ရန္ကုန္မွာ စက္ဘီးစီးတာ အခက္အခဲ႐ွိတယ္။ ႐ွိတယ္ ဆိုိတာ စက္ဘီးလမ္းေတြမွ မ႐ိွတာ။ အရင္တုန္းကလည္း စက္ဘီးလမ္း ေတြ မျမင္ဖူးပါဘူး။ စက္ဘီးကုိ စိတ္၀င္စားေတာ့မွ ဟိုဟာေလွ်ာက္ဖတ္ ဒီဟာ ေလွ်ာက္ဖတ္ ဖတ္တာေပါ့။ အဲ့ဒါနဲ႕ တစ္ျခားႏုိင္ငံေတြဆို စက္ဘီးလမ္း ေတြ႐ွိ

တယ္ သိလာတာေပါ့။

အရင္တုန္းက မသိပါဘူး ဒီလိုမ်ိဳးပဲ စီးေနၾကတာ။ နယ္မွၾကေတာ့ စီး

ရတာ လြယ္တယ္ေလ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ရန္ကုန္မွာၾကေတာ့ ကားေတြခ်ည္းပဲဆုိေတာ့ ကားေတြကို ကုိယ္ေတြကေ႐ွာင္ေနရတာရယ္၊ ကိုယ္ေတြကကားေတြကုိေ႐ွာင္ေ နရတာရယ္နဲ႕ ျပႆနာ။

ျပီးေတာ့ ရန္ကုန္ အစုိးရက ဆန္းၾကယ္တယ္။ ဒီ ဘာမွ မထိခုိက္တဲ့

စက္ဘီးေတြကုိၾကေတာ့ ရန္ကုန္မွာ တရားမ၀င္ ျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ စဥ္းစားလုိ႕မရ ဘူး။ တျခားႏိုင္ငံေတြမွာက စက္ဘီးစီးဖုိ႕ကုိ အစိုးရကပါ တိုက္တြန္းတာ။ ႐ံုးကို စက္ဘီးနဲ႕လာရင္ အပိုဆုေၾကး ကဘယ္ေလာက္ေပးမယ္ဆိုတာ မ်ိဳးေတြလုပ္တာ။ တုိ႕စီမွာၾကေတာ့ စက္ဘီးကုိ တရားမ၀င္ၾကီးျဖစ္ေနတာ။

အကိုၾကီးႏွစ္ေယာက္႐ွိတယ္။ ေက်ာက္ေျမာင္းထဲက ဆံပင္ညွပ္ဆုိင္ ဖြင့္ထားတယ္။ သူတို႕ေနတာက ကန္ေတာ္ၾကီးတာ၀ါမွာ။ သူတို႕က စက္ဘီးနဲ႕ သြားတယ္ စက္ဘီးနဲ႕ ျပန္တယ္။ သူတုိ႕ကုိ ၾကည့္ျပီးေတာ့ စက္ဘီးစီးခ်င္လာ တယ္။ အဲ့အကိုၾကီးႏွစ္ေယာက္က စီးေတာ့ ရန္ကုန္မွာလည္း အဆင္ေျပပါလား ဆိုိျပီးေတြးမိသြားတာ။ ပထမထဲက စက္ဘီးကစီးခ်င္္တယ္ ဒါေပမဲ့ ရန္ကုန္မွာ အဆင္ေျပမေျပ မသိဘူးေလ။

၀ယ္ထားတာမၾကာေသးပါဘူး။ ေလးလ ငါးလေလာက္ပဲ႐ွိေသတယ္။ အရင္ထဲက စက္ဘီးက စီးခ်င္တယ္ ဒါေပမဲ့ ထားစရာေနရာမ႐ွိလုိ႕။ အခုက လက္ဘက္ရည္ဆိုင္ တစ္ဆိုင္မွာ ေျပာလုိ႕ရတယ္။ ထားမယ္ဆိုေတာ့ ေပးထား တယ္။ အဲ့ဒါေၾကာင့္ ၀ယ္လုိက္တာ။

ရန္ကုန္မွာ စက္ဘီးစီးရတဲ့ အဓိကအခက္အခဲတစ္ခုကကေတာ့ စက္ ဘီးထားတဲ့ေနရာ။ ဘာျဖစ္လို႕လဲဆိုေတာ့ အထပ္ျမင့္မွာေနၾကတာေလ။ ေအာက္က ေျမပုိင္႐ွင္ေတြကလည္း အဲ့ေမာ္တာ႐ုံနားကို ေပးမထားဘူး။ အ ေပၚကို တင္သြားလို႕လည္း မရဘူး။ ဘယ္ေလာက္ပဲ ေပါ့ေပါ့ေလးလုိ႕ဆိုလည္း အနည္းဆံုးေတာ့ ေလး၊ ငါးေပါင္ေတာ့ ေလတာပဲ။ ေန႕တိုင္းသယ္ျပီး အေပၚ တက္ေနရတာ အထပ္ျမင့္ဆို ပိုဆိုးတယ္။ အဲ့ဒါကမလြယ္ဘူး။ ေျမညီထပ္မွာ

မေနဘူးဆုိရင္ေတာ့ အရင္ဆုံး စက္ဘီးထားဖုိ႕ေနရာ႐ွာထားတာပုိေကာင္းတယ္။ ပုိေကာင္းတယ္ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ဒါက ႐ွာကုိ ႐ွာရမွာ။

မနက္တုိင္း မနက္တိုင္း ႐ုံးကုိ စက္ဘီးနဲ႕လာတယ္။ ဘာလုိ႕ စက္ဘီး စီးလဲဆုိေတာ့ ဘတ္စ္ကား မစီးခ်င္လုိ႕။ ေျခြးေတြ သန္ေတြလူးျပီးေတာ့ ႐ုံးသြား လုိက္ ႐ုံးျပန္လိုက္။ ကာဘြန္ဒုိင္ေအာက္ဆိုဒ္ေတြ ႐ွဴျပီးေတာ့ အဲ့လို မသြားခ်င္ဘူူး။ အဲ့ဒါေၾကာင့္ စက္ဘီးစီးျဖစ္တာ။

အရင္တုန္္းကဆိုရင္ ဒီေက်ာက္ေျမာင္းကေန ျမိဳ႕ထဲေတြဘာေတြ သြား လို႕႐ိွရင္ ကားစီးရတာ တစ္ပတ္ၾကီးစီးရတယ္။ အခုက စက္ဘီးနဲ႕ဆိုေတာ့ ကုိယ္ ေတြ ၾကိဳက္တဲ့လမ္းက ဒုိးလုိ႕ရတယ္။

၂၃ ေဖေဖၚ၀ါရီ ၂၀၁၆

It is difficult to bike in Yangon. Well, there is no bike lane. Though, I have not seen bike lane before. Anyhow when I came to be interested in the bikes, I tried to read about bikes. Then I became to know there is bike lane in other countries.

In former time, I did not know value of bikes, I just bike. It is easy to bike in small towns. However, as there are a lot of cars in Yangon, it is a problem that bikers have to keep out from the way of cars.

Besides, Yangon government is strange. This harmless biking is illegal in Yangon. It is out of my logic consideration. In other countries, the government encourages to bike. They promote biking by giving bonus if you come to the office by bike. Unlikely, biking is being illegal in our city, Yangon.

There are two older men. They have a hair salon in Kyauk-Myaung. They live in Kandawgyi Tower. They bike to and from their work. I became to feel like biking seeing them biking. This thought came to my mind that it is also convenient to bike in Yangon. Since before, I wanted to bike but I was not sure that it would be convenient or not.

It has been just a while that I bought the bike. I wanted to bike before but there is no place to keep it. At the moment, my bike is kept at a Tea-Shop, the owner allowed me to keep at the shop. That is why I bought it.

The difficulty to bike in Yangon is the storage place to keep the bike as the residents live on the high floors. The landlord does not allow to keep the bike near the motor house. It can also not be brought up to those high floors we live. However it is light, it weighs at least four or five pounds. It would be a disaster to carry the bike to the high floor every day. It is not easy. If you do not stay in ground floor, it is better you find a place to keep the bike first. It is not better. You must find first surely.

I go to work by bike every morning. It is because I do not want to take buses. It is annoying that you have to be in the sweaty crowd to and from your work. I do not want to go to work like this inhaling carbon dioxide.

Before, if I want to go to downtown from Kyauk-Myaung, it takes me hours to get there as the buses go on the main road making a long path. But now as I bike, I can go whichever way I want.

Aung 23rd, February 2016

Translated by Thu Zar

Next Story : A conversation/chat with an acquaintance/brother who said the bus is not that kind of transportation system which is comfortable enough to read books on it and that s why he chose bicycling