself by letting the little boys selling postcards and copies of Burma Days by George Orwell try their spiel on me. That soon bored them so I helped them with their Japanese, so they can sell Japanese people more postcards. They had a book with Burmese to English translation and the career list was somewhat baffling: I’m not sure how often they were going to need the English words for “Horse and Buggy outfitter”.

So bike is probably the second best way to get around and see Bagan, the best you have to wait until sunrise for. Having not done my research I didn’t realise it costed $350USD (cash only) to take a hot air balloon over Bagan at sunrise, and that there would be a multi-day waiting list. I guess that will have to wait. Instead a taxi came and got us at about 5am and we drove out to Shwesandaw Paya to watch the sun rise. Devoid of it’s 1000s of people at sunrise (we could see it at sunset from where we were and it looked like there were people hanging off it) it’s one of the more central locations so you get a 360 view of the temples trailing off in all directions. As the sky lights up the dark pyramids rise up out of the mist and by the time the sun breaks the sky the temples are all glowing a stunning deep orange against the background of the mist shrouded mountains. When the hot air balloons then take off and move in a loose pattern between them it’s one of the more amazing sunrises I’ve ever seen.

Our only other day trip was out to Mt Popa, which is a temple dedicated to nat, which are spirits who the Burmese have believed in longer than they have Buddha. The temple is perched on a tall rocky spire and is reached by climbing hundreds of stairs, all barefoot of course. Not such an issue, except this was the first place in Myanmar I saw large amounts of monkeys, who like to chew things up, spit them out and throw the remains on the steps you are trying to walk up. From the very top you can see out across the valley on all sides, and I have a very cool picture of a big male monkey staring out over the valley thinking “One day this will all be mine”, a-la Planet of the Apes.

The bus ride between Bagan and Kalaw on the edge of the Shan State is 8 hours that could only really happen in poor Asia. They start off well, everyone having a ticket and a numbered seat, but you haven’t even left town before the locals are being sold cheaper tickets to squat in the seats that are empty for part of the journey, or more likely to sit in the aisle on kiddie stools, usually carrying all their personal belongings with them. The combination of winding roads, people who can’t see out the window and people who don’t travel in cars that much and you have the perfect recipe for a busload of people looking nauseated and holding a plastic bag of their own vomit. At least we didn’t attempt to have that double as accommodation on the night version of the bus.

Kalaw feels like a completely different country. Being up in the hills the air is noticeably thinner and the Himalayan feel is only accentuated by the fact the British built a hill station here and imported a whole bunch of Nepalese, Indian Muslims and Sikhs to man it. Their descendants are still here, so the people definitely have a Subcontiental feel about them. It was also possible to have a treat and dip into some Nepalese cuisine, which was so noticeably oil free after the Burmese curries.

Our Christmas eve was spent drinking beers in a small cafe overlooking the market with a couple of Dutch girls we'd been bumping into with some regularity along the way. One of them had bought 5 stuffed animal hats for some reason so we got quite a few thumbs up from onlookers as they walked past us, me resplendent in my stuffed elephant hat. The little boy who's parents ran the cafe was taken by the one that looked like a crocodile, so as soon as he had it on and spent the next half an hour pretending to be a crocodile it sort of had to become his. One thing that is a constant joy about travel in Myanmar is that people are almost universally extremely nice and helpful and always on the verge of laughing at whatever you're doing at the time. Like most countries where tourism is about to hit in a big way you know that can't last, but it's nice to be there at that moment in time.

Chick Monks

Nyaung U:: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Mandalay & Nyaung U (Bagan).

Coolest thing I did: In another sunset related moment witnessed one of the most commonly photographed scenes in Burma at U Bein's teak bridge.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Despite writing a book called The Road to Mandalay George Orwell never actually went there, though he was a colonial copper in Burma back in the 20s.

Early morning after the night bus found us in exotic Mandalay. Or rather, it might have if Mandalay seemed at all exotic. It’s most obvious feature is the giant fort the last King lived in, before the British showed up, razed its contents to the ground and replaced the middle with a parade ground. The walls and moat still remain, and today the middle of it is mostly made up for off-limits army barracks for the modern day Army of Myanmar. Except for the very middle bit, which the military junta decided to have reconstructed as a mock-up of the palace just before the British destroyed it. I'm usually more positive about this stuff, but it takes a good 20 odd minutes to walk to (assuming you haven’t already spent over an hour circling the thing looking for a gate foreigners are actually allowed to enter) and it’s not at all worth it.

As a result of the remains of this fort the rest of Mandalay is a strikingly painful place to get anywhere in. Most restaurants, shops, mechanics or whatever open out directly onto the street and most of them do things like unload all their stock blocking half the street and then drive off. The main roads are often 2 or 3 lanes in each direction so crossing is nerve-wracking to say the least, and as everyone drives everywhere because it is so not pedestrian friendly you also feel like you've just smoked 2 or 3 cigarettes by the corner. Cabs are cheap so after an afternoon we learned to not waste any more time that way.

To be fair, like much of poor Asia the very sight of rich white people voluntarily walking along the side of the road baffles the local mind. If you watch them, everyone here gets on the transportation ladder as soon as they can afford it – bicycle, moped, motorbike, truck with a tractor motor bolted to the front, car and so on. Only the absolute poorest people in the cities walk anywhere, and they’re usually begging and carrying all their belongings with them. What city council wastes money on footpaths as a public amenity when it’s a status symbol to not use them? 

So as far as tourist stuff goes, you aren't’t really supposed to stay in Mandalay, but rather go just outside it where there are a few rare gems. There seems to be a basic show-me-what-I’m-supposed-to-see trip every taxi driver who speaks any English will offer you. The bloke who picked us up from the bus station seemed alright, but he couldn't go so his less well spoken but highly amusing brother did it instead.

This is probably the first of two main experiences in Myanmar that will see you completely Buddha-ed out. During the day you see the pagoda encrusted hills of Sagaing, ruins of pagodas on the island of Inwa and countless other stops to see religious stuff. The stranger ones included the morning zoo that is watching 1000 monks at a monastery line up and eat breakfast together. While they were getting into to lines there was literally tourists coming right up to their faces with massive camera lenses and taking a countless photos. It was probably the first time I've thought tourism in Myanmar had reached too far at any point. On the plus side I also found out monks drink Shark energy drink for breakfast, the local knock-off of Red Bull. Even the novices who look about 6 years old. Must make focusing on memorising the scriptures later interesting.

One of the more interesting things about Burma in general is monks are simply part of the social fabric in a way they don't seem to be in other Buddhist countries. There are simply monks everywhere, sitting down to a meal, catching the commuter bus, taking photos on their camera phones of the same stuff you are. The distinctive, one garmet for all weather, purple robes are sprinkled into every crowd to the point you stop noticing them. There's also girl monks, who to my great disappointment are not referred to as chick monks, because you could totally shorten that to chipmunks. They wear pink, probably because when the monks are young and have their heads shaved it's hard to tell chick monks and dude monks apart.

I also liked an early stop to Mahamuni Paya still inside the city, where there’s a giant Buddha who the people just decided to honour by painting it’s reachable bits with gold leaf. There’s now about 6 inches thick of real gold all around the bottom now. While you do wonder how people get enough money in such a poor country to wack a bit more onto Buddha’s kneecap it is an impressive site. It’s probably a sacrilege to consider melting it down and using the money to pay for some roads or schools or something.

The end of the day involves making the trek across the world's longest teak footbridge in order to take pictures of people walking across it at sunset. In the best pictures those people would be peasants, monks and people on bicycles, but as this is one of the more famous sites of Burma what you really get is a crowd from the Chinese tour buses and lots of people with tripods and expensive cameras. What I found most interesting was most of them were standing on the bridge, making it had to take a picture of the bridge at sunset, but that kind of meant there wasn't many people standing in someone's cow paddock below the bridge with me getting better pictures.

There are fields either side of the bridge where guys in conical hats are ploughing nice neat rows in the rich soil and then going right ahead and flattening it out and doing it again. There were suspiciously few crops being planted, so I suspect they just get paid by the tourist boards to look rustic and keep pointlessly driving their bullocks back and forth all day. Who says repressive military regimes don't have an eye for a good postcard photo?

The next day was spent from sunrise to sunset taking the fast boat down the Irrawaddy River to Bagan. Again, I had visions in my head of sailing down through the jungle with tigers peaking out at us, but in reality what you get is the ultra wide, flat banks on both sides and the occasional glimpse of river life by those who still live on and by it. My guess at the reason on why this looks nothing like the Mandalay Bay casino in Vegas told me it was going to had a lot to do with the occasional barge coming past packed with giant logs. I'm not sure if they were teak (one of the reason the British came in the first place) and I'm not sure if the Irrawaddy ever was surrounded by forest or jungle but there certainly isn't any now. The afternoon stretched on and the beers started coming out and though I was a bit soft due to fairly severe food poisoning stalking me the whole time in Mandalay it was a much more enjoyable way to do it than sitting on a bus. 

A word on the Burmese food, because I ended up eating very little of it, due to the fact it was not long after arriving in Mandalay I ended up with some pretty strict food poisoning, including vomit inducing nausea whenever I smelt the local food. From what I had there seems to be one answer for any culinary decision to be made: more oil. The curries are quite tasty despite the oil, and we also had a pretty damn good Biryani at one point but in alltruth I had nearly nothing to do with Burmese food the whole time I was there, so my opinion of it is always going to be somewhat tainted by those bad experiences. 

So onto Bagan.

Golden Era

Mandalay :: Myanmar (Burma)

Note: Due to the horrible state of the Internet in Myanmar all of these Burma posts were cobbled together from notes taken at the time and poor memory. I'm currently in Cambodia as I post these but just pretend I'm not.

Places: Bangkok, Yangon & Mandalay.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the sun go down over the giant gold stupas of Shwedagon Paya.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The South East Asia (SEA) games happened to be on during our stay in Myanmar. I didn't even know there was such a thing. When Myanmar ended up in a 1 all tie with Thailand in the soccer the whole country had something to be universally happy about.

When you talk about the classic backpacker destinations around the world my generation would always have considered South East Asia to be the original and the best. Each and every place on the Banana Pancake Trail has its own backpacker slum full of cheap hostels and restaurants, but to get to any of them you pretty much have to go via Bangkok, and that made Khao San Road the quintessential example. That was then. I’ve been through the new Bangkok Airport probably half a dozen times since it was built in 2006 but I’ve not been into the city itself since 1998 and to say there’s been development would be a fairly epic understatement. I never went to the old Khao San Road, the tour I was on up to Chang Mai and around put me up in the Shangri-la (the joys of travel to a country in the midst of a currency collapse) and I had no need of it really. But to see it now, with it’s order, it’s paved roads and it’s complete lack of people who have taken too much in (in both sights and substances) wandering about made me think that scene has left.

Due to spending very little time here, really just to meet up with Mark before moving on to Burma (sorry Myanmar) we ended up staying at the very end of the airport train near the shopping district of Siam Square and I have to say this is not Bangkok as I remember it. You can walk for hours without reaching ground level, streets have 4 lanes in both directions and have to be crossed by overhead walkways and there are department stores and multi-level markets that go on forever. My first thought was simply who in this city has the money to buy all this stuff? I don’t think I ever saw a fat Thai person before now but I’m wondering if the fact you can now afford $3 ice mochaccino lattes from Starbucks can’t help explain it. In most Asian countries you visited it was always a small wealthy elite and then the rest of highly poor people, and that’s pretty much everyone you’d come in contact with. You were seen as this otherworldly source of external money so everyone wanted to know you. These days, whether it’s KL or Bangkok there’s a whole section of society that is pretty happy to ignore you, because they don’t see the need to pander to Westerners for their money – they do pretty well otherwise. Perhaps that’s progress.

My trip to Bangkok was fairly uneventful. For the last few weeks the news has been full of crowds of people besieging the Prime Minister’s house, complete with so much tear gas the streets of Bangkok are now shown as stock footage of riots being supressed by tear gas. Right up until I saw a picture of two elderly tourists walking past riot police in the Sydney Morning Herald under an article entitled “Should I got to Thailand for Christmas” I was even a little concerned. Turns out despite taking at taxi not 500m down the road from one of the main protest sites I didn’t see a single Police baton charge. The guys at work that gave me that big ziplock bag to put over my head to protect myself will be disappointed.

Mark’s trip, however was a little bit more eventful. On the ride out from the Airport at 1am the taxi driver kept falling asleep and drifting off onto the hard shoulder of the freeway so Mark made him get out and swap seats, so Mark could drive. He then woke the bloke up at random intervals to make sure they were still going the right way. Drove own Bangkok taxi on bucket list? Check.

While Burma was once a wholly-owned subsidiary of the British Empire it’s only in the old capital of Yangon (which the Brits called Rangoon) that shows the signs of it. The town’s main square is overlooked by both it’s democracy monument and the almost incongruous golden Sule Paya and is surrounded by old colonial buildings in various states of decay. What was most striking though is in a town where street paving with mismatched concrete is a lost art-form the lawn on the square is immaculate. It is still the haunt of the black market currency traders who were once the only way for tourists to get local currency but I suspect their numbers have been thinned by the arrival of ATMs that take Visa and Mastercard. I’d say it’s only a Buddhist acceptance of things is all that’s stopping the old illegal money changers from teaming up at night and pulling ATMs out of the wall for messing with their livelihood.

The highlight of Yangon is to go up to the Shwedagon Pagoda, though my attempts to pronounce that to the taxi driver started with confusion and then turned into amusement on his part. I’m not sure what the link is between Buddhism and gold is, but you certainly see a lot of it around the various temples and pagodas in Myanmar, but nothing like on the scale of Shwedagon. It’s in the order of 30m high and completely covered in beaten gold leaf. Despite it being the most popular attraction in the city and despite sunset being the best time to be there it’s still surprisingly peaceful to sit up there and what it turn from gold to orange as the light changes while purple robed monks climb up and clean it for the day. I guess it’s because even though Buddhism seems to have zero issue with combining commerce and religion in the same site they've managed to keep the hawkers out of the bits where actual worshipping goes on. What we couldn't get our head around is now a lot of the gold or bronze statues of Buddha show how enlightened they are by a glowing halo of multi coloured LEDs flashing around their head in sequence. I guess if there were various kinds of Buddha’s (Lying on Side Buddha, Cross Legged Serene Buddha) then this could only be Disco Buddha. 

We took a ferry over the Yangon river to see a bit of village life, not really sure what to expect. That turned out to involve paying a couple of trishaw (a bike with a sidecart) drivers to take us around for a few hours, a shrunken body of an abbot with a pretty solid looking gold death mask, a trip to the village grave site where a fresh hole had just been dug and then sitting out in a field in a makeshift bar drinking palm juice, eating dried fish and smoking something that looked like a rolled palm leaf filled with cardboard. The fact that we tried all these things caused great amusement to all the locals there showed it’s still novel enough and the trishaw driver that spoke good English was happy enough to discuss everything and anything. Unlike say Cuba, or China, no-one in Myanmar seemed at all worried about telling us their opinions on politics or anything else, and one of the highlights of the country is definitely how friendly the people are. This was probably the example where we spent the most time in one place talking. You also get a feel for it when you see the market stalls selling pictures of the 4 deities, Buddha, Jesus (due to a very enthusiastic missionary movement in the 1800s a surprisingly large number of Burmese are Baptists), Aung San Suu Kyi & Winnie the Pooh.

Apparently the delta region across the river from Yangon is about to undergo serious development in the wake of the cyclone a few years back, with the ferry being replaced by a bridge built by one of the South Korean conglomerates.  It won’t been too long after that before tour buses come over to replicas of these villages to see the local handicrafts and traditional dress no-one was worn for 100 years. So these things go.