As a European, my immediate thought when looking at the hopelessly broken shoe was that I would have to buy a replacement. This, however, turned out to be a lot trickier than I anticipated as none of the Burmese stores appeared to have my shoe size in stock.

After bellowing for a short time, a young man wearing the region’s traditional loose trousers emerged and met us at the gate. He was flanked by a dozen canine bodyguards and carried a Shan sword. At first, he was reluctant to allow us in and I appreciated the sensitivity of the situation. As ethnic Bamar, or Burman, we were guests in Shan State. The young boy was polite and smart yet I could feel his innate mistrust of these “foreign” visitors.

He explained that his great uncle was arrested for “tourism charges” and only recently released. I showed him our business cards and was glad to learn that he was familiar with The Irrawaddy and the famous Shan cartoonist Harn Lay who has contributed fantastic work. But even with our credentials confirmed,

As I left with my motorcycle taxi driver and guide I was emboldened. I had come to Burma alone, something many young women wouldn’t do already, and my plan was to distribute peace literature, stickers and music. The people I was working with in Chiang Mai, Thailand, exiles from Burma and activists, had encouraged my decision to do so, saying it would give some small but significant hope to those working on the inside. I knew I could be detained and deported, but that it was very unlikely, due to the color of my skin and the emblem on my passport, that I would suffer any greater punishment. This unjust privilege, which rests on other, more global systems of domination, repulses me.

While I would find it difficult or even impossible to travel there from the central parts of Myanmar, I almost managed to set foot in Myanmar’s Chin State from the outside. This is one of the poorest regions of the country. It is estimated that more than 100,000 Chin people alone have emigrated to neighbouring India where they, still fighting economic hardship, can at least secure one meal per day for their families. Many more live in Malaysia or simply migrated to other parts of the country.

After we managed to pass a landslide,

However, these days it is the tale of the admirable Irrawaddy dolphins, named after the waterway, which captures the imagination most of all.

These graceful swimmers are closely related to the orca (killer whale) with a large, rounded forehead and snub beak. Their gray bodies darken towards slate blue while their abdomens remain a slightly paler shade.

They are commonly seen in groups fewer than six, occasionally emerging for low leaps above the surface but never riding around the bow of passing vessels like their ocean-dwelling cousins.

Unlike dolphins from other Southeast Asian countries – such as Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh and India – the Irrawaddy variety of Burma is famous for helping local fishermen.

These adorable creatures communicate with each other through clicks, creaks and buzzes which are thought by marine biologists to be a way of determining their location using a dominant frequency

“

Inside the airport, a young immigration officer smiled as I gave him my passport. He was quite chatty, asking me about The Irrawaddy – how we gather news from inside Burma, how we designed our website. With a smile that betrayed his betel-chewing habit – his teeth had a telltale tinge of red – he said he visited our site as often as possible. Meanwhile, the people waiting in line behind me grew impatient as they were made to wait until my friendly interrogation was finally over.

A TV crew from Al Jazeera that came to film my arrival was soon joined by officers from the Special Branch who also wielded cameras. They politely snapped a few photos, and I smiled back at them. I also jokingly told them to make sure they reported the correct information about me to their superiors.  They assured me they would, asked me my age, and then left me alone.

Finished at the airport, I made my way to my hotel downtown.

After 20 years promoting organic food and sustainable agriculture, I found myself becoming increasingly cynical about the broader impacts of the food-reform movement. So I closed down my business, sold off my belongings, put on my backpack, and headed to Asia, where I hoped to gain a broader perspective on the environmental and social issues enfolding our planet. It was time to bust myself out of the Bay Area eco-foodie bubble, to which I had grown so accustomed that I believed it wasn’t even a bubble.

Burmese boys.

It didn’t take long. Soon I was venturing into Burma, where I wanted to experience and learn about the plight of the indigenous Hill Tribes of the Golden Triangle (Burma, Thailand, and Laos).

I had encountered a few tribespeople while traveling in Thailand. Many were in refugee camps; some, like the Long Neck tribes (the ones with necklaces that lengthen their necks), had become tourist attractions. In rapidly modernizing Southeast Asia, I wondered whether the fate of these indigenous peoples would be similar to that, say, of the Native Americans.

As dawn broke on my second day,

The Irrawaddy is not only full of nature’s beauty but also home to the dolphins which received their name from it – Irrawaddy Dolphins. These adorable creatures are one of the endangered species of the world and are only found in Southeast Asia. Our country is one of the countries that has these dolphins.

According to researchers, there were over a hundred of them before, but now there are only about 50 left. This is because of the toxic mercury discharged from the gold mines located on the banks of the Irrawaddy, which are littering the mercury wastes into the river after using it to purify the gold.

After spending one night at the Bangkok airport where we had to transfer flights, we finally found ourselves in Yangon (Rangoon). This was the beginning of our adventure and fulfillment of a long- standing desire of mine to visit this country. Travelling there feels like a journey to the last century. It is not rare to see horse carts in the streets, experience power cuts several times a day, and see mothers with babies sleeping in the streets.

I was told a joke by a Burmese person: The devil announces a lottery game in hell and that the winner would be able to leave hell and go back to earth on one condition: He has to sleep on an iron bed with electric shocks every night for the rest of his life.

The room had no windows and no air-conditioning, and was located on the top floor of a cheap karaoke bar in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand.

It was late at night, and we were waiting for a driver from a smuggling ring who was to take us north to the Thai-Burmese border where we would cross illegally into Tachilek. Like me, most appeared to be Shan migrant workers, but some were Burman. About half were women. I assumed that none of us had work permits, passports or travel documents, otherwise they would not have chosen this dangerous (and expensive) method of travel.

Most migrant workers in Thailand earn a salary between 3,000 baht and 9,000 baht per month [US $100 to $300]. According to most data from NGOs in Thailand, at least two million Burmese live illegally in the country,