Myanmar tourism sector reels after cyclone

Sitting and waiting
Meanwhile, those who depend on tourist dollars are feeling the pinch.

Yangon's budget hotels catering to backpackers are all but empty. With few takers for their T-shirts emblazoned with images of temples or monks, souvenir vendors at the Bogyoke Aung San market nap in the midday heat.

Tour guides at the city's most famous landmark, the golden-domed Shwedagon Pagoda, sit idly, waiting in vain for potential customers.

Since the storm, 33-year-old guide San San has spent his days chewing betel leaf in the temple's parking lot. He said that May, the start of the monsoon season, is generally a slow month but that he usually averages about three clients a day throughout the off season.

"There's been no one for many days," he said. "All I do is sit and wait."

High-end operators were also affected by the storm.

The luxury cruise ship Road to Mandalay, which normally plies the Irrawaddy River, was badly damaged in the storm, said Pippa Isbell, spokeswoman for the its operator, Orient-Express Hotels, Trains and Cruises. Existing reservations for a "few hundred" would-be passengers have been canceled through September.

"Whatever happens with the ship, we're committed to remaining in Myanmar," Pippa said.

Uncertain future
But the future is less certain for staff at hotels on Chaung Tha beach, an off-the-beaten-path destination whose foreign visitors are mostly budget travelers.

Because it's inside the restricted Irrawaddy delta, special permission is now required to make the five-hour journey over the narrow, pothole-scarred roads. Sometimes the travel permits issued by the Ministry of Tourism are not special enough for the guards at four military checkpoints along the route from Yangon, and travelers are turned back.

With little prospect of filling his 41 empty seaside bungalows, Shwe Sin hotel's assistant manager Ko Tin Oo appealed to his sole foreign guests, an Australian and a French national, to encourage their friends and family to travel to Myanmar.

"Tell everyone you know that Myanmar people need foreign people," he said as he switched on the evening's entertainment, an amateur video of Cyclone Nargis featuring cyclone-toppled trees, crushed houses and bloated bodies floating in flood waters.

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