AsiaLIFE

Seeking to connect with her mother’s homeland, Alison Lapp travels to Myanmar on a journey that challenges her to navigate the thorny landscape of responsible tourism. Along the way, she finds is a country of searing natural beauty and a people eager to share their heritage with the world.

Music fills a secluded cove in Myanmar’s Inle Lake, singing congratulations to newly weds. Realising a wedding is happening at our hotel, my travelling companions and I peep in for a discreet glimpse of culture, planning to creep away unnoticed. However, three westerners are hardly inconspicuous in this part of the world, and our sneak peak quickly gets us spotted. We are swarmed and swept onstage for a round of photographs and videos with our new friends, the bride and groom. The wave of hospitality carries us to our own banquet table, complete with plates heaped with local noodles and countless companions happy to practise their English with us while we eat.

While crashing weddings is an added benefit, the greatest reward and strongest deterrent to tourism in Myanmar are the same – the nation’s warm but repressed people. As the American daughter of a first-generation immigrant from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, I’d always viewed the country in wonderment. It was the land enshrined in my mother’s earliest memories, but also a destination deemed off limits by my grandparents, who support the ongoing international travel boycott aimed at forcing Myanmar’s dictatorial regime toward democracy.

The ban was called by Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent the worst part of 19 years under house arrest since her National League for Democracy (NLD) won a general election, only to be refused power. Pro-boycott groups point out that authorities have used forced labour to construct roads, hotels and other tourism infrastructure. They say any visit to Myanmar legitimises the current government. Other NLD members, however, argue that annual government income from responsible tourism is negligible, while the lack of visitors has devastated local economies dependent on tourism.

Beyond that debate, there is reality. Myanmar has a functional, if business-starved, tourism industry. My decision to patronise it was spurred by the fact that I have a large extended family in Myanmar who I’d never met, and who are growing steadily older. At the end of a two-week visit with my boyfriend and his sister, largely arranged through a tour company, I’m no authority on whether deliberate action by tourists can make visits more beneficial than harmful. But for personal gratification as much as for ethics, it’s possible for concerned travellers to keep the trip focused on the people – their stories, their businesses and their incredible talent as artisans. It’s a strategy made easy by Myanmar itself, which, regardless of the presence of small men with big guns, remains a nation of marvels. The country retains a great degree of regional variation, with many local economies driven in part by their reputations for master craftsmen in a given product. The phenomenon reaches its zenith in Mandalay, the country’s cultural and artistic centre.

A rhythmic clanging draws us into one of the city’s gold-leaf workshops. Workmen clad in the traditional longyis that Burmese men still wear with pride, pound squares of gold into impossibly thin sheets. In a nearby well, a coconut shell dipper with a pinprick hole in its husk connects the workers to the history of their trade. Before the advent of modern clocks, labourers would pound the metal until the container had filled with water 120 times. Today they work six-hour shifts, which, in a city that reaches temperatures in the mid-40s Celsius, is still no easy task.

The fruit of that labour is put to good use just 500 meters away, at the Mana Muni Pagoda, where Buddhist pilgrims have applied the leaf to a four-metre bronze Buddha so that the statue has turned plump and lumpy in its ad hoc gold vest. Stone-carving workshops turn marble from the surrounding hills into further religious art, the most dramatic example of which is the world’s biggest book at the Kuthodaw Pagoda. The entire Pali cannon of Thervada Buddhism is carved on 730 doubled-sided marble tablets, sheltered by 730 pure white stupas around the main golden temple. It took 2,400 monks six months working in 24-hour rotations to read the stone pages aloud when they were ordered by King Mindon to do so in 1879.

To the southwest, the ancient city of Bagan is known primarily as an archeological site. Thousands of earthen-toned pagodas stretch as far as the eye can see in every direction, the landscape a reminder of a kingdom that flourished a millennium ago. The region also is home to one of Myanmar’s signature crafts – lacquerware. Using the same process that begot the lacquer relics found in some of the twelfth and thirteenth century temples, artisan families shape figurines, betel nut boxes and trays out of bamboo before covering them with lacquer sap. Through an elaborate process of drying, polishing, painting, engraving and re-drying, the ornate works come to market. It can take months to finish a single piece and years to master the craft.

“My work has to be fast, if it’s only my family making it,” says U Zaw Aung, head of an umbrella-making family in Pindaya. From his home, nestled among the sweeping hills of the ethnic Shan State, he can whittle an umbrella frame in ten minutes while the women embed colourful leaves and petals in the handmade paper they dry in the sun. The end product is popular among monks and nuns who must protect themselves from the sun while collecting daily alms.
The Burmese exalt the Intha, residents of Inle Lake’s floating villages, as among the country’s most industrious peoples. Not only have they developed an ingenious one-legged method of rowing fishing boats and created vast swaths of floating tomato plantations, they’ve also devised numerous lake-top industries. Twisting the fine filament inside a broken lotus stem yields a reliable thread, which they dye and weave in characteristic local designs.

National commerce reaches a fever pitch in the bustling street stalls of Yangon, Myanmar’s most populous city, where all regional crafts eventually surface. All the contradictions of modern Burmese life appear here, in the glow of the golden Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar’s holiest site. Women still paint their faces with ground thanaka bark sunscreen next to the professors’ housing, left pointedly in disrepair after last year’s Cyclone Nargis. The stately colonial buildings that only have electricity three days a week – the beauty amid the poverty – offer a chance to reflect on tourism in Myanmar.

Voices for Myanmar, a non-profit organisation run by Burmese expats promoting responsible travel to the country, suggests tourists avoid government-run businesses, spread expenditure among different local enterprises, use natural resources sparingly and donate to development organisations. This offsets the “social debt” of paying the inevitable government fees and taxes. To that list I would add one simple item. Talk to the people. Offer them a window into your world, from which they’ve been isolated, and allow them to give you stories to bring back from theirs.