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Today, the litany of injustices grows: The confiscation of personal property, the torture of anti-government sympathizers, the rape of Karen women. The events are well documented. In the discourse about Burma, only one question remains unclear. Should you visit a country governed by a repressive govern ? South Africa during apartheid?
ist era of the seven-day visa. Flying between Calcutta and Bangkok, I skipped off a Thai Airways plane in Rangoon. At the time, much of Burma was off-limits. The places I wanted to go were the ones hardest to reach. I settled for a short stopover. Mostly I remember the exotic aromas of the markets, the sidecar rickshaws wheeling along dusty roads. And how much Burma reminded me of India. Coming from the subcontinent,
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orth I first travele Burma in 1981 , during the shadowy social
beauty like no other. Monks in saffron robes. Gold-leaf temples .. Rangoon's monolithic Shwedagon Pagoda was unlike any thing I had ever seen. Years later, when Burma's gates opened I wanted to return. An English friend called and told me about the Burma Action
mystery ha .. d tbe peace of northern climes and a this land of magic and
Group, a London-based organization that, because of the govern ment's human rights violations, advocates a tourism boycott. Andrew advised: "Before you go, read the piece on forced labor by John Pilger. Disturbing. It might change your mind." And so I did.
An article· entitled "Slave Nation" in the New Internationalist cata logued the horrors, dissuading me from my journey. Then I spoke to others. This time, travelers who had visited
Burma recently. They painted a portrait in living color, not shades of gray. Among them was Joe Cummings, a friend and journalist who wrote the first guidebook to Burma for Lonely Planet. On the
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phone his wife Lynne said, "Criticism about Joe's supporting tourism to Burma has been so intense, he's thinking about not revising the boo� next year. But most of the hate-ma.iI is coming from people who have never even been to Burma. How can they know what's best for the Burmese?" The Lonely Planet guidebook condemns Burma's current military regime. The
political left seethes. The military government stews. Now Joe Cummings is blacklist ed from traveling in Burma. And with the writing of this article, so, probably, am I. "I updated the guidebook three times in ten years, solo every time .. It's been a
difficult assignment. But I'm a writer. My responsibility is to inform. At least with the book, the world has some window into the country." My conscience rumbled, "Will a tourism boycott help? Who will it hurt? Will a
boycott only prolong Burma's isolation?" The first time I visited Burma was as a tourist. The second trip, I was on assign
ment. With the intention of reporting what I saw, I traveled there in February 1997. Journalists were banned. I knew this. At the embassy in Bangkok, I filled out the visa application, hesitating at the line for occupation. "Communications Specialist," I wrote. An apt euphemism. The photographer accompanying me had published an
innocuous photo book, Myanmar, a few months before. (Even the title was politically correct.) His name appeared on the blacklist. He was denied a visa. If travel is so restricted, why would anyone want to visit? The reasons are as
plentiful as the temples dotting the Burmese landscape. For a traveler, Burma offers a glimpse of life before technology took over-our own myopic, techno-throttled world becomes a still-frame, filtered through the corrective lens of time. There are more reasons still. The dense teak forests of the mountai[lous north
sparkle with rubies and sapphires and, if the stories be true, hide some of the last lairs of the Indochinese tiger. A thousanc;l miles to the south, verdant plains evaporate into the aquamarine Andaman Sea. Also beckoning is the exotic history of a country lying at the crossroads of China
and India. Mount Popa, a volcanic outcropping, is home to the 36 most powerful nats-guardian spirit beings-in the Burmese spirit pantheon, Along the sandy banks
of the Irrawaddy River, the ancient kingdom of Bagan stretches out amid 2,000 tem ples in a mind-melt of proportion .
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