Shiny Happy People’s Super Democratic Union of Myanmar (Burma)

I realized when I returned from Cambodia last month that I would actually need to leave Thailand one more time so as not to overstay my visa and incur a hefty fine upon my departure. I was already up in Chiang Mai for a final round of meetings and interviews and some fellow Burmese NGO expats were planning a visa run so I decided to join them. Of course this time, the visa run was to Burma.
I’ve been thinking about going to Burma ever since arriving in South East Asia in January. However it’s not a straightforward issue. Firstly there’s a serious ethical dilemma. The likes of Aung Sun Su Ki have instructed foreigners not to travel to Burma as tourism helps support the military regime. Others however articulate the opposite argument, saying that tourist dollars actually end up in the hands of local Burmese people and can actually do much more good. I did a lot of research on both sides of the ethical issue and was still on the fence until my Burmese students told me that they thought I should go.
Secondly, in my case there was a potential security risk as well. Since Burmese intelligence monitors people they suspect of aiding and abetting the “subversive” pro-democracy activists, it’s possible that they have identified me and will arrest me if I go to Burma. However, in speaking to friends in Chiang Mai who also work with these groups and have been back and forth to Burma several times, I was assured that the security threat to expatriates was infinitesimal as the Burmese junta is just not as interested in creating an international scandal as simply destroying the pro-democracy movement itself.
And so I spent the day today traveling to Burma and back. We left Chiang Mai at the crack of dawn and landed at the border in Mae Sot at midday. We got our passports stamped on the Thai side and we walked the 500 meters across the Thailand-Myanmar Friendship Bridge to the “Union of Myanmar.” As we walked across the bridge, I noticed people crossing the border river below in inner tubes. I thought back to my semi-illegal Rwanda-Burundi border crossing last year and to how porous and artificial most of these borders actually are…


Anxiety kicked in when we arrived at the Burmese border post, but the immigration police were actually very friendly—and not nearly as corrupt as their Cambodian counterparts! But they held on to our passports as we were only allowed to spend the afternoon in Burma and had to return to Thailand before the border closed at 5pm. We were barely in the country for 10 minutes and we already felt the regime’s iron grip.


The afternoon was excruciatingly hot and the entire town seemed quietly suppressed under the heat—or was it something else? We decided to hire a few cyclos to take us around the small Burmese border town for the afternoon. We toured several gilded temples around town and enjoyed a delicious lunch of traditional Burmese dishes. Our final stop was a surprise, the Crocodile Temple, which is exactly what it sounds like: a giant temple shaped like a crocodile.


After a long, hot, and slightly surreal afternoon of sightseeing in what I named the “Shiny Happy People’s Super Democratic Union of Myanmar,” we rushed back to the border just in time to grab our passports and cross back over into Thailand for an overnight in the sketchy border town of Mae Sot.