Saturday, May 5, 2007
AS THE plane from Bangkok circled over water-logged fields punctuated by gleaming bell-shaped temple roofs, I tried to imagine life in the country below bleak, cut off from the world, and monitored by soldiers at every corner. How wrong I was.
Myanmar (Burma's name since 1989) has kept up with its Asian tiger neighbours and satellite dishes shower the cities with CNN and Korean soaps.
It also wallows in natural resources: gold, rubies, oil, gas and timber bring in hefty revenues, and trade with China is booming. Businessmen wear crisp white shirts and sarongs, and mutter into mobiles as they trip over broken pavements in their flip-flops.
Leprous colonial facades stand beside characterless modern blocks. It's a strange, halfway, typically Asian world.
Then, as I tucked into breakfast at Yangon's Traders' Hotel, I saw that my fellow guests were from Italy, Spain, France, the US and the Far East and most were tourists. Boycott? What boycott? Officially, 660,000 foreigners came to Myanmar in 2005, of whom only 3.5 per cent were British.
UK historical links with Burma have encouraged most Britons to respect the tourism boycott called for by Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected leader held under house arrest by the ruling military dictatorship and that has included me.
In recent months, however, the arguments of the Free Burma Coalition, a key opposition group, which now actively encourages tourism for the sake of the people of Burma, have received growing exposure and credence in the West, and this prompted me to discuss a trip with Amrit Singh, the Burma-born owner of UK-based tour operator TransIndus. Adamant that only a tiny proportion two per cent of her costs in Myanmar actually go to the government, she is also convinced that tourism can only help the country on the path to democracy.
Despite the evocative lure of Yangon, Mandalay and the Irrawaddy river, you cannot ignore Burmese politics. Suu Kyi is gagged, ethnic minorities are victimised and censorship and forced labour are daily realities. Log on to your hotel broadband and you cannot access Hotmail or Yahoo!; switch on your mobile and nothing happens.
What has saved the Burmese spirit is an unwavering belief in Theravada Buddhism. Keen to win brownie points for an upgraded hereafter, they pile on the gold leaf (reducing one large Buddha I saw to a formless blob), stuff donation boxes with kyat notes and diligently construct pagodas. In no other Buddhist country have I seen such dazzle, from Yangon's Shwedagon, where a bejewelled gold finial tops the massive temple already dripping with 60 tonnes of gold, to Mandalay's Mahamuni Paya (paya means temple), where a 2,000-year-old Buddha statue is lovingly regilded and even has its teeth brushed daily. At these historic paya, and at less grandiose rural ones, I watched locals picnic, snooze and generally hang out in the shady halls and terraces.
Bagan, a 90-minute flight north of the capital, is Myanmar's spectacular equivalent of Cambodia's Angkor studded with some 4,000 pagodas, temples and monasteries dating from the ninth-13th centuries. Looting, neglect, floods, bats and, above all, an earthquake in 1975 have taken their toll, but restoration and Unesco have also revived delicate frescoes depicting Buddha's life, reinstated 10 metre-high gilded statues and rebuilt crumbling brick walls.
Some now look just too perfect. Yet as my pony cart (the local form of taxi) clip-clopped around the deserted outlying structures, it felt so like a lost age of innocence that it was too easy to forget the iniquities of today. Cattle grazed, bullock carts rocked by, goatherds strolled through peanut fields and beaming villagers strode past with yokes on their shoulders.
That tranquillity evaporated when I entered the more imposing royal temples of the central zone. I was stormed by women stallholders thrusting lacquer boxes and temple chimes at me and chanting dollar prices. These desperate tactics were in high contrast to their beauty Burmese women put any Western starlet to shame, despite large yellow splodges daubed on their faces. This is thanaka, a bark paste which acts as a natural skin cream and which even men wear quite unselfconsciously.
My next stop was Mandalay, home to 80 per cent of the country's monks. Temple-fatigue was setting in but nothing could beat the sight of hundreds of monks, young and old, hopping on and off buses on their morning food-rounds and, later, more than 1,000 of them patiently queueing for lunch at Mahagandhayon, Myanmar's largest monastery. One night, as I looked for a taxi, a young monk started testing his limited English. He ended up chaperoning me for the evening, including to see the outrageous Moustache Brothers, Mynamar's only satirists. Banned in Burmese after a performance at Suu Kyi's house, they now perform nightly in English in their family home with backpackers as their audience.
At Pindaya, a short flight away in the eastern Shan state, I gawped at a gigantic cave packed with 8,000 or so effigies of Buddha, before heading for a heaving marketplace. Danu, Pao and Palaung, ethnic minorities absent from the central plains filled the aisles and eating places, selling anything from larvae to steak tartare served on banana leaves. Women smoked little pipes and men chewed and spat betel with a vengeance.
After this trip I feel strongly that Burma's Big Brother needs observers; the more informed foreigners who travel there the better. As Lu Maw, the most voluble of Mandalay's Moustache Brothers, said: "We need many ears, many eyes. The regime is rich if tourists don't come it makes no difference to them. But it does to us."
I heard this again and again but only from people I spoke to on their own: they live in terror of informers. As one monk with magnificently betel-stained teeth and impeccable English said mischievously: "Tourists are a smokeless industry. We like them!" Then: "I got that from Time magazine!"
There isn't much you can put past the Burmese, dictatorship or not. Observer
Myanmar (Burma's name since 1989) has kept up with its Asian tiger neighbours and satellite dishes shower the cities with CNN and Korean soaps.
It also wallows in natural resources: gold, rubies, oil, gas and timber bring in hefty revenues, and trade with China is booming. Businessmen wear crisp white shirts and sarongs, and mutter into mobiles as they trip over broken pavements in their flip-flops.
Leprous colonial facades stand beside characterless modern blocks. It's a strange, halfway, typically Asian world.
Then, as I tucked into breakfast at Yangon's Traders' Hotel, I saw that my fellow guests were from Italy, Spain, France, the US and the Far East and most were tourists. Boycott? What boycott? Officially, 660,000 foreigners came to Myanmar in 2005, of whom only 3.5 per cent were British.
UK historical links with Burma have encouraged most Britons to respect the tourism boycott called for by Aung San Suu Kyi, the elected leader held under house arrest by the ruling military dictatorship and that has included me.
In recent months, however, the arguments of the Free Burma Coalition, a key opposition group, which now actively encourages tourism for the sake of the people of Burma, have received growing exposure and credence in the West, and this prompted me to discuss a trip with Amrit Singh, the Burma-born owner of UK-based tour operator TransIndus. Adamant that only a tiny proportion two per cent of her costs in Myanmar actually go to the government, she is also convinced that tourism can only help the country on the path to democracy.
Despite the evocative lure of Yangon, Mandalay and the Irrawaddy river, you cannot ignore Burmese politics. Suu Kyi is gagged, ethnic minorities are victimised and censorship and forced labour are daily realities. Log on to your hotel broadband and you cannot access Hotmail or Yahoo!; switch on your mobile and nothing happens.
What has saved the Burmese spirit is an unwavering belief in Theravada Buddhism. Keen to win brownie points for an upgraded hereafter, they pile on the gold leaf (reducing one large Buddha I saw to a formless blob), stuff donation boxes with kyat notes and diligently construct pagodas. In no other Buddhist country have I seen such dazzle, from Yangon's Shwedagon, where a bejewelled gold finial tops the massive temple already dripping with 60 tonnes of gold, to Mandalay's Mahamuni Paya (paya means temple), where a 2,000-year-old Buddha statue is lovingly regilded and even has its teeth brushed daily. At these historic paya, and at less grandiose rural ones, I watched locals picnic, snooze and generally hang out in the shady halls and terraces.
Bagan, a 90-minute flight north of the capital, is Myanmar's spectacular equivalent of Cambodia's Angkor studded with some 4,000 pagodas, temples and monasteries dating from the ninth-13th centuries. Looting, neglect, floods, bats and, above all, an earthquake in 1975 have taken their toll, but restoration and Unesco have also revived delicate frescoes depicting Buddha's life, reinstated 10 metre-high gilded statues and rebuilt crumbling brick walls.
Some now look just too perfect. Yet as my pony cart (the local form of taxi) clip-clopped around the deserted outlying structures, it felt so like a lost age of innocence that it was too easy to forget the iniquities of today. Cattle grazed, bullock carts rocked by, goatherds strolled through peanut fields and beaming villagers strode past with yokes on their shoulders.
That tranquillity evaporated when I entered the more imposing royal temples of the central zone. I was stormed by women stallholders thrusting lacquer boxes and temple chimes at me and chanting dollar prices. These desperate tactics were in high contrast to their beauty Burmese women put any Western starlet to shame, despite large yellow splodges daubed on their faces. This is thanaka, a bark paste which acts as a natural skin cream and which even men wear quite unselfconsciously.
My next stop was Mandalay, home to 80 per cent of the country's monks. Temple-fatigue was setting in but nothing could beat the sight of hundreds of monks, young and old, hopping on and off buses on their morning food-rounds and, later, more than 1,000 of them patiently queueing for lunch at Mahagandhayon, Myanmar's largest monastery. One night, as I looked for a taxi, a young monk started testing his limited English. He ended up chaperoning me for the evening, including to see the outrageous Moustache Brothers, Mynamar's only satirists. Banned in Burmese after a performance at Suu Kyi's house, they now perform nightly in English in their family home with backpackers as their audience.
At Pindaya, a short flight away in the eastern Shan state, I gawped at a gigantic cave packed with 8,000 or so effigies of Buddha, before heading for a heaving marketplace. Danu, Pao and Palaung, ethnic minorities absent from the central plains filled the aisles and eating places, selling anything from larvae to steak tartare served on banana leaves. Women smoked little pipes and men chewed and spat betel with a vengeance.
After this trip I feel strongly that Burma's Big Brother needs observers; the more informed foreigners who travel there the better. As Lu Maw, the most voluble of Mandalay's Moustache Brothers, said: "We need many ears, many eyes. The regime is rich if tourists don't come it makes no difference to them. But it does to us."
I heard this again and again but only from people I spoke to on their own: they live in terror of informers. As one monk with magnificently betel-stained teeth and impeccable English said mischievously: "Tourists are a smokeless industry. We like them!" Then: "I got that from Time magazine!"
There isn't much you can put past the Burmese, dictatorship or not. Observer