Editor's Note: The largest anti-government protests held in Myanmar in almost two decades were met in October, 2007, with a brutal crackdown. The heavily controlled state media reported scores of monks arrested and 10 people killed, but diplomats and activists claim the number is much higher. The ruling junta has now cut its citizens' Internet access. Myanmar's government faces worldwide condemnation for its actions against human rights. Go World Travel has made the decision to run the following story not as a travel suggestion, but as an opportunity for its readers to learn more about this enigmatic nation. Marc Oppizio wrote this story following his trip to Myanmar in April 2006.

Myanmar (formerly Burma), wedged between China, India, Laos, Thailand and Bangladesh, feels like a land lost in time. It is a medieval country of golden towers and ancient stone temples on hilltops.

Children play on Inle Lake, the second-largest lake in Myanmar.

The expansive plains of Bagan, in the country’s dry center, were once studded with more than 6,000 of them in an area of only about 15 square miles (40 km²). About 2,000 pagodas still exist today — some meticulously maintained, many crumbling back into the earth. This hazy savannah of closely packed pagodas stretches to the horizon, and feels like a scene from a movie epic. Many, originally built to house nat, or spirit deities, are more than one millennia old.

From Bagan it’s a 10-hour journey into the mountainous Shan Plateau in the Shan State of eastern Myanmar. Road travel is slow around Myanmar, and some major routes are often closed to foreigners by the ruling military junta.

Along with my fellow band of travelers, I chugged along in an archaic bus past horse-drawn carts, trails of orange-robed monks, and town people whose faces were smeared with beige paste, their lips blood-red from chewing betel nut. Out in the wilderness, a gang of “involuntary” laborers stopped digging just to wave at us enthusiastically — a typical response of the locals, who seem bewildered by foreigners, almost in awe of us, and often delighted to be in our company.

They are, however, forbidden from discussing politics with tourists. Their concerns about undercover police overhearing ensures that they obey. The locals were reluctant to talk with us about their country’s policies, and anxiously glanced around as they spoke to us.

In 1962, and again in 1988, a socialist military junta forced its way into power and has held the country in an iron grip, pillaging natural resources, crippling the economy and oppressing its people through human-rights abuses. Any citizen overheard talking state affairs with an outsider will find himself in a labor camp. As a foreigner, our only contact with any tourist-friendly authorities was an occasional road block or the requisite payment of a small government fee at some locales.