It’s nearing nine pm on a chilly night.  My colleague and I are on an empty highway, riding pillion on motorcycle taxis. There’s no other vehicle in sight. A lone truck speeds by every now and then. The streets are well-lit but the emptiness lends it a ghostly aura. Massive buildings border the highways. They look haunted too.

This is Naypitaw, the six-year-old capital city of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). Perhaps only Pyongyang rivals this place as the most desolate capital in the world. The ruling military dictatorship built it from scratch, investing billions of dollars in the scheme, despite the fact that Myanmar is the bottom five of all 170 countries on the UN Human Development Index.

Paranoia
Speculation has it that the country’s ruling generals share a paranoia of foreign invasion and so their leader, Than Shwe decided to move the capital from Yangon (formerly Rangoon) to Naypyitaw after consulting with astrologers. 
The new capital now hosts the Burmese parliament and all the government ministries.  There are stories of office workers and bureaucrats arriving at their offices in Yangon one morning in 2005, only to be told that they’d have to move to the new capital – a good 350 kilometres north of Yangon – to the then half-built city.

Our motorcycle drivers are clad in heavy, wind-proof jackets.  Their helmets have swastika stickers. “Why swastika?”  I have to shout against the wind and the roar of the engine.

He shouts back, “fashion,” and returns with a question in broken English, “What you do here?”

“Tourists,” I say.  He exchanges a few words with the rider of the bike carrying my colleague, and the two Burmans chuckle at their private joke as we speed along the 16-lane highway.  There are a few other motorbikes on the massive road, almost no cars and not a pedestrian in sight.  It’s a far cry from the narrow congested roads of Rangoon.

Undercover
Despite its recent so-called transition to civilian rule, Burma is not far from the military state it has been for decades.  Information is still tightly controlled, people are still routinely jailed for the slightest criticism of the military, and foreign journalists wanting to report independently have to do so as undercover tourists at their own peril. Foreigners deemed to be suspicious can be summarily detained and deported, a kinder treatment than that which awaits their fixers and translators. 

Every step we took in Naypyitaw we were watched over.  Every  meal we had, we were surrounded by curious onlookers. Rumour has it that one in four persons in Burma works for the security police, so we were constantly looking over our shoulder, lowering our voices and hurrying away from the clusters of men trying to take photos of us on their mobile phones.

Pricey
We request the drivers to take us to a cheap hotel. “No cheap hotel in Napyitaw, very expensive. 70-80 dollars for one night,” they say.

The average annual income here is US$200.  In Yangon, Mandalay and the handful of other tourist destinations, the most expensive hotels are usually owned or run by people with close ties to the military, but it’s still possible to find smaller family-run guest houses.  Not so in Naypyitaw, the most expensive city in Burma.

The city boasts fancier cars and apartment buildings than any other in the country.  It’s the only place in Burma where power and fuel supplies are regular and reliable. But such luxuries are not for the common Burmese. The high cost of living keeps the city quarantined from the widespread poverty prevalent in the rest of the country.

Deserted
Apart from the generals, their families and close aides, the city is largely home to government employees who live in residential complexes exclusively built for them.  Tourists are nowhere to be seen.  In fact on the roads, there’s almost no one.  The city is like an eerily empty suburb of Singapore.

Unlike the apparent absence of a population on the streets, the countless construction sites are a hive of activity. A new building site sprouts every couple of 100 metres, each with hundreds of labourers toiling in the vicinity. Machinery is rare – most of the construction work is done by hand.  Reports by international NGOs claim that most labour in Naypyitaw is forced.  The Burmese military have long been accused of forcing villagers, especially in the ethnic areas to work for them in farms, cities and mines, as well as porters and human landmine detectors in the jungle.

It takes us a good couple of hours to find an affordable hotel that first night. And we’re grateful to collapse in the plush room, complete with air conditioning, LCD TVs with satellite network, and a mini bar.
Our riders are impatient to be rid of us – they have a long ride home.  Like every worker who keeps Naypyitaw running, these guys can’t actually afford to live here.  They’re going home to a hut in a working class slum far from the city’s outskirts.