Burma Opens Door To Tourists

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32068, 16 August 1969, Page 7

Burma Opens Door To Tourists

(H.Z.P.A.-Reutar) BANGKOK. Burma has opened the door to let tourists squeeze in, six years after slamming it firmly shut in their faces. A Swiss tourist agency in Bangkok is advertising a package tour of four days and three nights in Burma, at an alWncluslve cost of $l5O a person. The tour begins at Rangoon, the capital and the site of the most sacred Burmese Bhuddist shrine, Rudyard Kipling’s “winking, waking wonder,” the Golden Shwedagon. It includes an up-eountry trip to the ancient ruins of Pagan, 300 miles north of Rangoon, which are rated second only in magnificence to those of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. The tour will end at Mandalay, 400 miles north of Rangoon, the last capital of the Burmese kings before the country was annexed by the British towards the end of the last century and made famous by Kipling’s poem “On the Road to Mandalay." To attract tourists, most of them Americans who flock to neighbouring Thailand, General Ne Win’s Government has relaxed rigid visa regu-

lattons by extending the stay in Burma from 24 to 72 hours. The State-owned Union of Burma Airways has also increased flights between Rangoon and Bangkok from five to six days a week. In 1963, one year after General Ne Win and his army seized power in a bloodless coup and embarked on wholesale nationalisation of Srlvete economic enterprises, urrna resolutely shut the door to tourists.

The period of stay in Burma with a tourist visa was whittled down to 24 hours. Private tourist agencies in Burma closed through lack of business. Only hardy travellers, including Western journalists in search of a rare Burma dateline, with firm bookings for onward flights within 24 hours, showed up in Rangoon, only to spend the greater part, of their stay in one of the two international-standard hotels in the city. General Ne Win said two years ago that he was afraid that undesirable foreign capitalists who had been forced out of Burma might return as tourists to re-exploit the Country. But faced with economic difficulties resulting from a sharp fall in exports and a drastic reduction in imports every year under the Statemanaged economic programme, the need to earn precious foreign exchange has become imperative.