Why Right Now is the Time to Visit

Myanmar
by Andrew Solomon

It's a nation on the cusp of great change, and there's never

been a better time to go than right now. Find out why T+L has
annointed it "Destination of the Year."
You might not want to go to Myanmar yet.

You might want to wait until the country, formerly Burma, becomes a full-fledged democracy, possibly led by Daw
Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and icon of righteous courage. You might want to wait until the
Muslim problem settles down, and until the armed conflict with minority ethnic groups is resolved. You might hold
out for utopia, as lots of Myanmars citizens appear to be doing. You might sit tight until the political prisoners
have received their reparations, censorship is truly of the past, and the sometime junta has written itself out of
existence. You might want to wait until it becomes what it is now becoming.

You might, however, be well advised to go right now. Go before the place internationalizes and loses the look of
old Asia that has been preserved by its harshly imposed self-isolation. Go before irreligiosity strips Myanmar of its
mystical Buddhist purity. Go before the people in remote villages grow accustomed to tourists and lose their
curiosity about you, before people switch to global ways of dressing and thinking. Go before they fix the English on
the menus and signs. Go before the place gets wealthy and ugly, because if one can generalize from the little
pockets of prosperity there, economic miracles are not going to make for an attractive sight. Go before everyone
else goes.

I had anticipated a time of hope in Myanmar. In the few years prior to my visit, political prisoners had been
released, censorship of the media had been eased, parliamentary elections had taken place, and international
sanctions had been lifted. Foreign investment was beginning to invigorate the economy. Suu Kyi, freed from about
two decades of house arrest in 2010, was engaged in a campaign aimed at the presidency. The country seemed to
be barreling toward both wealth and democracy. But what I found was an extremely cautious neutrality. The
exuberance of transition was tempered by the Buddhist philosophy of a people who had seen too many rays of
hope extinguished. The population had been optimistic, perhaps, in the lead-up to independence in 1948; they had
been optimistic again in 1988, when student uprisings promised a new justice; they had even had a streak of
optimism during the Saffron Revolution of 2007, when thousands of monks rose up against the government only to
be brutally crushed. By 2014, they had eliminated such buoyancy from their repertoire of attitudes and were
merely waiting to see what might happen next.

That did not make it an unwelcoming place to visitin fact, quite the opposite. Besides being a land of spectacular
landscapes and buildings, Myanmar boasts a fierce, proud, and kind population who will go to almost any lengths
to make you feel welcome. Sammy Samuels, a Burmese Jew who owns a travel agency called Myanmar Shalom,
said that people had had absurdly high expectations that with reform, foreign investment would pour in, new
airports would be built, and everyone would become wealthy. Many were disappointed to realize how sluggish
development is; the Burmese call the Internet the internaynay being the Burmese word for slowand Internet
penetration is only about 1 percent. But there were still incontrovertible changes. Two, three years ago, every
time I come back from the United States, I am so scared at the airport even though I have nothing on me, Sammy
said. The immigration officer starts asking, What were you doing there? Now, theyve start saying, Welcome
back. Its a happier place.

Author and presidential advisor Thant Myint-U, chairman of the Yangon Heritage Trust, said, For the bottom fifty
percent in terms of income, daily life is not much better at all. But the country was based on fear, and now the fear
has been taken out of the equation, and people are discovering how to debate or discuss their own fates.

Golden stupas (or pagodas: the terms are interchangeable here) glitter in the sun wherever you go in Myanmar. In
the shadow of these towers, peasants labor in rough conditions. One local drily remarked to me that the country is
rich, but the people are poor. For many, life seems to have gone on largely unchanged for the past 2,500 years:
peasants, oxcarts, the same kinds of food and clothes. The same glittering pagodas, covered in gold in the richer
towns, and merely painted in the poor ones. Nothing ever happens when it should; its amazing that the sun sets
on schedule. My voyage among these contradictions and inefficiencies was impeccably curated by GeoEx and went
startlingly smoothly. They had designated as my guide the charming Aung Kyaw Myint, with whom my friends and I
spent our time learning history, geography, culinary arts, and cultural fluency.
We began our trip in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), the heart of the country. Its Shwedagon Pagoda is among the
holiest sites in the land, and people come from near and far to worship at it. The central stupa is covered in gold
not gold leaf, but thick plates of solid goldand there are receptacles full of jewels near its apex. The Burmese
maintain that the pagoda is worth more than the Bank of England. Incongruous amid the modernizing city, it feels
momentous and transcendent, a sort of St. Peters Basilica of Theravada Buddhism. At Burmese pagodas, you are
required to take off your shoes as a mark of respect. When President Obama visited in 2012, the secret service
protested that its agents couldnt be barefoot, but at his insistence, they broke a previously unequivocal rule and
removed their footwear, and the President paid his respects.

Myanmars cuisine is largely unknown outside the country. The national dish, lahpet, is a salad of fermented tea
leaves mixed with chiles, sesame oil, fried garlic, dried shrimp, peanuts, and ginger. In Yangon we ate at the local
favorite Feel, which serves excellent noodles; at Monsoon, the chic favorite of the international crowd, which
offers delicious Burmese and Pan-Asian food; and at Padonma, which is a splendid, traditional operation out near
the Belmond Governors Residence hotel. The historic colonial center of the city, which Thant Myint-Us group is
trying to preserve, has the majestic sweep of the Raj.

After a few days in Yangon, we headed northwest to Rakhine state, center of anti-Muslim prejudice in Myanmar
and locus of some of the countrys greatest sights. We flew to Sittwe, capital of the state, a depressing place with
an extremely colorful fish market.

Early the next morning, we boarded a boat for the five-hour ride to Mrauk-U, an imperial capital from the 15th to
the 18th century. If you make it to Myanmar, take as many boats as you can. The life of the country unfolds on the
rivers, and they make for smoother journeys than the badly paved roads. Everyday scenes appear as picturesquely
as in genre paintings, the breeze is delightful, and there is always another pagoda ahead. If you are staying at the
Princess Resort in Mrauk-U, you will get to embark in one of its old wooden bargesand the food on board is
delicious.

The Princess is not opulent by international standards, but its charming campus of pretty little cottages around a
pool of lotus flowers is overseen by the nicest possible staff. After visiting a few pagodas and other Buddhist sites,
we returned to the hotel for a dinner that included a delectable salad of banana flowers. The next morning, the
hotel manager woke us at 4:45 for a drive through the eerily darkened byways of the impoverished town to the
foot of a small mountain with steps carved into it. We went up and up and found at the summit that hotel staff had
come even earlier and arranged a continental breakfast for us, and we sat there to watch the sun rise over the
pagodas. Mornings in Myanmar often find bewitching mists hovering in the valleys and around the hills,
delineating what is small and close and what is large and far; though temples and monuments may look similar in
size upon first glance, the blurring of their edges bespeaks the distance. I called our Mrauk-U sunrise Pagodas in
the Mist.

We had Rakhine breakfast at the hotel, which is fish soup with rice noodles and a lot of spices and condiments,
then sailed upriver to visit Chin villages. The Burmese king used to take beautiful women for his harem; to protect
themselves, according to legend, the Chin began tattooing their faces with lines like spiderwebs, a custom that
continued long after the threat had abated.

We headed south the next day, driving from Yangon, stopping at various pagodas and other sacred sites before
reaching the Golden Rock. At the base of the mountain on which it sits, we boarded one of the ascension trucks.
As we drove, I kept reminding myself that people actually pay to get this kind of experience at Six Flags: going
dizzyingly fast up and down and around tight switchbacks.

The place was mobbed with pilgrims, Buddhist monks and nuns, and more. Street foods and the ingredients for
traditional medicines were being hawked everywhere: porcupine quills; a goats leg soaked in sesame oil; bunches
of dried herbs. Many people were sleeping on bamboo mats or in makeshift tents. Thousands upon thousands of
candles flickered, the hum of chanting was ubiquitous, and the air was heavy with incense. Young couples come
not only out of piety, but also for the chance to interact in the anonymity of the crowd, and younger boys and girls
in groups pay respect to the Buddha and have a raucous good time; we saw and heard them singing Burmese pop
songs. Flashing, Chinese-sourced LED displays were draped over the buildings, even the animist shrines and holy
outbuildings. If I were to say that it made Grand Central Station at rush hour look like a meditation retreat, Id be
underselling the anarchic chaos. Yet for all of that, it felt peaceable; one sensed a layer of holy calm just beneath
the wildness.

The Golden Rock itself is an extraordinary sight: a boulder, nearly round, 20 feet in diameter, balanced on the edge
of the mountain as if on the verge of plummeting. Legend holds that three hairs of the Buddha keep it on its
precarious perch. The entire rock is covered in gold leaf, which devoted pilgrims keep adding, so that in some
places, the gold is an inch thick and stands out in lumps. Atop the rock, far out of reach, is the Kyaiktiyo Pagoda.
The gold orb glows at sunrise, in afternoon light, at sunset, in the floodlit nighttime. When the light changes, the
effect shifts subtly, but it is never less than awe-inspiring. We climbed under it, stood beside it; from every
vantage, one feels the fragility of its odd balance, the drama of its massive heft, and the tranquillity that holy
places can have. It has the grandeur of a fire, or a rushing river, or a mountaintop panorama. We descended the
mountain by pasha-worthy sedan chairs, surveying the surrounding jungle in a semi-recumbent posture.

There are 500,000 monks and 150,000 nuns in Myanmarwhich is to say that nearly 1 percent of the country is
in orders. Most boys spend at least some time as monks before returning to their families. As a visitor, you pick up
a bit of Buddhism as you go along. To wit, there are six types of religious structure: the pagoda or stupa (or zedi), a
solid structure with no interior that often contains a relic; the temple, a hollow square building in and out; the
cave, which serves as a meditation center for monks; the ordination hall; the monastery, which is a residence for
monks; and the library, where the scriptures of the Buddha are kept.

We visited examples of them all. Most of the Buddhas one sees are made of a base of brick, or occasionally
limestone, with a covering of plaster and lacquer. The standard policy is to fix the plaster and lacquer as they fade
or chip, which results in Buddhas that look as though they have just been reupholstered; no elegant patina of age
comes to settle on them. The restoration of the 11th-century reclining Buddha at Thaton looked as if it had been
fashioned on Tuesday by a pastry chef.

The small city of Hpa-An lies on a flat plain interrupted by limestone hills so abrupt that they resemble furniture
delivered by an incompetent moving company and left to be positioned later on. The south of the country is less
developed (which is saying something) and the roads are mostly pretty bad. We stopped at various holy caves, in
which ornament has been carved from and applied to the rock itself and dozens of large lacquered Buddhas stand
guard. We took a boat, another gorgeous river trip, to Mawlamyine; the cities of the region have some charm, but
the high points were the countrysides wooden pagodas and caves.

We headed up north of Yangon, to Mandalay, the last royal capital of the former Burma. The city is more beautiful
as a romantic idea than as an actual place, but it was there that we boarded the Belmond Road to Mandalay, a
floating bit of Western luxury owned by Belmond (formerly known as Orient-Express). It plies the stretch from
Mandalay to Bagan, stopping one night in Mandalay, sailing for a day down the Irrawaddy River to Bagan, and then
staying a night at anchor in Bagan. Its cabins are elegant, the food is divine, and the crew are so coddling that
youre surprised that they dont tie your shoes. The top deck is a teak platform with straw chairs and a small
swimming pool and bar; there is enough space so that you can have reasonable privacy even when many other
passengers are up there. Our second night on the boat, we were invited up on deck for a special treat: six little
boats, hidden upstream, set afloat 1,500 tiny banana-wood rafts, each with a candle burning inside a colored-
paper shade, and we watched as the current carried them down the water. It was almost unimaginably poetic.

Bagan was the capital from the ninth to the 13th century. In this period, it became fashionable to build pagodas
and temples, and noblemen competed with one another to construct grander and more splendid ones; poorer
people built more modest structures. The detritus of that spiritual one-upmanship is a 26-square-mile plain
festooned with 4,446 religious monuments. Its impossible to understand through photographs, because its power
lies in its sweep. We walked among the pagodas; we drove among them; we climbed one of the temples to watch
the sun set; we surveyed the whole gloriously littered landscape from a hot-air balloon. Even in person, its hard to
compass the scale of Bagans Plain of Temples. Its bigger than Manhattan, more than eight times the size of the
gardens of Versailles. Some of the buildings were badly restored by the junta, others are dilapidated but still
coherent, and many are in ruins. Whichever one you are looking at, you see a thousand more over its shoulder. If
one feels exalted by the Golden Rock, one is humbled by Bagan, by the glory that was and the splendor that is.

We ended our trip at Inle Lake, in central Myanmar: a shallow lake where the locals have for eons lived by fishing.
They stand up in their boats and paddle with one leg to keep their hands free for their nets. Its a spectacular sight:
they stand erect and move with astonishing grace in a serpentine full-body undulation. You go by boat to visit the
lakes many shrines. Local weavers produce cloth from the fibers of lotus stems; I brought some home and had a
summer jacket made from it, and later learned that one of the Loro Piana cashmere billionaires had done the same
thing after his visit. There are numerous pagodas, of course, and picturesque villages, and an abandoned temple
complex, now overgrown. There is a famous floating market, which is rather touristy, and some others along the
shore that are less so. The Princess Resort there is as lovely as the one in Mrauk-U, and its creator, the French-
trained Burmese hotelier Yin Myo Su, has also constructed the Inthar Heritage Housea building of perfect
traditional style that houses a breeding operation for Burmese cats and a restaurant where we had our best meal
of the trip.

But on the lakes eastern shore is a gash in the landscape, the site of a construction project that will triple the
number of hotel rooms at Inle Lake. There is no way that the lakes fragile infrastructure can support such a deluge
of tourists. The lake itself is silting up from unsustainable farming practices, and the narrow waterways around it
are already crowded. The beauty of the lakeindeed the beauty of Myanmaris in considerable part a
consequence of its long-term inaccessibility. It is on its way to becoming so accessible that there may soon be
nothing to access.

People I met shook their heads over such development, but they had made their peace with tougher things. I was
surprised at first by the fact that the country is not in a time of tremendous optimismbut I was astonished in the
end by the pervasive equanimity that seemed to exist among even those with little hope of personal betterment.
There was not so much optimism in Myanmar, but there was also very little pessimism, which is perhaps a high
expression of the countrys Theravadan ideals. Between my explorations of Myanmars landscape and monuments,
I interviewed a dozen former political prisoners there. Many of them spoke of being grateful for their experiences.
In prison, they said, they had had time to develop their minds and hearts, often through meditation. They had in
most instances set out knowingly to do things that would result in their imprisonment, and they had marched into
their cells with their heads held high. When they were released, their heads were still held high. The writer and
activist Ma Thanegi told me that the best way to oppose the regime was to be happy in prison. If they could be
happy there, then their punishment had failed, and the regime had no power over them. As she explained it, their
adamantine cheer was both a discipline and a choice.