Dave's Travel Journal

Sorry for being so slow updating my blog. I've made an attempt at catching up now, although I realise it's a little brief.

In Myanmar I visited the ancient temples of Bagan, Mandalay; Myanmar's second city and the beautiful Inle Lake, before returning to Yangon for my flight back to Bangkok.

I had 6-7 days to kill in Bangkok before my family arrived from the UK for a holiday. This time was spent on Khao San Road.

My family flew direct from London to Bangkok on the 14th March, I met them from the airport and went directly to the hotel. After visiting the Grand Palace the following day, we set off for the vast Khao Yai National Park, where 2 nights were spent sleeping under canvas in the midst of the rainforest. Whilst at the national park, we went on a guided walk and a night time pick-up ride, where we saw a small number of the animals which inhabit the park. Even though we didn't see any of the large mammals which reside within the park it was still a great experience and definately worth the visit.

We left Khao Yai 2 days after our arrival there, catching the bus straight back to Bangkok and, luckily, being able to transfer from Bangkok to Surat Thani the same night, arriving at Surat Thani the next morning. From Surat Thani we caught the ferry to Ko Samui for some time on the beach. Whilst we've been on the island we've also been snorkelling, sea kayaking as well as visited many of the islands attractions. My Mum flew back to Bangkok early this morning, where her flight to the UK departs around midday. My brother is staying out in Thailand with me for a couple more weeks.

Traveling through Myanmar was an enjoyable experience although once I had flown from Dawei (Tavoy) to Yangon (Rangoon) I was back on the well established tourist trail. The vast majority of these tourists are paying vast sums of money to be hoarded around from sight to sight, staying in (sometimes government run) opulent hotels. This is very disheartening to see when considering the amount of care most backpackers take in distributing the small amount of money they have to worthy causes, even paying more money to avoid flying with the government airline or using the government water transport company.

Legitimacy is not necessarily given to the military junta by tourism in general. It is however brought, together with the large sums of cash, by naive, usually European, package tourists. I truly believe that travel in Myanmar can be beneficial to locals and could, if undertaken responsibly and intelligently, help to inform the outside world of the plight of the Burmese people, a cause which receives little international media attention.

The onus for responsible travel obviously falls to the individual traveler and their conscience. But it must be accepted that if tours are offered, people will go on them, often without researching their destination any further than glossy travel brochures supplied by their tour agents. The burden of discouraging irresponsible travel therefore falls only on a secondary level to discouraging the people to go, which is obviously very important, but is practically impossible, to both reach the audience and to be successful in persuading them, especially if "it looks so nice in the brochure." After all, some people will never be concerned about the impact of their travel, even if they are aware of its effects. The problem of legitimacy brought by tourism is therefore self-perpetuating, and the initial power for this is the profit generated by this type of tourism.

Tourism, must however be kept in proportion. Comparing it to the investment of nations such as China, India, Thailand and Singapore in Myanmar's natural resources is totally unrealistic. It is very sad to see the people of a land so rich in natural resources suffer such unnecessary poverty. Far greater change could be brought about if those countries imposed economic sanctions in the same way the United States has. The U.S has taken a rare but, admirable stand on Burma. Although motives, I am sure, could be brought into question.