Burma in the news

Treading Lightly on the Road to Mandalay

THE blob of traffic in front of our car had stopped dead. Having arrived in Mandalay from crowded Bangkok, I'd hoped to escape gridlock, but here I was, just 30 minutes after touchdown at the airport, in bumper-to-bumper again. Frustrated, I poked my head from the car, and was immediately pelted — with garlands of jasmine.

I swiveled my head, and found myself staring into a crowd of Burmese girls standing on the bed of a truck festooned with ocher prayer flags. I had blundered into a novice ceremony, a festival celebrating the entrance of young girls into the local Buddhist nunnery. Burmese preteenagers in fuchsia and white robes, with crowns of garlands and gold leaf atop freshly shaven heads, stood on pedestals in the trucks, queens for the day. Truckloads of relatives held parasols over the girls' heads and tossed garlands into the street. Monks chanted while bands of wood drums and thin flutes belted out reedy atonal melodies.

As Southeast Asia modernizes rapidly — Starbucks appears to be colonizing Thailand — Myanmar, as Burma is now called, remains the last country in the region preserved in amber. In Myanmar, men still wear saronglike lungis rather than pants, and traditional rituals like the novice ceremony, rather than new-model Mercedes, still hold up traffic. Western influences are almost nowhere to be found. "We go nowhere," one Burmese businessman told me over drinks at a sailing club in the capital, where the wooden dinghies were cracking. "What can we do? Have another drink."

Read the whole thing here

http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/travel/07myanmar.html?8dpc=&pagewanted=print