Candy floss at Sule Pagoda and the Burmese Gold Rush

There’s candy floss outside Sule Pagoda. It’s like spun insallation lining – bright yellow and pink. There’s a little girl screaming next to a bright blue ferris wheel that spins unnveringly, propelled forward by men climbing and leaping up the inside of the contraption. Music blasts and men drink Myanmar whisky. There’s the sweet goodness of sticky rice and seaseme. The kind of goo that tastes so good and sets your stomach to sickness. There’s the stickiness of sugar cane juice squeezed through another contraption. And over the sound of the pagoda screaming blessings into the slightly chilly air, is louder music from the copywrighted DVDs. Everything is bathed in fluorescent light, eiry, as the moon looms overhead, pushing its way out from behind clouds and over the crumbling buildings.

There’s a cave like area behind the ferris wheel and next to the candy floss, where stalls sell pots and pans and plastic guns, strung up alongside cheap plastic toys from China. Yangon’s pumping tonight. And alongside the t-shirts and cheap plastic is another stall in bright red. It’s an NLD stall.

And this is the point in time, when I feel as though I have to step back in time and re-adjust my weight to take on the enormity of what has happened here.

When I explained to someone how I lived here back in 2008, 2009 and have newly returned, I tell them that I feel as though I have returned to a new country. It’s familiar. There’s still holes in the pavements that can swallow you up. You still walk away from pay day with bags of filthy kyat notes. People are still heartwarmingly good. But there’s the inperceptable moments, when the world seems to have turned upside down and I feel as though I am Alic wondering through the looking glass into a new world.

The NLD stall is one of those moments. There’s cheap earrings of Aung San Suu Kyi. Her father, the independence leader, Aung San, is emblazoned onto t-shirts. There are mugs of Daw Suu Kyi and Hilary Clinton. The NLD members are even putting red stickers onto people’s faces.

When I sigh with amazement that there’s real debate in a parliament no one ever believed in, my friends tell me, that’s been the case for a year now… you have to catch up.

And that’s how I feel. As though I am racing full speed to catch up with the changes. And in that respect I feel like every other person in the country. The speed of reform is flabbergasting.

I feel like an old lady who has been dragged into the 21 st century. And, sometimes people who are newly arrived can’t quite tell.A friend who has been here four years, says to me, that she knows things have changed, but she can’t see it.

But for me, everything stands out.

The new City Mart. A monster of a shopping mall that looks like it belongs in Bangkok not Yangon. 

When I was here last, we had a book club, set up specifically to swop English books, because it was so hard to buy any here. Now, Monument Books stands tall - an English language book shop, with "Burmese Days" and "Finding George Orwell in a Teashop".

There’s other changes too: New restaurants everywhere; hotel prices that are through the roof; expats getting kicked out of houses because rents triple over night; Pictures of Daw Suu Kyi everywhere; the fact that the airport now allows you to change money at the black market rate; banks that exchange money.

And for me, most incredible of all are the newspapers. If nothing else has changed, I have only to pick up a newspaper and my head spins.

I visit my old office, the local English language newspaper. The political journalist is bursting with importance and a sense of the timeliness of her position. She doesn’t have time to attend a training with me, to talk for more than five short minutes before she must run. Myanmar has waited so long for political reform, that now it has come there’s no time to waste.

I remember I used to stop by the desk of our last political journalist a few times a week to quiz him about politics. His back was always bowed. His articles were almost always cut by the censorship board. His dogged determination finally gave way and he left to join the UN, who offered a better salary and a chance to do work that saw the light of day.

My editor reminded me how he used to have sleepless nights every Thursday as he worried, what on earth would he put on the front page when the censor board cut our main news stories.

And now, it’s unrecognisable. Just one article cut last week.

And the front page covers the ethnic conflict! ! Unbelievable a few months ago.

If nothing else, for me, that is where change has come. And will continue to come.

Alongside all this is another change – harder to articulate. It’s the way people speak. It’s a relaxation around people’s shoulders and eyes. I work with a group of young Myanmar men and women. They talk about the possibility of what democracy means. They organise small events. They’re reaching a point of almost calling them, “campaigns”, but not quite.

There’s a change in myself too. I consider publishing under my real name. And then, I hesitate and pause and wonder. Maybe that is going too far.

I speak with an old timer here. She arrived here in 2000. She told me that at that time too there was hope. There was hope that things were opening up. Khin Nyunt was in power. He was bringing in the internet, journals, newspapers… until he became too powerful and was purged, along with thousands of others.

But from many people, what I hear is not fear that things will go back, but fear that things are coming too fast. They hope that not everything will come at once. There is not the capacity to deal with the hundreds of people who are due to come here, the hundreds of new laws being written, the massive increase in aid and foreign direct investment. There’s not space for everyone. There’s not the capacity. Everyone I know is writing 5-year ambitious plans for development and political change. But simultaneously they say that they hope things won’t come too fast. No one wants another Cambodia, where NGOs are a business.  

A consultant visiting the country to write a proposal, tells me that she will go right back to France and tell them to come and visit Myanmar now, before it is ruined, like other countries before. Before all the tourists and foreigners here, with big houses and salaries, make people realise the potential in crime.

Right now, you can walk down the road without fear. I can walk with $500 and a laptop through the streets at midnight and feel safe… how long until that changes?

And out along the border with China in Kachin, war rages and the military continues it's campaign undeterred by the political changes in Nay Pyi Daw or U Thein Sein's request that they stop.  We hear that most of the ethnic groups don’t trust their leaders. And I wonder how long until the ethnic question comes to the forefront of politics here? 

I hear that China has control of 40 percent of the land to the north. That is a scary thought. And one that asks again: how change will come to the rural areas? How will the economic interests of foreign powers influence this rich country? 

And then there's the budget, the currency, the lack of a commuications person in the government, to wrap up and explain the messages, the fact that there are bills and laws passed without scrutiny or transparency. 

On the flight over here, I sit next to a lawyer, who tells me he is opening up for business here - expanding. He tries to get me a job here. He's like many of the people I meet at the moment. This is the era of cowboys and charlatons. Ex-FBI agents seeking the next great "resource frontier", NGO workers looking to relocate to the next "aid hot spot"; Burmese Americans or Australians coming back to see where they might fit into the new country. This is the era of making money from the boom. But, what will the gold do for those who live here already?