Myanmar: the road less travelled

A journey through the wild hills of Myanmar's eastern Shan State

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In rural Myanmar women and girls make up their faces with thanaka, a paste made from ground bark.

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Dear NE-One

These past four(ish) weeks have been quite a ride. In a good way. Our month in Madagascar is almost up, and I have thousands of photos to go through, notes to file, thoughts to process and features to get started on – but before I do, we have one last day in the country’s capital, Antananarivo.

It’s a day I’m looking forward to, as we’ll be exploring the city with Mark’s old friend Eloi, who lived here as a student and is the only person I’ve met so far who admits to actually liking the city. Me, I’m on the fence. I wanted desperately to love Tana – the old architecture and sense of history here are captivating – but the poverty is harrowing and the constant warnings that “this city is not safe” have left me feeling uncharacteristically on edge when we’re out on the streets.

This strange mix of intrigue and unease remind me of a trip Mark and I took seven years ago to Myanmar’s wild eastern Shan State. It was late March 2016, and the democratic government was due to take over from the military on 1 April; the people of Myanmar were, it seemed, just starting to exhale but still, the dark shadow of the oppressive regime loomed ever-present.

Things have changed a lot in the years since we were there – not necessarily in a good way, and I can’t even begin to pretend I’ve ever been up to scratch with the country’s complicated political situation – but I wanted to share the story from that trip for Jetstar’s inflight magazine. It covers the days that Mark and I drove deep into the wild Shan area, on a road (we were told) that had rarely been travelled by foreigners…

Myanmar: the road less travelled

It’s an hour after dark and we’re a table of three, sharing a plate of jin lung – meatballs – and the two coldest beers our humble hotel can offer. We’ve had a full, hot day on the road and the chilled lager is both thirst-quencher and celebration: after leaving the verdant rice fields and floating tomato gardens of Inle Lake, it took nine hours to drive east on Myanmar’s National Highway 4, a spindly strip of sometimes-tarred road that took us through 250km of increasingly dry lands and hairpin mountain passes to Kunhing, a small town in eastern Shan State.