Journalists are often a contrary bunch so Thailand’s troubled neighbour Myanmar, a country from which western media workers are banned under threat of arrest and deportation, was somewhere I was eager to visit before leaving Southeast Asia. I had heard that visas for the country formerly known as Burma were hard to come by so I got the ball rolling on my application a month before I planned to go.
My options for getting a visa to Myanmar were to either go to the Bangkok embassy at the crack of dawn and queue for hours in the hope of getting to hand my application in to one of the notoriously difficult staff. The second, more appealing strategy was to pay a travel agent to queue for me. Always happy to take the easy route, I popped along to an agency one rainy Sunday, lied brazenly about my profession on an application (which featured questions such as ‘What is your hair colour?’ alongside a spot in the top right hand corner onto which a passport photo had to be fixed) and headed off after being assured that my passport would be returned with a visa stamp valid for three months by the end of the week. Cyclone Nargis, the worst natural disaster in the country’s recorded history, hit the following evening.
As the extent of the damage slowly dawned on the world, NGOs rushed to secure the visas needed to gain entry. With that, the Bangkok embassy was mobbed and my hoped-for timescale of one week went out the window. To top things off a fire in the embassy building meant it was closed for a day and a national holiday meant its doors were also shut for the following two. After a week-and-a-half of being told by my excitable agent that her courier had spent another fruitless day in a queue only to have my application handed back by a grumpy Burmese official on some flimsy pretext or other, she threw in the towel and handed my money, application form and passport (minus the visa stamp) back with an apology.
The inherent newsworthyness of the cyclone, which coupled with the wilful neglect of survivors by the country’s ruling junta is now believed to have claimed as many as 100,000 lives, meant Bangkok was rapidly filling with international journalists scratching their heads about how to secure a visa that would allow them in to assess the damage and make a name for themselves. A few did make it in, most by applying to the embassies in their home countries, but many were sussed by the authorities and turned away at the airport once they arrived. More still were restricted to the capital Yangon and were unable to get into the devastated Irrawaddy delta region. Of the fortuitous, talented handful that did make it to the delta, which was swamped with military whose mission was to root out foreign journalists rather than to aid the victims, most could remain there only a day or two before the woeful security risks meant a return to the capital was the only realistic option. Sadly, even Yangon wasn’t safe as the junta began circulating names and photographs of any journos who appeared on foreign TV or declined anonymity in print. However, the journalists lucky enough to be chased in and out of guesthouses in Yangon or from village to village in the delta by the manically paranoid junta were raising their profiles massively. A journalist can boost his stock by going somewhere perceived as dangerous and amid the misery of its stricken population, Myanmar was hosting a journalistic gold rush.
But for every eager young journo that made it into Myanmar in those fraught days after the cyclone another 500 queued at the Bangkok embassy. I was beginning to ponder the viability of renting a dingy and rowing it from Thailand when I suddenly hit on an alternative means of breaching the country’s formidable banks of red tape and flat refusals.
