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Authors@Google: Ari Juels

at costumes, jewelry, palaces and gardens and spent many thousands of dollars on antiques and reproductions in Paris. She'd even bought an ...

Women’s Travel Silver Winner: The Moustache Brothers of Mandalay

By Shauna Sweeney

It takes fifteen minutes to confirm I’m being followed. At first I had my doubts, kept second-, triple-, quadruple-guessing. I thought fear was playing tricks on me, making monsters out of shadows. But we’ve turned too many corners, switched onto too many new streets for coincidence. The car hasn’t left my taxi’s bumper since we pulled out of the dirt driveway of the Peacock Lodge at the other end of Mandalay. I can’t see my pursuers’ faces because their high beams are blinding. It doesn’t matter. The message is clear. They know where I’m headed. 

My taxi, a miniature blue pickup with a cramped tarp-covered bed, splashes through puddles and jolts across potholes on the unlit street. The right side-view mirror catches the reflection of my driver, a sun-weathered Burmese man with a broad face and thinning black hair. His eyes dart to the reflection of the headlights. My chest constricts with a heady rush of fear. This is riskier than I had thought. Yet, I’ve come all this way. I have to meet the Moustache Brothers.

I shift on the rain-soaked cushion, grasp one of the steel handholds above to keep from bouncing out the back, and remember the American Vice-Consul’s warning that morning in Yangon: “Be careful. Watch what you say. Whatever you do, please don’t talk politics. You might be fine, but who you talk to could end up in prison, or worse. And if you happen to end up there yourself, I can’t get you out just because you’re American. Trust me; you don’t want to go there.” 

I met his suspicious gaze with a wide-eyed, innocent one of my own and nodded yes, yes of course, no, no never at all of the appropriate moments. But my itinerary was already mapped out, the tickets purchased hours before. I’d be in Mandalay by mid-afternoon and if all went according to plan, at the Moustache Brothers doorstep by nine o’clock that evening.