Arriving to Yangon

It was Christmas Eve the night we arrived to Yangon. It was the part of the trip we most anticipated. By then we'd seen a bit of SE Lao, and walked through the forest for a couple days to a remote village for staying over and a meal or two, and were ready to enter Burma. I picked up the book, Finding George Orwell in Burma, at the airport in BKK during our layover there.

All the stereotypes about the exotic orient, shrouded in mystery, an ancient meeting place of the peoples of Asia were coming into play. And being closed off from the rest of the world because of the dictatorship, we didn't know what to expect; would there be terrible deprivation of all kinds because of the US and EU sanctions? What would be familiar to us at all?

When we touched down, the airport looked a bit old and dilapidated. I was thinking Beijing ca 1986. We were pleasantly surprised at how modern and new looking the international terminal appeared. We wondered who would be traveling there? We met a number of Japanese tourists, among them one who seemed to be married to a Burmese man, and many others, who seemed to be going home to visit family, and more Americans than we'd met in the rest of our travels before. A huge throng of people were behind the glass right at immigration waving to visitors coming down the escalator. That's when we first saw all the many shades of people from the country. Most of the men were wearing longyi as were the women. Many wore glasses, something we hadn't seen in rural Laos. We were moved at how they all seemed so excited and thrilled to see their family and friends appearing on the escalator. We'd heard the Burmese are wonderfully friendly, and wanted to be in touch with the outside world: were their shining faces and smiles behind the glass evidence of this?

Soon we saw our guide, who turned out to be of Nepali descent (his great-grandparents came to Burma from Nepal). He stood maybe 5'10", at over 200 lbs (he later told us), wearing a dark longyi and a white, banded collar shirt, and a backpack. He seemed to be in his 30s, and had long dark hairs dropping out of a mole on his left cheek. We were excited to meet our ambassador to this exotic land. He spoke excellent English, with a slight British accent, and asked us to call him Desmond!