Burma Lost & Found: Three years living my dream job in the travel industry in Rangoon and beyond by Lenarcik Marek

Author:Lenarcik, Marek [Lenarcik, Marek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-04-30T21:00:00+00:00

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One of the best things about the travel-business world is the so-called inspection trip(s). If you are a professional salesman, you cannot sell a product that you don’t know. The product in this industry is the destination and the tour. Every respectable travel agency in the world sends their staff every now and then to their featured destinations so that the agents can learn about it and generate more business upon their return. Selective Travel, based in the United Kingdom, is one of these agencies. It happened also to be one of Tour Myanmar’s biggest clients, sending probably a few thousand tourists a year to Myanmar alone. In just a few days I was about to meet their two representatives, John and Jason, which stressed the hell out of me knowing how important Selective Travel was to us.

John arrived first. He was a typical British 30-something man in shorts and T-shirt and feeling worn out by the long flight from London. We exchanged formalities, and I introduced him to our guide Nay Maung, who would be accompanying us to southern Myanmar.

Nay Maung had two distinctive traits. For one, even though his English was close to excellent by Burmese standards, very often he failed to understand John’s questions. When that happened he pretended to understand (or was sure he had understood correctly) and answered something totally unrelated. In fairness, the way John asked his questions was difficult to understand probably for anyone who didn’t live in London. I caught myself acting as a translator of John’s English into Burmese English and vice versa. The second special thing about Nay Maung was his flamboyance. He moved and spoke in a way that left it quite clear why he didn’t have a wife. I would have been sure he was gay if it wasn’t for my godfather, who lives and works in Poland. He talks and moves the same way, but he has a wife and a daughter, and promises he is one hundred percent straight.

Our happy trio stopped just outside of Yangon to attend a strange ceremony. A large bouquet of fresh flowers was placed on the front of our van. The driver drove a meter forward and a meter backward, a meter forward and a meter backward, and a meter forward and a meter backward as a monk stood in front of the car and made blessings.

“It’s for our protection. The blessings. So we avoid a car accident,” Nay Maung explained. I looked around and saw more monks doing the same for the cars stopped at the side of the road. We drove back onto the highway only to stop five minutes later at the front gate of the Allied War Cemetery near Htaukkyant, the final resting place of 27,000 Allied soldiers who died during the Myanmar Campaign of the Second World War. While hundreds of identical neat and tidy graves do not look like a tourist attraction to me, I acknowledged that it might be an important place to visit for tourists from Allied countries, especially the United Kingdom.

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