Thingyan week in mid-April 2022 was a boon for hotels and travel businesses in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. The traditional new year holiday saw over 16,000 domestic visitors flock to the state’s tourist sites. Others went to celebrate the Thingyan water festival, like the one organized by the powerful Arakan Army.
Sixteen thousand visitors over the course of a week is not much, but is triple the number who visited Rakhine for all of 2021. Planes and hotels were booked out, even…