Burma: On the Irrawaddy in search of the truth about Burmese tour

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The country was Burma, where there is currently a fad for military helmets, imported from China and worn in ignorance of what their insignia represent in the world outside. The Burmese are not encouraged by their masters to look beyond their borders.

Nor are we much encouraged by the travel trade to venture over theirs. Burma, or Myanmar (a local, formal name, the use of which the military regime has tried to make exclusive and compulsory), is a dictatorship. Only last week, the New York-based organisation Human Rights Watch reported that the number of political prisoners had doubled in the past two years; and Aung San Suu Kyi, the most famous detainee, was denied permission to appeal in person against the recent extension of her house arrest.
In Britain, organisations such as the Burma Campaign UK, Tourism Concern and Co-operative Travel argue that tourism aids the grasping generals. They cite a comment of Aung San Suu Kyi’s in a BBC interview in 2002: “We have not yet come to the point where we encourage people to come to Burma as tourists.”

As Telegraph Travel reported last month, Aung San Suu Kyi is said to have changed her mind. Through a former member of her party, the National League for Democracy, she has let it be known that she believes that private-sector tourism might be a good thing, both for her hard-up people and their battened-down country. Shortly after our report appeared, a party of tourists, customers of the Ultimate Travel Company, was due to leave London to cruise the Irrawaddy, the great river that flows north to south and cuts the country in two. I joined it for the first week.
In the picturesquely dilapidated southern city of Rangoon (Yangon) – which the generals abandoned as a capital in 2005 for Nay Pyi Taw, a Burmese LA-in-the-bush 370 miles north – our base was the Governor’s Residence, a property owned, like our ship, by Orient-Express. Every stick of furniture, and the sticks that fastened the club sandwiches served by the pool, seemed to be made of teak. Having arrived out of a clear sky, we were soon being treated to the lovely percussion of monsoon rain on a roof.