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For all the recent reforms, as I wander the city streets, I realise that this is still a land apart. There are none of the hulking high-rises that define the megalopolises elsewhere in the region. Here, crumbling apartment buildings from the British colonial era dominate. Women hang washing from the stuccoed balconies, and flocks of pigeons clatter over the rooftops. Outside the old British law courts, scholarly middle-aged men sit before battered typewriters, ready to write out petitions for illiterate plaintiffs. But there are plenty of foreign travellers admiring the city’s glittering golden pagodas and colonial relics
“Right now there is not enough accommodation in Yangon. Every place licensed for foreigners is full,” he says. Aung Bo first started taking in foreign travellers 15 years ago after an inspirational visit to Bangkok’s backpacker ghetto, Khao San Road. But for all his experience, he has been surprised by the speed of the upsurge in recent months.
“Firstly, I think it’s been because there were big floods in Thailand last year, so people were looking for an alternative. But the biggest reason is that Myanmar has become more open, so foreigners are more happy to come here,” he says.
The pale morning mist is melting over the steely waters, and the long black line of hills beyond is stark against a pale sky. The boat driver cuts the clattering outboard motor, and we drift in silence between the clumps of water hyacinth.
Inle was one of Myanmar’s original tourist destinations. The sleepy township of Nyaungshwe at the head of the lake is speckled with guesthouses, and this year they are busier than ever before. Most visitors I speak to express surprise at how “touristy” they have found Myanmar to be.
“The thing is, there are so many more travellers now, but everyone is still going to the same few places — Yangon, Mandalay, Inle and Bagan. They haven’t really opened up the rest of the country. That probably makes it feel more crowded than it is,” says Robert, a visitor from Germany, who I meet amongst the souvenir stalls at Ywama traditional market on the edge of the lake. Old village women in orange head cloths go about their business — hawking muddy vegetables and sweet rice pancakes cooked over hot charcoal — apparently oblivious to the hordes of camera-carrying trippers.
“I’d already been to Laos and Cambodia, and Thailand is boring now, so I wanted to try somewhere new,” says Dutch traveller Rutger, who I meet a few days later in Bagan, a stretch of scrubby plain studded with some 4,000 12th and 13th century pagodas. Like many other visitors, Rutger has taken advantage of cheap flights from Bangkok to tag a Myanmar onto a longer trip through Southeast Asia. But despite what he says, the shortage of rooms in the nearby town of Nyaung U suggests that the drip feed of positive news from the country in the past year has been having an effect on would-be travellers, even if only subconsciously.
The end of the line for tourists is the old port town of Mawlamyine. Much of Myanmar is still closed to outsiders for security reasons. In the north the Kachin Independence Army is still in open conflict with the state, and in the south Karen National Union controls some of the remote border areas.
Ivan, the owner of a guesthouse that once belonged to a British teak trader on Mawlamyine’s riverfront, tells me that the past year had been the busiest since he gained his license in 1996.
“Last year we had more than 1,100 foreign guests; just yesterday there were 17 staying!” he says.
I borrow a bicycle and head out into the countryside. Soon I am rattling along red dirt tracks between great sweeps of ripening rice. Knobby karst outcrops rise from the plains, and villages of neat wooden houses stand beneath the broad-leafed mango trees. This, I decide, is “the real Myanmar” that the increasing numbers of tourists are looking for.
“Compared to Malaysia, Myanmar is really not developed. You could say this is a very poor country. But when I come home, it is good to be here,” he says.
It is dusk by the time I finish chatting with Bunny, and he flags down a passing pickup to take me back to Hpa-An. They sling my bicycle on the roof and I squeeze in amongst the other passengers — old women with bundles of vegetables and trussed chickens. We bounce over the ruts through the lavender-tinted gloaming, and at the next village a young monk clambers aboard and perches himself on the tailboard. He smiles at me, and I catch sight of what he is carrying, wrapped in a clear plastic envelope — a photo of Aung San Suu Kyi…
Photos and text By Tim Hannigan
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