This week’s travel dream: Myanmar before the deluge

Myanmar is on the verge of a tourism boom, said David Farley in the San Francisco Chronicle. Long one of the most “closed off” places in the world, the Southeast Asian country formerly known as Burma is expecting almost a tripling of foreign visitors this year, with further increases to follow. Encouraged by government reforms, pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi recently reversed her 15-year-long plea to foreigners to boycott tourism within the military-run nation. So prodded, I booked a flight quickly. “I wanted to see it before the crush of tourism changes the face of the country.”

You could argue that my first stop was one of Myanmar’s main tourist attractions: U Bein’s Bridge, a 1,300-yard pedestrian crossing outside Mandalay, was built two centuries ago using teak columns from a former palace. But there was hardly another tourist in sight—and not a single souvenir hawker—as I crossed at sunset with a parade of maroon-robed monks and the sun’s rays “twinkling off Buddhist temples in the distance.” Mandalay, a city of 1 million, isn’t exactly primed for Westerners either. As in the rest of the country, Internet service there is “painfully slow” at best, only the most pristine euros or U.S. bills are accepted for exchange, and there’s not an ATM to be found.

Not needing such conveniences, I booked an all-day hiking excursion through an NGO. By evening I was sharing tea with an elderly woman in her small house, surprised to learn that she knew little about the world outside her mountain village. A few days later, I stayed on Inle Lake at Nyaung Shwe, a town on stilts that looks like “a decrepit, teak-laden” Venice. I hired a boat and driver and set out for the tribal villages and floating pagodas at the lake’s center. Occasionally, my driver would dock and point to a house, and I’d walk up to find a woman inside making jewelry, or young men eager to share some betel nut, a mild stimulant. “If Inle Lake were in Thailand, I thought, it would be part of the canon of Southeast Asian must-sees.” I had the whole place to myself.

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Intrepid Travel (intrepidtravel.com) books two-week tours of Myanmar for $2,310.