A car gets blessed at a nat shrine on the road to Bago.

AFTER passing under the “Towards a new modern developed nation” gate at 10 Mile while travelling north on Pyay Road, you’re presented with two options: To the right, the entrance to Yangon International Airport with links to Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong and other gleaming Asian metropolises. Or straight ahead, the ancient capitals of Pyay, Bago and Mandalay many hours farther to the north.

For foreigners, at least, the route to Myanmar’s provincial cities is certainly the road less travelled.

This is Highway 1 – a 622-kilometre road that joins the country’s largest cities, Yangon and Mandalay. In many countries the name Highway 1 designates a tourist route, an iconic road trip – in the US, Highway 1 follows most of the picturesque Californian Pacific coast. In Australia, the 24,000km route circumnavigates the country – the longest national highway in the world.

A roadside vendor pulls a creepy-crawly from a jar of alcohol.

In Myanmar, Highway 1 is not much of a tourist road. The country is flat and dry, and there are few immediate sights. But it feels like a living, breathing entity – a vital artery linking Myanmar’s most important city with the rest of the country. Thousands rely on it for their livelihood, eking out a living along the highway’s shoulders or in the adjacent rice paddies and fruit plantations.

It might be mystery to foreigners but most locals know the patchy stretch of bitumen all too well, particularly the 51-mile (82-kilometre) section from Yangon to Bago, which crosses the fertile farmland of the Bago plain.

Highway 1 is equal parts commerce and history but, like everywhere in Myanmar, there is also an element of religion. Where the apartment blocks and golf courses of Yangon give way to dense jungle greenery, a crowd of vehicles gathers perpetually under an unusual Banyan tree, flanked by several small car repair shops.

At their centre is a nat shrine, known as Shwe Nyaung Bin, where it is believed the guardian of the highway – the nat spirit – resides. Car owners like Ko Kyaw Min, from Kyaukmyaung township in Yangon Division, bring their new vehicles here and believe the blessing from the nat medium will ward off possible car accidents. The ceremony is somewhat strange: The owner drives the vehicle forward then backward three times while the medium dribbles perfume on the bonnet and recites a prayer, before attaching a garland to the vehicle’s grill. Naturally, this requires a generous donation.

While the tradition is gradually losing favour with drivers, about 50 cars still make the journey to Shwe Nyaung Bin each day, perhaps more on weekends. Next in line after Ko Kyaw Min is a set of three white taxis – the drivers perform the back-and-forth ritual under the watchful eye of the cars’ owner, who stands nearby, arms firmly crossed.

Also watching on are four bemused foreigners on their way to Kyaikhtiyo. We see the same group in nearby Taukkyant War Cemetery, the largest World War II cemetery in Myanmar. Taukkyant is maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and 6374 Allied soldiers – from Britain, India, Australia and elsewhere – are interred here.

As the foreigners filter out among the carefully tended gardens, I ask their Adventure Myanmar guide Ko Ye Win Naing if there is anywhere else worth stopping on the way to Bago. “No, just some shops, nothing else interesting for the foreigners,” he smiles, before herding the Spanish tourists back into his vehicle.

Under the shade of the memorial, three of the cemetery’s 12 gardeners have downed tools for a few minutes. It’s an easy job says one, a 60-something former soldier – but pays only K800 a day.

“That’s okay for me, I’m supposed to be retired and I live near here so I can walk to work every day,” he says. The hardest part is keeping amorous young Myanmar couples out of the gardens, particularly the dense bushes in the southern part of the cemetery.

“It’s not good for the image of the place, foreigners don’t want to see that kind of behaviour and it’s disrespectful as well – this is a cemetery,” he says indignantly.

At Taukkyant, Highway 2 veers left off Highway 1 and continues 260km to Pyay. Nearby is the new six-lane highway to Nay Pyi Taw.

On the outskirts of nearby Hlegu, farmer U Tin Sein says he is pleased with the opportunities the new highway has presented his family. His two sons now drive trucks between Yangon and Nay Pyi Taw and they earn far more than they could by farming the family’s 6-acre plot of paddy.

“It is good for us. I wish I had the same opportunities when I was their age,” U Tin Sein says, as he dries the rice husks beside the highway.

Hlegu is a transit town; a rest and repair stop for vehicles and trading centre for the agricultural produce.

The busiest time is January and February, just after the rice harvest, when the region’s farmers bring their paddy into town to sell to the rice mills. It seems every second shop along the main street is selling tyres, repairing cars or trading motorbikes.

“I don’t think the new highway will be bad for other businesses around here. There will still be a lot of traffic on the road to Bago,” U Tin Sein says.

Bago has been a commercial centre since the 12th century when, under the name Hanthawaddy, it was the capital of the Mon kingdom that dominated Lower Myanmar.

Goods from Bago – food products as well as gold, rubies, musk and tin – were traded as far as India, Malacca, Sumatra and Siam, transported in Martaban jars – large ceramic containers made in present-day Mottama. But ceramic products were also being made on the west side of the Gulf of Mottama, on the Bago plain that Highway 1 crosses. The kilns were built beside the many rivers and streams, which would then be used to transport the ceramics to nearby trading centres.

A few miles before Intagaw, we cross Lagunbyee (or Lagunbyin) Creek, which marks the border between Yangon and Bago divisions. Just to the northwest lie the ruins of Lagunbyee, an ancient Pyu city that in Mon times was a military stronghold that protected the capital Bago.

In 1987, researchers discovered the first cross-draft ceramic kiln in Myanmar here among the city’s ruins. They later uncovered approximately 85 kilns in the Intagaw area alone, according to Lagunbyee Old Town and the Discovery of the First Ceramic Kiln, “indicating that it was once an important ceramic production centre”. Traces of the kind of pottery produced here and at Twante, known as green and white ware, have been located at the Julfar and Hulaylah sites in the United Arab Emirates.

Unfortunately, the original kiln – discovered beneath a modern, karaweik-shaped pagoda – has been flooded by the Lagunbyee dam, which was completed in November 2001.

Highway 1 has robbed the streams that flow across the plain and into the Bago River, like Lagunbyee Creek, of their importance as trade routes. Many have now been harnessed to feed the area’s many rice paddies with water – despite receiving more than 100 inches (2.54 metres) of rain annually, the Bago plain is dry in the hot season.

The 180,000-megalitre, K1.1 billion Lagunbyee dam captures the runoff from the Bago Yoma in the wet season, helping to irrigate about 22,000 acres of farmland in Yangon and Bago divisions.

The waterways also support other forms of income generation. A 20-metre wide channel runs adjacent to Highway 1 and it’s here we see a suspicious looking character: With tattered clothes, a small, square backpack and two long sticks, he looks like he’s just crawled out of the swamp. As soon as we slow down, he darts off across the channel, wading into the maze of rice paddies.

Nearby, the colourfully dressed U Myint Oo is expertly untangling a net that contains precisely one small fish. For the 45-year-old fisherman from Intaing village – about 12km away – the fish is his only reward for the morning’s work.
“I don’t own any land, I don’t farm. All I have is fishing,” he says, as his companion Ko Thar Ei begins to wade into the water, his net dragging behind him.

“Whatever I catch – mainly fish, sometimes frogs – I use to feed my family and then try to sell the rest in the market,” he says, adding that frog curry is a particularly tasty dish.

It’s not the only “delicacy” that can be found in the area. At Banda village, about 10 miles (16km) south of Bago, a dozen small stalls peddle bottles of alcohol mixed with centipedes, scorpions and taw shout khar (wild bitter lemon).

The concoction is reputed to fix all kinds of maladies, including swelling, paralysis and impotence. Locals will rub the ointment on the affected area, while Chinese buyers often drink the home-made elixir.

In Banda village we can see the ceramic tradition of the Bago plain still exists. Several shops sell glazed and unglazed pots, plates, bowls, cups – even toys.

Behind the largest, open-air ceramic shop, Ma Aye Myint slaps and softens foot-long lumps of clay on a wooden board. The clay comes from nearby fields and is put into a temporary pit in the floor of the workshop, beaten and then shaped on a foot-propelled pottery wheel. Hundreds of jars are stacked in the wall-less workshop and at the rear a cross-draft kiln – similar to those used in the area hundreds of years ago – is being used to fire the pots. While some are glazed, most are the burnt orange water containers that can be seen on just about every street corner in Myanmar.

The last stop before entering Bago is Shwe Ein, one of several mega-teashops on the outskirts of Bago. Nestled between garment factories and watermelon stalls, it’s doing a brisk trade selling le pet thoke and tamin gyaw to hungry pilgrims returning from Kyaikhtiyo.

From here, the traffic thickens on the approach to the Bago. The customary bottleneck at the Bago River crossing – Lonely Planet likens it to a “clogged artery” – is exacerbated by roadwork and construction. Stains on the walls of the buildings that line the river, in the centre of town, show where a flood in August peaked: 9.22 metres, 12 centimetres above the warning level. Above the two- and three-storey buildings looms the hti of Shwemawdaw Pagoda.

After Bago, Highway 1 continues through the country’s heartland – Taungoo, Pyinmana, Meiktila – winding between the Sittaung River and Bago Yoma into the dry zone before ending at the last capital of the Myanmar kings: Mandalay.