
The price for a safari in Naypyidaw is higher than the average month’s salary in Burma. It is no surprise that it is meant for the ruling elite and the few tourists who venture there.
Located in the north-east of the city, the atmosphere in the Naypyidaw zoo, where white tigers stand alongside Chilean penguins, is at the same unhealthy and absurd.
The Chinese upper class has a new favourite entertainment: posing in front of the animals and sending their pictures to their friends. In Burma, a SIM card costs around $785.
Than Shwe, former commander-in-chief of the Burmese junta, is behind the founding of the new capital city. As a true despot, he never consulted the Burmese people before spending more than $5 billion to satisfy his whim.
Outside the park, the employees (mostly women) are paid less than two dollars per day to rake the grass and plant flowers.
The zoo’s main attraction: six mini-penguins from Chile to which the visitors get to on this yellow minibus. While the temperature outside is close to 115 degrees, the penguins are kept in a refrigerated pen which strongly smells like shit.
This is the inside of the pen. In a country where the inhabitants struggle to be well nourished, these little penguins are fed fresh fish imported from China.
With its ridiculous demography (less than 100,000 inhabitants for a city three times as big as Paris and its suburbs), Naypyidaw is a ghost town. That is why no one ever comes to visit the zoo’s tortoises.
The leaflet handed out at the park’s entrance, writes that tourists may, if they wish, “go for a ride on an elephant’s back.” But the two pachyderms are confined in a pen, killing time by scaring the kids who are pissing them off.