Ghost City (Naypyitaw)

So what would it feel like to be in a city after a Apocalyptic event? Well you only have to come to the New Capital city of Myanmar called Naypyitaw.

It is the strangest place I have ever been. They say there are over a million people here, but I doubt there are even 10,000! Yangon used to be the capital city, but since the current leader had a fortune-teller predict a catastrophic flood. They created a whole new capital city and moved in 6 years between 2000-2006.

We all know the saying build it and they will come. The only people who came were the government officials forced to come because all ministry offices were moved there.

The government (military ruled) also forced business who wanted to open up in Yangon that they must also build in the new capital. So what you have is resort after resort that would rival the best in Las Vegas. Except these are absolutely empty. What they do is finish the first two floors and leave all upper floors baron.

We could park our vehicles like this because we were the only customers in a hotel with over a 100 rooms.

I felt like I was in a scene from the movie the shinning.

Here we are in the dining room. The only guests of course and yet there is all kinds of new construction of further hotels.

These two pictures are clear proof of the egomaniac mentality of the current President and his refusal to admit this was a complete failure. What you are looking at is a 20 lane highway with no cars on it.

The only car you see is Andrews Landrover.

Why give anything back to the people when you can spend it on yourself building an oversized palace to live in. The whole city is like a movie set facade........empty houses, malls, museums, libraries and the list goes on. The government official with us was trying to tell us there were people living in all the nice houses we were passing. But there were no cars in the driveways or lights on at night. Whole communities built with no people?

The classic saying "if you build it they will come" is not the case here.

This is a replica of the buddhist temple from India where buddha found enlightenment. They already have one of these in there old capital but again had to duplicate everything for the new capital?

This giant Stupa also a copy of the one found in the old capital Yangon was impressive. Like everything else in Myanmar it was covered in gold leaf, 64 tons to be exact.