Burma in the Balance

Today in Bagan, a short flight from Rangoon, there are plenty of tourists to buy lacquerware, hire donkey carts and shop the many micro-markets that locals set up around the temples. Many of the peddlers hawk their wares inside the shrines, with T-shirts, knockoff ceramic idols and calligraphy laid out for sale at the very feet of giant Buddhas. Often it's young girls doing the selling, wheedling and haggling with an ad hoc vocabulary of English, French, German and Japanese. "Good price, good price." For many, it's the only schooling they get.

A few years ago, the government uprooted the main village of Bagan and moved it a few kilometers outside the tourist zone where most of the temples are concentrated. But every day, dozens of locals walk or bike back to sell to the tourists or work in the hotels. In some of the major stupas, like the giant Shwezigon Paya, vendors push with surprising aggressiveness -- sometimes turning a sales pitch into a plea for money.

Even so, with literally thousands of ancient structures packed into the region, it's easy to find solitude in one of the world's great archaeological wonders.

"It's as good as I've seen anywhere," says Gerald Lewis, a well-traveled officer of a U.S. Christian relief agency based in Bangkok. "I'm surprised by how intact it all is."

Lewis and his wife, visiting on a weekend vacation, are staying at the Bagan Hotel. It's a comfortable place of rolling lawns, huge tropical plantings and polished teak rooms. During the high season from January through April, the hotel is often completely booked. This weekend, it's filled with three separate bus-based groups of Germans. ("Here come the Panzer Divisions" is how one waggish Irish guest announced a group's arrival at the lavish outdoor breakfast buffet.) The hotel is privately run, as is the major hotel next door and most of the other properties in the region. Once all government-controlled, the regime recently opened the door to private foreign investment, and Japanese, Thai and German companies came in. Although the government owns most of the land and all hotels must have a Burmese partner, Voss, the Bagan Hotel's manager, insists the government takes nothing from his revenues beyond a 10 percent tax. It's a promising development, but democracy activists say the regime still has ways of getting a cut.

"There just aren't many people with money to invest in these enterprises who aren't in some way connected to the regime or the drug syndicates," says John Jackson, head of Britain's influential Burma Campaign. "Burma just doesn't have a very broad-based middle class."

Reflections on Inle Lake

One hotel that seems truly independent from the regime is perched on skinny bamboo pilings at one end of another major Burmese tourist zone, Inle Lake. Reachable only by boat, Golden Island Cottages is a spider web of long sturdy piers connecting dozens of bamboo bungalows to a roomy central lodge. Each cottage sports a private veranda, an immensely pleasing place to muse on the sunrise over the lake's misty waters and, even better, the lake's unique fleet of fishermen. An Inle fisherman, using a huge conical net, is famous for the one-footed way he finesses his wooden dugout around the shallows; with his paddle wrapped around one ankle he works the net with his free hand (think of how you wield a broom wrapped around one arm with the dustpan in the other).

The cottages were built not by the military regime but by one of the many local tribes that has waged civil war against it. The Pa'O people, from the mountains surrounding Inle Lake, had been fighting an armed insurgency when the government allowed them to build this hotel as part of a ceasefire in the mid-1990s. The whole community donated money, labor and materials, and it opened in 1996 with 40 rooms. Now, the hotel employs 58 people and is second only to jade mining as a source of revenue for the Pa'O tribe. A committee of 30 elders dispenses the money for road building, scholarships and other basic needs Rangoon can't meet.

"This money goes directly to our people," says a Pa'O who is part of hotel management. "We didn't even have electricity before tourists started coming."

The hotel is nearly full. This time it's a British tour group that arrives in canoe after canoe, each being greeted at the landing by a traditional drum and cymbal band. (Every arriving boat gets this treatment; it's very welcoming but a bit much if you're just dashing back for some forgotten sunscreen.) Over the next two days -- in long canoes driven by unmuffled two-stroke motors -- the Brits will ply the lake's chief attractions: villages built over the water; whole farms constructed on floating rows of sod; silk looming workshops, blacksmith shops, cigar factories; an overly touristy floating market; and finally, a floating monastery where monks with a lot of time on their hands have taught house cats to jump through hoops.

"My favorite was the jumping cats," says Daniel Hill, a 15-year-old from Melbourne, Australia, sitting in the hotel's open-air dining room. It's past dusk and the red and yellow lights on the cottages cast long neon streaks across the black water. His mother, Rikki Hill, brought Daniel and his sister to Burma after reading that tourism was beginning to open here. She was aware of the boycott but decided to come anyway.

"By the end of two weeks, yes, I think we've contributed to the local economy," she says. "It's all well and good for people to get on a high horse, but some of those same people will go to China or Indonesia or Malaysia where things are also not too good."