 |
| Blog |
 |
| Archive |
|
|
|
|
| Blog |
| To find an archived article, simply click on Index and scroll the subject titles, or do a Ctrl-F search |
|
|
| Blog |
|
|
| Archive |
|
|
|
|
| Blog |
| To find an archived article, simply click on Index and scroll the subject titles, or do a Ctrl-F search |
Opinion & Analysis |
Day, Month Nbr, 2009 |
||||
All that glistersBurma is one of the world’s poorest countries, run by the generals who keep Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. It’s a risky place to travel to, but worth it, writes TONY ALLWRIGHT MYANMAR MAY NOT be every tourist’s first port of call, but this southeast Asian country, better known as Burma, has much to recommend a visit, assuming you have the perseverance and paperwork to obtain a visa. Its nearest embassy is in London, where you can post your passport. Alternatively, you can visit a Burmese embassy in person, as I did. Flights to Burma are few, but there is a daily service from Bangkok, so you could stop there a few days while arranging your visa at the local embassy. Once you have filled in countless forms, provided copies of your passport and travel details, furnished three passport photos and paid the requisite fees, the process is rather simple and, I found, courteous. Rangoon airport, though small, is very new, spacious and all glass and marble. Immigration and customs work fine once you’ve filled out even more forms and had stern uniformed officials minutely scrutinise your papers. Once you’ve cleared customs you will find a small official tourist office with helpful English-speaking staff. They can fix you up with hotel accommodation, maps, advice about what to visit, a car with English-speaking driver and numerous local tips. Foreign mobile phones don’t work – you need to buy a local Sim card – but the internet does, just about and very slowly, but not Skype, all subtle reminders that you’re in a totalitarian state where communication must remain controllable. And don’t photograph anything military or you’ll lose your camera. Unlike the airport, Rangoon city, 20km away, is ramshackle. Clearly there has been no maintenance for the 47 years the generals have been running the place. It reminded me of Lagos, in Nigeria, in the 1970s or Hong Kong in the 1950s: dirty, broken paving stones, potholed roads, rust-bucket vehicles, formerly gracious buildings from a bygone colonial era, hawkers selling food on the street – after dark every pavement transmogrifies into a restaurant – mothers washing their naked toddlers in the drains, laundry hanging out of the windows to dry (in the rain), coolies asleep on makeshift beds (their only home). The only things in good condition seem to be huge and magnificent gold-clad pagodas – hence the country’s Golden Land moniker. Everyone seems very friendly and eager to talk to a foreigner – of whom there seemed to be very few.
With hard currency, everything becomes extraordinarily cheap. You quickly learn to avoid the banks, as private money-changers give you three times as many kyats (pronounced “cha”). My downtown hotel, the Panorama, cost €20 a night for a huge room. A typical dish in a restaurant will set you back a couple of euro; another euro will buy you a pint of the local beer, called Myanmar. Via the airport tourist office I hired an ancient car with English-speaking driver for a full day’s sightseeing for €40, including tip. Myanmar is the size of France, with 48 million people, 90 per cent of them Buddhists. It is divided into 14 provinces, most with their own language and culture, so you’ll need a lot of car days to see much of the country. Alternatively, a day trip out of Rangoon can delight. The pagodas that dot this city of four million and the surrounding area are magnificent places of reverence, in immaculate condition and wonderfully illuminated at night, all funded privately by people with very little to spare. To see the statues, paintings and other icons and the devout worshippers, deep in prayer, almost makes you want to convert to Buddhism. Burma’s three war cemeteries are well worth a visit, an uplifting reminder of the ultimate sacrifice made on our behalf 70 years ago by others from the nations of the world united in determination to halt Japanese imperialism. For golfers Rangoon also has three lovely courses, with green fees of about €25, and you can also drop in for a meal and a drink. Although Rangoon is no culinary capital, you can eat well at bargain prices throughout the city – and that Myanmar beer is wonderful. If you talk privately to the people – and a surprising number have quite good English – you quickly learn that there is a visceral hatred, said to be shared by 90 per cent of the populace, for the military junta that governs them, backed up by 600,000 armed men in uniform. Citizens believe that spies and informants are everywhere, much as the Stasi infiltrated East German society under the Soviets. So citizens welcome illicit activities such as black markets not just as acts of economic necessity but as symbols of political defiance. Apart from currency and the usual DVDs, these include roadside sales from rusty oil drums of unlimited petrol for a 50 per cent mark-up, as the state will sell you only nine litres a day at its official filling stations. People will tell you they yearn for democracy and revere the Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, recently incarcerated for a further 18 months on spurious charges to keep her out of politics. In 2002, Suu Kyi warned against tourists visiting the country, but last month she appeared to soften her stance by saying that visitors might help draw attention to oppression by the junta. The Department of Foreign Affairs has advised against all inessential travel to Burma in light of the political situation. In the best traditions of nationalism and socialism, an evocative combination, the generals forbid most forms of foreign investment and retain major industry, such as there is, in the state’s hands. They prefer dealing with fellow totalitarian governments: China for mineral mining and timber exports, North Korea for secret tunnel building (and maybe even outsourced nuclear activity ). Thus you see none of the familiar multinational names, such as McDonald’s. Bureaucratic red tape impedes private enterprise except for very rudimentary businesses such as taxis, primitive restaurants and small shops. But you will never be mugged in the street, as crime, like all important businesses, has been nationalised, and only the state machinery is allowed to rob, rape and kill.
The people know that only one thing prevents Burma from emulating the economic development of their much-envied Asian neighbours, such as Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore: the iron hand of the reviled junta. They live in hope that one day democracy will arrive, even if it is, some will whisper, courtesy of an American invasion. Where to stay, eat and go Where to stay
Where to eat
Where to go
Go there
© 2009 The Irish Times
|
|||||
|
More on this subject in a blog post entitled “Burma/Myanmar: Observations from a Trip” |
|||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Gift Idea |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Good to report that as at
FREED AT LAST, |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
BLOGROLL
Atlantic Blog (defunct) Blog-Irish (defunct)
Jihad
Religion
Iona Institute
Leisure
Blog Directory
My Columns in the
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
What I've recently
But it's not
entirely honest in its subtle pro-Palestinian bias, and therefore needs
to be read in conjunction with an antidote, such as See detailed review +++++
BP's ambitious CEO John Browne expanded it through adventurous acquisitions, aggressive offshore exploration, and relentless cost-reduction that trumped everything else, even safety and long-term technical sustainability. Thus mistakes accumulated, leading to terrifying and deadly accidents in refineries, pipelines and offshore operations, and business disaster in Russia. The Macondo blowout was but an inevitable outcome of a BP culture that had become poisonous and incompetent. However the book is gravely compromised by a litany of over 40 technical and stupid errors that display the author's ignorance and carelessness. It would be better to wait for the second (properly edited) edition before buying. As for BP, only a wholesale rebuilding of a new, professional, ethical culture will prevent further such tragedies and the eventual destruction of a once mighty corporation with a long and generally honourable history. Note: I wrote
my own reports on Macondo +++++
A horrific account of:
More details on my blog here. +++++
After recounting a childhood of convention and simple pleasures in working-class Aberdeen, Mr Urquhart is conscripted within days of Chamberlain declaring war on Germany in 1939. From then until the Japanese are deservedly nuked into surrendering six years later, Mr Urquhart’s tale is one of first discomfort but then following the fall of Singapore of ever-increasing, unmitigated horror. After a wretched journey Eastward, he finds himself part of Singapore’s big but useless garrison. Taken prisoner when Singapore falls in 1941, he is, successively,
Chronically ill, distraught and traumatised on return to Aberdeen yet disdained by the British Army, he slowly reconstructs a life. Only in his late 80s is he able finally to recount his dreadful experiences in this unputdownable book. There are very few first-person eye-witness accounts of the the horrors of Japanese brutality during WW2. As such this book is an invaluable historical document. +++++
This is a rattling good tale of the web of corruption within which the American president and his cronies operate. It's written by blogger Michele Malkin who, because she's both a woman and half-Asian, is curiously immune to the charges of racism and sexism this book would provoke if written by a typical Republican WASP. With 75 page of notes to back up - in best blogger tradition - every shocking and in most cases money-grubbing allegation, she excoriates one Obama crony after another, starting with the incumbent himself and his equally tricky wife. Joe Biden, Rahm Emmanuel, Valerie Jarett, Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Steven Rattner, both Clintons, Chris Dodd: they all star as crooks in this venomous but credible book. ACORN, Mr Obama's favourite community organising outfit, is also exposed for the crooked vote-rigging machine it is. +++++
It is really just a collation of amusing little tales about surprising human (and occasionally animal) behaviour and situations. For example:
The book has no real message other than don't be surprised how humans sometimes behave and try to look for simple rather than complex solutions. And with a final anecdote (monkeys, cash and sex), the book suddenly just stops dead in its tracks. Weird. ++++++
It's chapters are organised around provocative questions such as
It's central thesis is that economic development continues to be impeded in different countries for different historical reasons, even when the original rationale for those impediments no longer obtains. For instance:
The author writes in a very chatty, light-hearted matter which makes the book easy to digest. However it would benefit from a few charts to illustrate some of the many quantitative points put forward, as well as sub-chaptering every few pages to provide natural break-points for the reader. +++++
The author was a member of Britain's V Force, a forerunner of the SAS. Its remit was to harass Japanese lines of command, patrol their occupied territory, carryout sabotage and provide intelligence, with the overall objective of keeping the enemy out of India. Irwin is admirably yet brutally frank, in his descriptions of deathly battles with the Japs, his execution of a prisoner, dodging falling bags of rice dropped by the RAF, or collapsing in floods of tears through accumulated stress, fear and loneliness. He also provides some fascinating insights into the mentality of Japanese soldiery and why it failed against the flexibility and devolved authority of the British. The book amounts to a very human and exhilarating tale. Oh, and Irwin describes the death in 1943 of his colleague my uncle, Major PF Brennan. +++++ Other books here |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
After
48
crackling, compelling, captivating games, the new World Champions are,
deservedly,
England get the Silver,
No-one can argue with
Over the competition, |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
