© John Vink / Magnum Photos

It was your 61st birhtday and I, just like many other Cambodians, enjoyed a nice holiday in Kep. We wish you a happy birthday…

A first set of photographs I took in Myanmar is now available on my website at this link. They are a first attempt to try and grasp the complexity of the ethnic diversity in Yangon. Hopefully I will be able to work more on this story in the near future. There are 135 ethnic groups […]

Flying back home to Phnom Penh this afternoon… Time to go through the basics in Yangon before leaving: ferry, Bogyoke market, Schwedagon… Initially I thought I would not be able to post that much during these Myanmar days. It turned out to be a very productive trip. More on my website soon. Stay tuned.

Having been parked by the attendant in the ‘Upper Class’ wagon of the Circular Train in Yangon instead of the much more interesting popular wagon I jumped off at the third or fourth station and ended up walking in the Yankin township. Sure enough I was invited in a temple after 15 minutes… Yangon or […]

And now for something totally different from the previous days in Myanmar indeed. A Tamil festival in the streets of Yangon is kind of an instantaneous jump some thousands of kilometers Westward, and shows how intertwined different cultures are in the country…

Back in Yangon now. The party with all the ‘7 Days in Mynmar‘ participants is over, the files delivered… Job done… Or is it? Not really of course. As usual a pandora’s box was opened by starting that new story on the demise of the hill tribes. There is so much more to say, so […]

That is basically what the story I will submit for the ‘7 Days in Myanmar‘ project will be about… The demise of the hill tribes, the ‘normalisation’ of ‘difference’, the difficult to stop cultural leveling of society… The opening up of Myanmar will for sure increase the speed of those changes.

The pieces of my Myanmar puzzle during the ‘7 Days in Myanmar‘ project are coming together. As usual it is a few random encounters which bring the nicest batch of sub-stories: talking to an Akha woman in the streets of Tachileik brings me to a funeral, talking to some streetkids under the bridge crossing the […]