Should you go? The politics of travel to Asia's most controversial destination.
By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 25, 2003
It would easy to mistake this postcard-perfect sunrise over Burma's ancient city of Bagan for a travel cliche. But it's not a cliche. It's a metaphor. Take a closer look:
A rosé horizon backlights a black skyline of spires and domes. A thin morning fog lies on the plain, torn by temples that rise beyond number above the treetops. They stretch to every horizon, squat pagodas to soaring Buddhist cathedrals, more than 2,000 shrines dating to an 11th-century religious building boom. Watching the tide of dawn creep across this antique world is like meditating on a just-opening lotus blossom.
In the quiet, a bulge detaches itself from a temple to the north and floats smoothly into the brightening sky. The bulge resolves into three separate hot-air balloons that drift tranquilly among the holy ramparts. A flare of gas lights up a cluster of tourists peering over a gondola, followed a beat later by the soft roar of propane. From high on a temple ledge, other foreigners click shutters and murmur appreciations at the surreal and beautiful scene of -- here comes the metaphor -- tourism taking off in Burma.
More and more international visitors are making it to this long-shunned corner of Southeast Asia. The government's own statistics -- notoriously suspect -- show almost a half-million foreigners arriving last year, more than doubling since it began a major tourism push in 1996. No matter how inflated those figures, outside observers agree that tourism is climbing, particularly after last year's bombing in Bali sent travelers in search of alternate Asian beaches.
"Last year was our best year; we were up 20 percent," says Juergen Voss, the German manager of the high-end Bagan Hotel, a plush resort on the banks of the Irrawaddy River and in Bagan's archaeological district.
As he sips club soda on a hotel terrace, small groups of German and French guests arrive at the hotel's masonry gates, mostly retirees on package tours. They climb down from donkey carts, patting the animals and tipping their local drivers for a few hours of sightseeing among temples as stirring as better-known sites like Angkor Wat or Tikal.
"Myanmar is becoming very popular," says Voss. "It's a completely new destination for Westerners."
More people are coming, but the question is, should they? Arguably more than any other country, Burma presents the conscientious traveler with a dilemma: Will my visit help or hurt the local people?
Burma, also known as Myanmar, enjoys both pearl and pariah status in Southeast Asia. It's a largely preindustrial preserve of stirring panoramas, ornate Buddhist architecture, connoisseur-class artisanship and culture that is deep and welcoming, even by the graceful standards of the region. And it's all under the control of what human rights activists say is one of the most vicious governments on Earth.
Many of those activists -- led by Burma's own indomitable opposition hero, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi -- say tourist dollars prop up an all-controlling regime that's guilty of torturing and killing dissidents, wholesale narcotics trafficking, forcing citizens to build roads and hotels, conscripting children to fight in the army and holding more than 1,000 political prisoners. But others, who also condemn the atrocities, argue that tourism is just the kind of "engagement" with the outside world that will improve the lives of some ordinary Burmese, increase global awareness of Burma's plight and, ultimately, hasten the regime's fall.
"My opinion is that tourists should go," says David Steinberg, director of Asian studies at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. "I'm a great admirer of Aung San Suu Kyi, and I'd very much like to see her come to power. But I disagree with her on this point. Tourism provides a rare channel of communication for the Burmese, it provides jobs and it allows foreigners to learn about this culture."
Jeremy Woodrum doesn't buy it. "They're one of the world's most brutal military regimes, cut and dried, and tourism provides them with a significant amount of hard currency," says Woodrum, director of the Washington office of the Free Burma Coalition. "We think tourists who travel to Burma play right into the regime's hands."
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."
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."
It's a fair question. Ask an activist why Burma deserves a tourism boycott when other oppressive states don't -- China, Tibet and Cuba come to mind as popular destinations with dodgy human rights records -- and they cite the dynamic role of Suu Kyi.
"There are three key factors that make Burma unique," says Jackson of Burma Campaign. "You have an elected party that's never been allowed to take power that is asking people not to come. You have a government that tries to promote tourism specifically to raise desperately needed hard currency. And you have systemic, pervasive human rights abuses used to build the very infrastructure tourists use when they go there."
How firmly committed Suu Kyi is to the boycott is a matter of debate, according to Western diplomatic sources in Rangoon. Clearly, her party is not about to give up any bargaining points before the regime begins long-promised, long-delayed negotiations. But Suu Kyi has softened her opposition to certain kinds of humanitarian aid to Burma. And on tourism, her spokesman seemed to allow a little wiggle room in a recent phone interview, suggesting that some kinds of targeted tourism are more acceptable than others.
"My party's official position is that unless we have a dialogue [with the government] we will not change our stance," said U Lwin. "My personal view is that it is up to the individual tourist. Does their money go to the local people? Sometimes, yes. But most of them are not serious. They are looking at the countryside on a bus."
"In Burma," he says, unnecessarily, "things are a little bit different."
Details: Burma
The call to boycott tourism to Burma is voluntary, not official. The U.S. government maintains strict trade sanctions against the country but doesn't prohibit travel there. And Burma is not on the State Department's current list of countries travelers should avoid. However, the department does warn about political tensions: "Popular unrest and violence continue to be possible. U.S. citizens traveling in Burma should exercise caution and check with the U.S. Embassy for an update on the current situation." Details: www.travel.state.gov/burma.html.For more information on the boycott, contact the Free Burma Coalition in Washington (202-547-5985, www.freeburmacoalition.org) or Britain's Burma Campaign (www.burmacampaign.org.uk).
If you decide to visit Burma, here are some things to know.
GETTING THERE: Several major Asian airlines fly into Rangoon, including Thai Airlines via Bangkok and Singapore Air's Silk Air through Singapore. Round-trip fares from Washington are all over the map, but seem to range within $2,000 to $5,000. One way to save money is to shop for bargains to Asia, then add on the relatively cheap hop to Rangoon (about $200 from Bangkok right now).
VISAS: Burma grants 28-day tourist visas for $20; contact the Myanmar Embassy in Washington (2300 S St. NW, 202-332-9044).
CURRENCY: At the airport in Rangoon, all arriving foreigners are required to exchange $200 in cash for dollar-pegged Foreign Exchange Credits, which are accepted by hotels, larger restaurants and shops. For the kyat, the official exchange rate of six to a dollar is universally ignored in favor of street rates closer to 1,000 to 1,200 kyats to the dollar.
WHERE TO STAY: Whether Burmese hotels are controlled, directly or indirectly, by the military regime is a matter of mystery and debate. Here are some that purport to be as independent as possible: the
Savoy (129 Dhammazedi Rd.,
www.savoy-myanmar.com
) in Rangoon, pricey but excellent at $210 a night during the high (dry) season of January to April; the
Bagan Hotel (
www.myanmars.net/baganhotel;
about $55 a night in high season), a comfortable tropical hotel in the archeological zone of Burma's ancient city; and
Golden Island Cottages (011-95-1-571513; $42 a night), built by a local hill tribe on pilings in Inle Lake.
WHAT TO EAT: Burmese food reflects the country's crossroads status between Thailand and India -- rich curried stews, chicken, fish and pork satays, stir-fried vegetables. Excellent Thai and Chinese food is also readily available, particularly in Rangoon. Market lunches cost about $3 per person, nice restaurants, $10; five-star places, $20.
TOURS: The easiest, and probably most common, way to visit Burma is with one of the many package tours. Two that reportedly make in-country arrangements in a politically sensitive way are Rangoon-based Myanmar Travel (www.myanmartravel.net), offering eight-day and longer tours staring at $860 per person, double occupancy; and New York-based Absolute Asia (800-736-8187, www.absoluteasia.com), with eight-day itineraries beginning at $1,860.
Activists, however, say group travel often sends the most hard currency to the regime. Independent travel, on the other hand, allows tourists more chances to target their spending. You may have to make some of your plans after you arrive. Many Rangoon travel agents are savvy and sensitive enough to help you book, for example, privately run Air Mandalay over government-run Myanmar Airways; ask a hotel concierge to recommend a travel agent.