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As soon as the protests had been violently quashed by the army, the regime set about making everything look normal again. At the UN General Assembly, the Burmese junta’s Foreign Minister, Nyan Win, even went so far as to declare, “Normalcy has now returned to Myanmar [Burma].”

But Rangoon felt to me like a movie set. I imagined an invisible director ordering a cluster of fruit vendors to set up their stalls at the edge of a market, calling for a crowd of pedestrians to surge across a busy street, and hanging billboard advertisements for the latest cinema releases.

On my first day in Rangoon I telephoned an old friend who had a merry greeting: “Welcome to my wonderful country where nothing has just happened!” Later that same day I bumped into another friend who was visibly agitated by events: “Everyone is just pretending,” she told me.

Things might look normal on the surface but, in the diary I kept while I was there, the adjectives I used to describe the moods of the various people I spoke to are repeated over and over again: angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed…

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Following are some headlines from the English-language New Light of Myanmar, a newspaper that functions as the regime’s mouthpiece (the headlines describe September’s peaceful protests after which thousands of people were arrested and hundreds are feared dead at the hands of government soldiers):

"Internal, External Destructionists Applying Various Means to Cause Unrest, Instability"

"People and Security Forces Grapple with Violent Protestors who Attack them with Weapons in Yangon"

"11 Violent Protestors Arrested Together with their Weapons"

"Inquiry Under Way to Expose Manipulators from Behind the Scenes"

The “inquiry” is in fact a manhunt on a massive scale. Each night, when the streets fell silent after the military-imposed curfew, I sat at the window of my hotel room and watched police cars and army trucks drive past on their way to track down and arrest anyone who had been involved in the protests.

In an environment where reality is malleable and the local media is distorted by propaganda and censorship, rumours offer an alternative source of information. Among the rumours I heard while I was in Burma are the following:

Some 300 monks escaped to the Thai border and they are now armed with weapons and marching towards Rangoon to fight back against the junta...

The regime’s soldiers wept after they killed monks on the streets, and hundreds were imprisoned for refusing to follow orders and shoot their own clergy...

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Just back home after a couple of weeks in Burma, I find myself shaking shredded notes out of my bags as I unpack. In the country’s unbearably tense climate, I did not feel comfortable throwing away anything that I had written down while I was there – phone numbers, addresses, surreptitiously scribbled interview notes, or even innocuous shopping lists. Instead, I tore-up the notes and shoved the resulting confetti deep inside my luggage.

After the military regime cracked down on peaceful protests led by thousands of monks in Burma at the end of last month, an even more treacherous crackdown began and is now taking place behind the scenes. Part of this crackdown involves stopping the flow of information from leaving the country (brave Burmese bloggers had been sending out up-to-the-minute news reports and rare photographic evidence of the regime’s brutality – pictures of bleeding demonstrators who had been severely beaten by government soldiers, the corpse of a monk floating face down in a river). The regime’s response was simple: turn off the Internet.

As I visited old friends and met people who had witnessed the protests in Burma, I was constantly given messages to carry out of the country; without the Internet, the safest way to get messages out is to send them by hand. Among the variety of messages I have unpacked from my bags are:

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Emma Larkin is our guest blogger during the week of October 15th. She wil be blogging about her recent trip to Burma (also known as Myanmar). If you have any questions for Emma Larkin, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some information about Finding George Orwell in Burma:

Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. It is the place George Orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. She was frequently told by Burmese acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their country - his first novel, Burmese Days - but in fact he wrote three, the "trilogy" that included Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet!"