I steamed into Myanmar armed with a cheerful, gung-ho attitude hoping to emerge a few days later with enough material for a few decent articles and a handful of war stories about one of the few countries on the planet that getting into and around still represented a genuine challenge. In some way and on some level, I was also hoping to enjoy it. However, after setting out for a stroll around Yangon on my first evening in the country, it quickly dawned on me how inappropriate this approach was. This was no joke. It wasn’t a game.
            I wandered among the city’s haunted inhabitants for over two hours and during that time I spotted exactly one foreign face – a western guy who needn’t have bothered removing his press badge – he had ‘journalist’ written all over him. He gave a small, knowing nod as we walked past me by way of acknowledgement. The bloke thought he was in an episode of Highlander.
            If a white guy wanders off the beaten track in any of Myanmar’s neighbouring countries they’ll find themselves navigating their way through a sea of smiles and stares. The Burmese people I passed on the packed footpaths that ran along the sides of the city’s empty roads also stared unashamedly at the rarity of a Caucasian, but the smiles were hauntingly absent. It felt like every time I left my hotel there were a dozen pairs of brown eyes following me around.
          People in Myanmar have taken to the practice of chewing a thing called beetlenut. It’s an ungodly mixture of barks, chemicals and some weird little nut all wrapped in a leaf. It’s chewed in much the same way cigarettes as are smoked, and it produces some equally horrible side effects. The mouths of users are stained blood-red and their gums retreat up their teeth. It can also, with prolonged use, cause the facial features to sag tragically, in severe cases even pulling the lower eyelids downwards revealing their sickly red underside. It also causes the chewer to salivate and they constantly spit blood-coloured gobs all over Yangon’s slimy, dirt-slicked footpaths. The image of these red-eyed figures staring at me in the gloomy evening light as I approached, spitting as I neared and then craning their knecks as I passed wasn’t something I got used to during the trip.
            I returned to my hotel after my aimless wander and came to the decision that I needed a guide. I called up Aye, the travel agency girl who arranged my visa and hotel and she was happy to fix me up with a rental car plus driver/tourguide.
            There seems to be a very deliberate, practiced distance put between tourists and the people trained to deal with them. Staff in hotels and eateries maintain a deliberate detachment by being overly deferential, smiling a lot, bowing all the time and saying ‘sir’ after every second word. It’s way, way over done and is blatantly not a part of normal interaction between locals. I mulled over it for sometime before copping that it’s a hangover from British colonial times; when the Burmese who came into contact with the white-faced foreigners were trained to act in a particular way – like butlers, basically.
I found it quite depressing. I attempted to get to know the young lads who worked in my hotel, doing everything from taking reservations and fixing fans to making and serving meals in the building’s little café. I’d hammer away with the chit-chat and eventually their guard would drop, they’d start to smile and we’d have a bit of craic, slagging people on the telly or bitching about the scaldy weather. Sadly, the next time I’d run into one of the blokes he’d be back to acting like a robot.
            When my guide Pha, a thirty-something Burmese guy with flawless English, arrived first thing in the morning to begin our tour of Yangon I got the feeling it would be more of the same. I didn’t guess it then – as he refused to take a seat beside me while I finished off my breakfast – but he would turn out to be one of the bravest, not to mention the most interesting people I’d ever met.