My First Time in Myanmar

Photo taken on Sony Nex-5 in 2012.

Around a decade ago the world was a vastly different place. Aung San Suu Kyi had been released and was poised to run her country, finally. The country, so close to mine yet so far apart in so many ways, was opening up. I set out to try to see it before it became another Southeast Asian tourist hotspot with breathless growth and development. I think I was concerned about ecological destruction then, but boy, there was that and so much more to have been worried about.

This was maybe the second last time I traveled anywhere that had no Internet connectivity whatsoever (the last place was Cuba, 2016). 6 months from the time this photograph was taken, you could get data on sim cards at the airport for five bucks; at this point, I still had one of the infamous three thousand dollars (yes, green bucks) per Burmese sim card arrangements, that I got through work. It also had no data on it, in spite of the cost. (For a long time, the market in issuing Burmese sim cards was very much like the used car market in an oligarchy. The elite officials ran the whole thing.)

Friends with Burmese connections helped me plan this trip. You couldn't buy a domestic travel ticket for bus or plane outside of Myanmar, because that was closed, but you could do it in Peninsula Plaza, Singapore, the hub of one of the largest Burmese diaspora in the world. You couldn't use an ATM there, but you could send money to someone in Singapore, whose uncle would then meet you at your hotel to give you a bag of cash.

I was trying to get to Bagan. "Go to this place, wait there, and someone will come and help you sort out everything."

It was a whole thing. I waited here for a long time, so I had plenty of time to take photographs. Sometimes, I wonder what happened to the people in the photographs I took a decade ago. But it's hard to think about it.

Later, I went on to spend much more time in Yangon and Mandalay. I was there on a project with a company for almost a year. It's one of the countries I love so much, and so terribly, and I stand with the brave Burmese people who rise up, decade after decade, against crushing military rule.