So, it’s OK to visit now?
That’s right. The NLD lifted its boycott in 2010, and Myanmar’s unexpectedly rapid return to democracy – with an NLD government elected in 2015 in the first free and fair elections in half a century – has gone faster and more peacefully than anyone might have dared expect.
But it’s not all peaceful, is it?
No, sadly not. There’s still considerable ethnic unrest in remote areas of the country, with fighting continuing sporadically between the government and Shan and Kachin separatists.
Most alarming, however, is the long-running oppression of the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim people living in northwest Rakhine state, who are denied citizenship and almost all basic human rights.
Most Rohingya families have been living in the country since colonial times, but the government considers them illegal immigrants and insists they go “home” to Bangladesh. The Rohingya have been suffering staggering oppression for many years, although the situation has recently dramatically worsened, with thousands killed and many more displaced.
Any hopes that the Rohingya would find justice under the new NLD government have also been swiftly crushed. Aung San Suu Kyi’s own party appears as uninterested in their desperate plight as the previous military regime.
Indeed the Rohingya might plausibly ask for a tourism boycott of the country to protest their brutal treatment under Aung San Suu Kyi – a savagely ironic turn of events, given the years she spent fighting against government oppression and human-rights abuses.