ရခုုိင္မွာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုုိ႕ကအိမ္က ျမိဳ႕နဲ႕ နည္းနည္းေ၀းတဲ့ ေနရာမွာ စက္ဘီးေတြဘာေတြစီးျပီး ေက်ာင္းကုိုေတာက္ေလွ်ာ က္တက္ရတာ။ ရန္ကုုန္ကုို အလုုပ္လုုပ္ဖုုိ႕ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ၂၀၁၃ မွာေျပာင္းလာတယ္။ ဒီမွာၾကေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္က ကားပဲဆီးရတယ္။ ကားဆီးရတာ ဘယ္လုိုမွသေဘာမက်ဘူး။ တိုုး စီးရတာနဲ႕ ေတာစီးရတာနဲ႕။ ျပီးေတာ့ traffic နဲ႕ဘာနဲ႕ဆုုိေတာ့ ကားေပၚမွာ ပိတ္ျပီးေတာ့ေလာင္ေနရတာလည္း ကၽြန္ေတာ္က မလုုိခ်င္ဘူး။ ကားေပၚမွာက စာဖတ္ျပီးေအးေအးေဆးေဆးသြားလိုု႕ရတဲ့ transportation system မ်ိဳးလည္း မဟုုတ္ဘူး။ အဲ့ေတာ့ စက္ဘီးစီးမယ္ဆိုုျပီးေ႐ြးလိုုက္တာ။

ရန္ကုုန္မွာ စက္ဘီးစျပီးစီမယ္ဆိုုတုုန္းက နည္းနည္းေတာ့ေၾကာက္တယ္။ ဒီမီးပြိဳင့္ေတြဘာေတြလည္း နားမလည္ေသးဘူး။ စက္ဘီး၀ယ္မွ စျပီးေလ့လာျဖစ္တယ္။ မီးပြိဳင့္ကဘယ္လုုိျဖစ္တယ္။ ဒီရန္ကုုန္ျမိဳ႕က ဒီမီးပြိဳင့္ system ေတြ သိယံုုေလာက္နဲ႕မရဘူး အထာလည္းသိဖိုု႕လိုုတယ္။ ဘယ္ကားကေတာ့ ဘယ္လိုုသြားတတ္တာေပါ့။ ဒီကားကေတာ့ ငါ့ကုိုေက်ာ္တတ္ၾကေတာ့မွာပဲဆုိုျ ပီးေတာ့။ အထာေလးေပ့ါ ကုုိယ့္ရဲ႕ဆဠမအာ႐ံုုေလးသံုုးျပီး စီးရတာေပါ့။

ကၽြန္ေတာ္က ေက်ာက္ေျမာင္းမွာေနတယ္။ အလုုပ္က လမ္း(၅၀)မွာ။ ကားနဲ႕သြားတုုန္းက တစ္ေကြ႕တစ္ပတ္ၾကီးျဖစ္ေနတယ္ နာရီ၀က္ေလာက္ၾကာ တယ္။ စက္ဘီးစီးနဲ႕ဆုုိ ဆယ့္ငါးမိနစ္ေလာက္ပဲ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုို႕အလုုပ္က တစ္ ေနကုုန္ထိုုင္ျပီးလုုပ္ရတဲ့ အလုုပ္ဆုိုေတာ့ စက္ဘီးစီးတာက က်န္းမာေရးေလ့ က်င့္ခန္းလည္းလုုပ္ျဖစ္သြားတာေပါ့။ အသြား ၁၅မိနစ္၊ အျပန္ ၁၅မိနစ္ စက္ဘီး စီျဖစ္သြားတယ္။ ေခၽြးေတာ့ နည္းနည္းစိုု႕တယ္ ဒါေပမဲ့ အဲ့ဒါ အရမ္းေနေပ်ာ္တယ္။

ကၽြန္ေတာ္တုုိ႕က ကားပိတ္တာကိုု မလိုုခ်င္လိုု႕ စက္ဘီးစီးလိုုက္တာကုို။ ကားေတြပိတ္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာ စက္ဘီးက ေဘးနားေလးက အသာေလး ေက်ာ္တက္သြားလုို႕ရတယ္။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ကားေတြက ၀ုုန္း၀ုုန္း၀ုုန္း၀ုုန္းနဲ႕ သြားေန တဲ့ အေျခအေနမ်ိဳးကၽြန္ေတာ္ၾကံဳဖူးတယ္။ အဲ့ဒါက သာေကတဘက္သြားတဲ့အ ခါမ်ိဳးမွာ။ ကားမက်ပ္ေတာ့ဘူး။ ဒါေပမဲ့ေနာက္ေက်ာက ဘယ္လိုုမွမလုံုဘူး။ အေနာက္က ၀ုုန္း၀ုုန္း၀ုုန္း၀ုုန္းနဲ႕ ေက်ာ္တက္ေနေတာ့ ကိုုယ္တစ္ခ်က္မွားရင္ ပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ သူတစ္ခ်က္မွားရင္ပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တိုု႕ပဲ တစ္ခုုခုုျဖစ္သြားမွာ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္႐ံုုးျပန္ေတာ့ ဘာလုိ႕လမ္းၾကားတြထဲေ႐ြးလည္းဆိုုေတာ့ အဲ့ဒီ့အခ်က္ လည္းပါတယ္။

ကၽြန္ေတာ္စီးရင္ လမ္းသြယ္ေလးေတြကုိုအဓိကထားစီးတယ္။ လမ္းမ ေတြကုို တတ္ႏုိုင္သမွ်ေ႐ွာင္တယ္။ လမ္းမေတြက ကားတြ႐ွဳပ္ေနရင္ အရင္က အတိုုင္းပဲ မီးခုုိးေတြ႐ွဴရတာနဲ႕ ဘာနဲ႕ဆုိုေတာ့ သေဘာမက်ဘူး။ ေနာက္ျပီး ဒီ တိုုင္း ဦးထုုပ္ေတြဘာေတြမပါဘဲ ဒီတုုိင္းသြားမယ္ဆုို သူတိုု႕က ခန္႕ခ်င္မွခန္႕မွာ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ဒါၾကီးကအရမ္းလံုုျခံဳတယ္ေတာ့မဟုုတ္ေပမဲ့ ဒါေစာင္းထားေတာ့ ဒီ ေကာင္က စက္ဘီးကိုုစည္ကမ္း႐ွိ႐ိွစီးတယ္ဆုိုတာမ်ိဳးေတာ့ ျဖစ္တာေပါ့။

ကၽြန္ေတာ္က ကိုုယ့္လမ္းကိုုယ္သြားတာပဲ။ အရမ္းၾကီး ေက်ာ္တက္တာ တိုု႕ ၾကားထဲ၀င္တာတိုု႕ မလုုပ္ဘူး။ သူတိုု႕ဆဲမွာဆိုုတာ သိေနတာပဲ အဆဲေတာ့ မခံဘူး။ ေနာက္ျပီးေတာ့ သူတိုု႕ရဲ႕ ေျပာတာဆုုိတာလည္း မခံခ်င္ဘူး။ ျဖစ္ႏုုိင္ရင္ ေတာ့ ကားေတြကုုိေ၀းေ၀းေ႐ွာင္တယ္။ ရပ္ကြက္ထဲမွာဆုိုရင္ေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္

စက္ဘီးမစီးေတာ့ဘူး။ အဲ့အခါၾကရင္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လမ္းေလွ်ာက္လုုိက္တယ္။ ညဘက္စီးဖိုု႕အတြက္ေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ့စက္ဘီး မီးေတြဘာေတြေတာ့ ေသျခာျပန္တက္ရမယ္။ အခုု ကၽြန္ေတာ့ရဲ႕ေရာင္ျပန္ေတြက နည္းေသးတယ္။ ေနာက္ျပီးေတာ့ bell တုို႕ဘာတိုု႕ၾကေတာ့ ကားေတြေလာက္ အသံမက်ယ္ေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ့ဟာက ေပ်ာက္ေပ်ာက္သြားတယ္။ အဲ့ဒါေတြေတာ့ ျပန္လုုပ္ရအုံုးမယ္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႕ေမာ္ကြန္းမဂၢဇင္းကလည္း ရန္ကုုန္မွာ စက္ဘီးလမ္းေတြ လုုပ္လိုုက္ရင္ ဘယ္လိုုျဖစ္လာမလဲဆုုိျပီး စာေရးဖိုု႕ဟာေတြလည္း႐ွိတယ္။ အဲ့မွာ အင္တာဗ်ဴးတဲ့ဟာေတြမ်ိဳးေတြပါမယ္။

စက္ဘီးစီးရတာတကယ္ေကာင္းတယ္။ မစီးေသးတဲ့သူေတြကိုုလည္း

စီးၾကည့္ေစခ်င္တယ္။ အရမ္းစိတ္ခ်မ္းသာတယ္ သြားရတာ ။ ကိုုယ့္အားနဲ႕ကုို သြားရတဲ့အခါၾကေတာ့ ကိုုယ့္လမ္းကုိုယ္သြားတယ္။ ကုုိယ့္စက္ဘီးနဲ႕ ကုုိယ္သြား လုုိက္ရင္ေရာက္သြာေရာ။

၃၁၊ မတ္ ၂၀၁၆

At Rakhine State, I used to ride bicycle when I went to school in my childhood since our house is in the rural area of the town. I came to Yangon to work in 2013. Here bus is the major transportation to move. But I do not like taking buses. Every day I have to face struggle to take buses since it is over-crowded. Despite that traffic congestion also bothers me, I hate to be stuck in the buses on that bloody hot weather. It was not that kind of the transportation system that I can read comfortably on it. That is why I decided to cycle.

I was a bit scared when I started cycling in Yangon. I still do not understand system of traffic lights. I started to learn how a traffic light works after I have bought bicycles. How does the traffic light works. It is not enough only to know how the traffic light works, there is some trick with them to be familiar with. I have to be clever enough to guess which vehicle would go in which direction, how do they go and which car would be overhead of me. There is trick to ride bikes on the road and I have to use my sixth sense capability when biking.

I live in Kyaunk Myaung township and work on 50th street. When I go to work by car, it took me half an hour since the track is not straight. Meanwhile the bikes take me only fifteen minutes to get work. Besides, since I have to sit at work for the whole day, biking becomes a healthy exercise. So, I am used to ride bike 15 minutes to go work and 15 minutes to be back home a day. It makes me sweat a little bit but it is very pleasing to live.

We bike because we do not want traffic congestion. When the buses are stuck in the traffic, the bikes can pass them very easily. But I have encountered the vehicles are going rushing. That s when I go to Tar-Kay-Tha township. There is not traffic anymore on that area. But my back is so tight since the vehicles are going very fast and in a careless manner. I would face something serious in any case whatever if I do something wrong, or whatever they do. That is why I choose the small street to bike when I am back from office.

I rely on small lanes to bike. I avoid main roads as much as I can. Main road is polluted with smokes in congestion full of cars, at this situation I dislike to breathe the smoke from cars. Furthermore, people may not respect the bikers if we do not wear helmet. Although wearing helmet is not that safe, it would be assumed that I ride bikes in a well-equipped manner.

When biking, I just go on my way. I do not try to pass the cars and do not go between them intentionally. I know they will yell at me if I do so, so I avoid to get shouted. Besides, I do not want to get blamed. If possible, I keep a distance from cars. In the ward, I do not bike ride anymore, then I walk there.

For bike ride at night, I have to fix the lights on my bike. At the moment, the reflection of the lights of my bike is still scattering. And since the bell of my bike is no longer louder than the cars’, it disappeared among them. I have to refix them in order to ride bike at night. There is also agenda on our magazine, “Maw Khun” to write about “What If there are bike lanes in Yangon” which will include interview of biking.

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

Biking is really good. I want to suggest people who have not tried yet. It is so lively and cheerful to bike. We just go on own way since we go in our effort. The destiny is yours if go with bike.

Aung 31st, March 2016

Translated by Thu Zar