When former Victoria resident Ron Zakreski was travelling in Thailand, he was warned not to go to Burma — or Myanmar, as the country has been named by its military government.
But Zakreski, a 62-year-old veteran traveller, decided on March 24, 2011, to ignore all the warnings. He crossed a small well-used bridge over a river, entering a country where even suspicious locals offered warnings to go back. It was “an error of judgment,” he now concedes.
Once inside Myanmar, it didn’t take long before he noticed a man watching him while speaking on a cellular telephone. A short time later, he was met by someone who asked him, in English, to accompany some rifle-toting soldiers.
It was a detention that was to last for 17 bizarre days, which he has now chronicled in a self-published book, On a Short Leash: Detained in Burma. Copies are available at Munro’s Books and Tanner’s Books.
He recalled it as a stay at times terrifying and at other times almost ridiculous.
“It was kind of a mixed vibe,” said Zakreski, who is back in Victoria for a visit this week. He has been travelling around, visiting friends. “I was part guest, part prisoner.
“Local people decided after a couple of days they should just ship me back,” he said. “Upper echelons decided to keep me a little longer.”
Zakreski was moved around from post to post, on motorcycle and truck. When trucks got stuck in jungle muck, he marched.
He was interviewed and asked to sign a form, written in Burmese, and promised to be released back into Thailand.
The form turned out to be a confession to entering the country illegally. A judge started talking about five years in a prison, called Insein, and pronounced “insane,” which Zakreski says gives a good description of its rumoured conditions.
Soldiers who accompanied him didn’t mistreat him, but Zakreski said he twice witnessed them severely beating army underlings.
One night, when the soldiers got drunk, he borrowed a cellphone and made a call to Thailand to alert the outside world of his predicament. The phone call led to widespread notice, including a story in the Times Colonist.
That notice, Zakreski believes, set in motion a process where authorities decided keeping him wasn’t worth it.
He was transported to a border village, then enjoyed some kind of official reception where he was granted his release.
“It was, ‘OK, go and here’s a piece of cake and we are going to take you to the river and float you across,’ ” Zakreski said.
“It was quite bizarre, the shifts I was going through,” he said. “One minute, you would think I was gone and my life was just about over, and the next, they just drop me off.”
