ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 3, 1996 TAG: 9611050032
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ANGON, MYANMAR
SOURCE: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS\LOS ANGELES TIMES
If you're one who believes in visiting the former Burma, you may or may not be up-to-date on the fatal repression, the global heroin trade and the strange stranded-in-the-'50s atmosphere here. But either way, your most visible enticement to this Southeastern Asian country is probably the tower that stands gleaming on a hill above the city once known as Rangoon.
The 300-foot-high spire of Shwedagon Pagoda is layered with tons of gold and thousands of jewels, a 76-carat diamond on top, surrounded by a riot of red and yellow paint, dragons and elephants in effigy, steeply pitched, ornament-heavy roofs and smoldering incense.
From dawn to dusk, long-suffering workaday Burmese and red-robed monks circle the 2,500-year-old site, their faces protected from the sun's rays by yellowish rice paste. They nod to tourists, acquiesce to photos, kneel to meditate, perhaps reach to place a drooping blossom in a cup beneath a holy figure. W. Somerset Maugham wrote that the pagoda stood out ``like a sudden hope in the dark night of the soul.''
One can take it as a symbol of Burmese spiritual resilience despite tyranny and poverty, as many American visitors do; or one can take it merely as a pretty picture, as Myanmar's governing but nonelected State Law and Order Restoration Council would probably prefer.
In any event, the pagoda sells well. And the SLORC, eager to silence human rights activists calling for a tourism boycott of the country, is looking for more customers.
Over the last year, even as political pressures have led several international corporations to scale back their Burmese investments, Myanmar's leaders have stepped up a ferocious campaign to lure Western tourists - and their hard currency. That campaign accelerated in October with the start of ``Visit Myanmar Year.''
The tourism campaign may pique the interest of adventurers who have heard of Myanmar as a gorgeous, exotic land that is only now beginning to show Western influences after more than 30 years of isolation. But the case of Myanmar raises a nagging question for modern-day travelers: Is my vacation a political act?
Many travelers, and most of those who make their living from tourism, argue that a tourist can't be blamed for all doings in their destinations, or no one would ever leave home. Under that philosophy, crossing borders may put some money in the pockets of objectionable leaders but stands as a chance to communicate the ideals of democracy and perhaps spread some wealth among strangers living in need.
Visiting Myanmar ``is not appropriate,'' says Kyaw Tint, who fled the country in 1985 and now lives in Alhambra, Calif.
``All the facilities - the roads, the hotels and almost all the infrastructure used by tourists - are built by forced labor or foreign workers. Almost all of these hotels where tourists are going to stay are owned by the military or their families. If you go, the military is going to get profits. And if they have more money, they are going to make more oppression.''
Yet by some measures, the ``Visit Myanmar'' campaign is a success already.
Several large, upscale American travel companies have begun bringing travelers into Myanmar, including Abercrombie & Kent International, Classical Cruises & Tours, Geographic Expeditions, Butterfield & Robinson, Mountain Travel-Sobek and Radisson-Seven Seas Cruises. Stressing that they put as little money as possible into the government's pockets, those companies report a small but growing number of bookings from adventurous American travelers.
Burmese government officials say tourist arrivals have grown from fewer than 10,000 in 1989 - the year after troops opened fire in the streets of Yangon, killing an estimated 3,000 pro-democracy demonstrators and bystanders - to more than 60,000 in 1994. (Last year's numbers weren't available.)
Those travelers who reach Myanmar find a world unto itself.
As tourists arrive on a sunny Saturday outside the monstrous concrete red-and-yellow Karaweik restaurant, designed to resemble a hulking royal barge on Yangon's Kandawgyi Lake, a mysterious fellow appears, wearing a Department of Tourism badge and wielding a video camera. He tapes the foreigners, then vanishes.
On a muggy afternoon in the rural outskirts of Yangon, amid the buzz of mosquitoes and the smell of cows and chickens, a load of foreigners steps down from their bus, expecting a glass factory, finding instead a sort of junkyard path strewn with dust-coated glassware from years past. But inside a broad barn, they find a crew of shyly smiling workers standing in the blasting heat of a furnace, prodding, turning and blowing orange ingots of molten glass.
The cooled, hardened results of their work are spread on a table, including dozens of egg-size art pieces, twinkling with blue and green hues and suspended bubbles. These nuggets are the kind one finds in the elegantly lighted shop windows of upscale American resorts for $40 apiece.
``A year ago, the price was about 5 cents each,'' proprietor Myat-Aywe confesses in halting English. Now that more foreigners have come, he says, ``it's 50 cents. Half a dollar. Still not too high.''
The most affluent visitors stay at the teak-lined, 95-year-old, $300-a-night Strand Hotel, once the refuge of old colonials, now restored and run by the Amanresorts luxury chain.
Others choose a cruise on a newly refurbished 128-berth luxury ship, The Road to Mandalay, that since last December has plied the Ayeyarwady between Mandalay and Pagan under the operation of Orient-Express Hotels. With two cruises weekly scheduled from September through May, and prices beginning at $1,500 per person for a three-night cruise, the company forecasts about 4,000 passengers this year.
``Generally, Myanmar people are quite content,'' a government tour guide announces to a busload of Americans as they head toward the waterfront. One American asks if the bus can make a detour past the home of Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of anti-government dissenters. Guide and driver ignore the request. Another American asks how many people died in the 1988 unrest.
``Nobody knows,'' says the guide.
Alistair Ballantine, president of Abercrombie & Kent, which brings high-end tours into the country, has suggested that ``being exposed to the political aspects of day-to-day life in Myanmar turns ordinary travelers into advocates for a cause. They return home as goodwill ambassadors, bringing pressure to bear on their own governments to facilitate change.''
But Carol Richards, an independent anthropologist who is co-founder of the Santa Monica-based Burma Forum, asserts that there really is no free communication between the Burmese and tourists because ``it's very risky for a common person to speak with foreigners, and many tourists don't realize that.''
In the armchair tour of Myanmar's unromantic realities, the first stop would be just a few miles northwest of the Shwedagon Pagoda, on University Avenue.
There, under constant surveillance, stands the home of Suu Kyi, 51, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. In that home she endured house arrest for six years. Since her formal release in 1995, Suu Kyi has delivered regular anti-SLORC speeches here, sometimes with American tourists in her frontyard audience. But in recent interviews, she has denounced casual tourism to her country as ``tantamount to supporting authoritarianism in Burma'' and thrown her support behind the effort to keep tourists away during Visit Myanmar Year.
Next stop on the anti-itinerary might be the forests along Myanmar's western and eastern borders. There, poppy-planting drug lords produced an estimated 220 tons of heroin last year, which the U.S. State Department says makes Myanmar the world leader in opium and heroin production.
Next stop: perhaps a prison somewhere up the Ayeyarwady, where SLORC has jailed two comedians whose crime was making jokes about the government on Independence Day, Jan. 4. Amnesty International estimates the country's political prisoners at more than 1,000, which doesn't count most of the 300 dissidents arrested and released in a May crackdown.
Following that action, on May 23, the U.S. State Department cited ``the potential for violence'' and recommended ``that U.S. citizens exercise all due caution in traveling in Burma and consider curtailing nonessential travel to Burma for the time being.'' (End optional trim)
Still, for a Westerner who sees a benefit to crossing lines, curiosity can be stronger than repulsion.
Along the alleys between Bogyoke Aung San and Anawrahta streets, travelers browse among booksellers who stack their wares on the sidewalk, the inventory running to Paul Erdman (``The Crash of '79''), Thomas Hardy (``Tess of the D'Urbervilles''), a few Tom Clancy offerings and many romances. English-language books are so prized that an entire cottage industry has risen in improvising cardboard bindings to lengthen these volumes' lives.
Downtown in the Bogyoke Aung San Market, where locals gather to gossip and sip tea, visitors wander through a cavernous market area stuffed full of lacquerware, puppets, jewelry of varied quality and cheap T-shirts. Hand-carved teak picture frames fetch $9.
In the dim bar of the Strand hotel, meanwhile, a Mandalay beer goes for $4. On a slow Friday night, the freshly mopped marble floor is empty of customers and a melancholy clarinet-guitar-piano trio is at work. With a ceiling fan slowly circling overhead and colonial ghosts of Maugham and Rudyard Kipling floating just out of view, the players struggle through ``Love Me Tender'' and ``Blue Moon,'' waiting for those Westerners their government wants so badly to come.
LENGTH: Long : 169 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS/Los Angeles Times. 1. The palatialby CNBKaraweik restaurant on Yangon's Kandawgyi Lake resembles a royal
barge. 2. The 300-foot-high spire of Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon,
Myanmar, is layered with tons of gold and thousands of jewels. 3.
Bubbles and baubles shine at a glass-making factory on the outskirts
of Yangon. A year ago, the price was about 5 cents each,''
proprietor Myat-Aywe said. Now that more foreigners have come, he
adds, ``it's 50 cents. Half a dollar. Still not too high.'' 4.
Doormen stand ready to greet hoped-for tourists at a hotel in
Yangon. Burmese government officials say the number of tourists has
grown from fewer than 10,000 in 1989 to more than 60,000 in 1994.