Myanmar

Harry spends a few days in Yangon with Cameron Mofid, for whom it is the 193rd of 193 countries — Laos, filmed afterwards, completes the set.

His verdict: pleasantly surprised, and a country that is genuinely undiscovered and authentic. He is careful about the qualifier — the areas tourists are allowed into were, in his experience, very safe, and people are suffering elsewhere.

The situation

Obs: the political summary below comes from the video’s description, which is more precise than anything in the narration. Under the schema, the description outranks the transcript where they differ.

• A 1962 military coup imposed a socialist regime and isolated the country.
• Limited democratic reform in the 2010s, with elections led by the National League for Democracy.
• The military seized power again in 2021, ousting the NLD and returning the country to authoritarian rule and open conflict.
• The civil war between the junta and the People’s Defence Forces has caused over 6,300 civilian deaths since the coup, alongside airstrikes, arson, torture and extrajudicial killings.
• The Rohingya genocide drove over 700,000 people into Bangladesh, and investigations suggest up to 25,000 lives lost to military action.
• Censorship is severe — internet shutdowns, VPN bans and high data costs — and at least 98 journalists have been detained since 2021.

Harry’s own framing on the ground is the comparison he draws with Ukraine: a country being at war does not mean the whole country is dangerous. People are shooting at each other while he films, a long way from the city.

Observations

From All Aboard the Myanmar Dictatorship Express! 🇲🇲

• There is a night curfew, roughly midnight or 1am until 3am, and the streets are genuinely empty. If you’re in a bar when it starts, you stay until 4am. Harry’s taxi driver drops him at his hotel and then has to wait until 3am before he can drive home.
• The kyat is a closed currency. You cannot buy it outside Myanmar. Harry arrived with some only because Luke Damant had given him a stack before he left.
• There are two exchange rates. The official — locals call it the white market — and the black market rate, which is better and which tourists are not really supposed to use. It is volatile and moves daily, so you don’t know what you should be getting and largely have to trust whoever is changing it. A subscriber told Harry the correct rate so he wouldn’t be cheated.
• Immigration took five minutes, because there are barely any foreigners on the flight.
• Roughly 20 to 25 tourists a day visit the country’s most famous pagoda, against, Harry is told, a great many three years earlier.
• Why they don’t come isn’t fear, according to the guide who tells him this — it’s Thailand. Next door, more developed, direct flights, no transit. Myanmar needs one or two connections, which costs time and money.
• Incomes have collapsed. The answer Harry gets on wages is that nothing is stable and most work has fallen away.
• 80 to 82% Buddhist, and Myanmar practises the Theravada school — the same as Thailand — as against the Mahayana school of Japan, China and Korea.
• The population is around 52 to 53 million.
• The country is far more religiously mixed than he expected, with churches, mosques and Hindu temples alongside the pagodas, and a great range of faces and dress.
• Thanaka — the yellow paste worn on the face by a large proportion of people — is not makeup. It’s skincare, and it’s traditional.
• Betel is chewed everywhere. A betel leaf wrapped around lime paste, chewed as a stimulant. Harry tries it and reports feeling mildly energetic after five or ten minutes.

Places

• Yangon