Coming into the Country

Landing at Yangon airport, I suddenly had all the feeling of travel in an exotic place, a feeling that had gotten lost in my decades-long self exile from the land of my birth. I had tried to come here in 1987, but things then were so complicated that it just didn't work (another place that happened that way was the Hunza valley of Pakistan, twice I have tried to go there and have had to turn back), and secretly I vowed to come back when circumstances were better.

Well, 17 years on, the Lonely planet has resumed publishing about Burma, people are starting to travel there, and little by little Yet Another Boycott Which Didn't Work (to which we must add, unfortunately, Cuba and North Korea) will work its way into the shadowy pages of non-history. I decided this past Christmas that I finally had to kill my exotic Burma fantasy; why in the time I had waited, the country had even changed names, there had been demonstrations and a bloody Tianenmen-style repression, and Burma continued to grow slowly through the helping hand of China and India.

There was a curious mixture of fear and curiousity as I walked from the plane (walked? when was the last time anybody did that on the tarmac?) to the exotic looking terminal (see picture above). Well, maybe I've already used up my quota on that word, exotic. And perhaps the terminal doesn't deserve it because it looks sort of like a cheezy outlying temple complex building in Thailand. Burma shows its closeness to Thailand, not only geographically, but religiously and through decorations like this.

But still, even Don Muang Airport in Bangkok was just another airport, generic terminal bays, taxi ranks, all that jazz. But here was this - this monstrosity, and whether you cared for that kind of SE Asian gaudy baroque or not, for better or worse this place was different and visibly so from the outset.

The taxi ranks were also different, as we (I had hooked up with an intriguing Dutch couple by this point) found ourselves walking past the parking lot and down a dirt road with this taxi driver, who for some mysterious reason (not mysterious, it's always about money) parked half a mile away...in fact, as I looked around, after two minutes, it was easy to forget we were even at the airport - here were houses, trees, streets....no sound of jets....weird kind of space-time warp.

I better call it a night. We'll delve into the seamy underside and the gleamy overside of Yangon next.....