Burma in the Balance

Pagodas and Politics

The flying tourist loop in Burma is small and well established, limited to the few areas where foreigners are allowed to wander: Bagan for the ancient temples; Mandalay, Burma's second-largest city, for a brief homage to Kipling; and finally over to the floating villages of lovely Inle Lake. (More recently, many visitors are adding a side trip to Ngapali or one of the other beach resorts appearing on the Andaman Coast.)

But almost all visits begin in the capital, known as Rangoon to Westerners and Yangon to locals. And all visits begin with a government shakedown: Foreigners at the airport must exchange $200 for an equivalent handful of Monopoly script known as Foreign Exchange Credits, a dollar-pegged tourist currency accepted only by major hotels, restaurants, shops and a few savvy cab drivers. (Reports are common that officials will, for a little side gratuity, lower the $200 minimum substantially.) The street currency is the kyat (pronounced "chat"), with a laughable official exchange rate of about six kyat per dollar. The real rate, available through ubiquitous freelance money changers and hotel concierges, fluctuates around 1,000 to 1,200 kyat to the dollar.

The streets of central Rangoon are crowded with bicycles, cars and trucks overloaded with passengers. Buddhists monks are everywhere, walking the streets and jammed robe-to-robe in pickup truck beds. Rangoon feels like a slow-motion version of Hanoi before its boom -- tree-lined, lush and largely decrepit. (It's without Hanoi's handsome French architecture but also without its nerve-jangling swarms of motor scooters.) Near the crowded downtown, bottles with flowers line the curb as a signal that someone has rationed gasoline to sell. At one corner, evening headlights play across a massive tree trunk that's draped in vines and packed with small figurines and fairylike houses -- the fanciful shrines to spritelike Buddhist spirits called nats.

On Mahabandoola Street, shabby taxis wait for Westerners to emerge from the labyrinthine Scott Market, the main tourist shopping zone for silks, carvings and Burma's signature lacquerware bowls and platters. A couple of boys scurry across a dangerous intersection, struggling under the weight of the 10-foot wooden sign they carry -- it reads "Neurosurgery" in neat, hand-painted letters. Nearby, in a vacant lot, a group of shirtless young men perform gravity-defying tricks with a chinlon, a woven cane ball that players keep aloft with feet only. It's what Hacky Sack would look like if they played Hacky Sack in "The Matrix."

Rangoon's biggest tourist attraction by far is the colossal Shwedagon Pagoda, a mountainous Buddhist shrine that dominates the capital horizon. A group of a dozen Westerners, having paid their $5 fee and dutifully removed their shoes, shuffles along in bare feet as a backward-walking Burmese narrates in French. Like most men in Burma, he wears a Western-style button-up shirt over the traditional wraparound sarong called a longhi. Many of the women, even the urbanites of Rangoon, wear the traditional Burmese swipe of pale mud on their cheeks, a natural sunscreen made from bark called thanakha.

The circling tourists flow slowly around the many locals engaged in a hundred acts of reverence -- palms together, heads to the ground -- in front of countless placid Buddha statues. Shwedagon is very much a working holy place for the Burmese. Its centerpiece is a bell-shaped golden spire that towers over Royal Lake. The surrounding open-air complex is filled with acres of smaller shrines and domes called stupas. Tourists and supplicants alike enter through one of four grand arcades, long staircases lined with vendors selling flowers and souvenirs. The air is rich with chanting, incense and the coo of doves roosting on curlicue rooflines. Bells jingle and the occasional boom of a gong startles the birds and shivers the ribs of tourists.

It's tranquil and grand. But some of the larger Buddha heads are wrung with jarring halos of Vegas-style flashing lights. And it's all so supersized, you wonder if this is the cathedral Oral Roberts might build if he were to accept Siddhartha as his personal savior. A sign advises foreigners that "it is not allowed to wear the short pants, shameless dresses and not good looking dresses."

A middle-aged man in a green plaid longhi watches Shwedagon's evening exodus. "How do you find Myanmar?" he asks. "It is very beautiful, yes? Do people in America think Myanmar is a bad place?"

It's a question you get from almost every Burmese you talk to, an eager request for impressions. This man, like most locals interviewed for this story, is willing to discuss the country's problems if his name is not printed. Typically, he condemns the government -- "They are only for themselves." -- and whispers devotion to Suu Kyi -- "She is our great lady." Asked if he thinks tourists should come to Burma, he seems surprised by the question. "They should come," he says. His brother works at a hotel, he says by way of explanation.

Whether or not they agree with her on the tourism boycott, Suu Kyi is clearly -- if quietly -- beloved by the Burmese. After her party won a landslide victory in the 1990 general election, the junta ignored the vote and put her under house arrest until 1995. She was arrested again in 2000 and released last May with a promise of meaningful political negotiations with the regime. But a year has passed, no real negotiations have begun and Suu Kyi continues to be harassed. One tourist from New York reported walking through Bagan with her Burmese guide and being invited in for tea by a local woman. "I had my guidebook and there was a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi in it," she says. "The government media never shows her, so they all gathered around and their faces just lighted up."

Ironically, Suu Kyi herself has become something of a Rangoon tourist attraction. Taxi drivers coming in from the airport will vaguely point out the road along Inya Lake that leads to her house or her opposition party's headquarters a few blocks from Shwedagon. The storefront office, next to a woodcarver's shop, is always under the watch of sunglass-wearing military intelligence officers. Still, it's something of a dare among informed backpackers to go in and purchase small handmade pins baring the likeness of the laureate. I visited the office without incident, but other tourists have reported being stopped and questioned afterward, and having their Suu Kyi souvenirs confiscated.

"Many, many people are becoming dependent on tourism," says a Burmese who works in the travel industry. This person recalls the period of violent political oppression in 1988 when tourism completely dried up. "In Bagan, there is almost nothing but tourism. People in Bagan were in the river looking for gold. Without tourists to buy lacquerware, there is no money for food."