Burma at the Crossroads

In Mandalay, a dusty, sprawling city that doesn't deserve its bewitching name, I'm met by a friend of Mister Smile, an NLD member I'll call Magic. We ride south in a borrowed car, past the town of Amarapura,and pay a $3 entrance fee to the Sagaing archaeological district, a cluster of stupas and monasteries nestled in the green hills along the western bank of the Irrawaddy River.

We never make the main summit, however. A plainclothes soldier accessorized with aviator shades and a cell phone sits at a roadblock, demanding an additional $2 for the "renovation committee of Sagaing Hill." Furious, Magic refuses to pay the bribe. We turn around and drive instead to another hilltop temple. After climbing to a deserted terrace, Magic—who has already done time for his political activities—feels free to speak. "The army—the money goes right into their pocket," he says quietly. "Not to my people."

The following evening, the Moustache Brothers theatrical troupe gives a pwe, a vaudeville-styleperformance, at its south Mandalay home, lampooning such small-minded corruption. Comic Lu Maw waves a traffic cop's hat at the 20 foreigners packed into the garage-sized space, calling it the donation box. His brother, U Par Par Lay, told a similarly mild joke at a 1996 show inside Suu Kyi's home. He spent the next five years in labor camps. At this performance, U Par Par Lay only dances, leaving the one-liners to Lu Maw.

The next morning I recognize several faces from the pwe aboard the government-owned tourist ferry to Pagan, the royal capital until Kublai Khan took it over in 1287. While everyone I speak with is aware of Suu Kyi's request for a travel boycott, not one regrets coming. "There will always be tourists," says Chantal Boisvert, 37, a Quebec social worker. "And I don't think the government will change for this [tourism] money. It has more to lose."

She may be right. Having ignored election results for more than a dozen years, expanded the army at the expense of basic services for its citizens, and cut deals with narco-traffickers to consolidate power in the fractious borderlands, the generals are not about to go gently. Especially not as long as Asian nations like China and Singapore continue to pursue constructive-engagement policies to get at Burma's still-abundant natural resources.

Boycott or no, the SPDC wagers that tens of thousands of travelers won't wait to see wonders like Pagan, where more than 2,000 ancient temples and shrines erupt from a plain along a broad bend in the Irrawaddy. The place and its people are just too enchanting.