My flight to Yangon on 18 June is cancelled. Thai Airways announces that heavy rain has closed Yangon airport. In the restless gloom of the waiting area, rumours start to spread. The Myanmar Army has taken over the airport, people whisper. Aung San Suu Kyi's birthday is a day away. Has some event occurred while they have been away? Young fathers sit staring into space, wondering whether they can ever return home.
We get bussed to the Amaranth Hotel, a fancy five-star hotel in the outskirts of Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok. Using my wireless thumb drive, I e-mail my friend in Washington, DC, and request her to check Twitter. Within a few minutes, I get my answer: a plane has skidded off the tracks at Yangon airport. Flights supposed to land there are being rerouted to Singapore.
We fly to Yangon the next morning. In the excited conversations I start up with my fellow travellers, I refer repeatedly to my visit to 'Burma', to which they politely remind me it is now 'Myanmar'. At a crowded traffic junction, a young newspaper boy flashes me illicit news printed in The Nation, a Thai newspaper. The front flap is folded over to hide the headlines inside: Kachin rebels resume fighting at border, threats of civil war. Only 3000 kyats (around USD 468), he says. I get a Hollywood thrill seeing the news, hidden so discreetly and flashed briefly before my eyes.
In a nearby restaurant, the kindly owner starts to discuss the Kachin rebels with me. The people are protesting, she says, because the benefits of the new hydroelectricity dam currently being built will all go to China. The Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River will dry up and the Kachin will get nothing in return. She is surprised I do not know all this already. 'I think you are journalist and you come to report about this,' she confides. I deny this, but she hardly believes me: how could I not be a journalist? Obviously I was not a tourist – clearly I had come for some specific purpose.