By Andrew R.C. Marshall

Hundreds of foreign journalists are preparing to leave Myanmar after covering the by-elections that Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won by a landslide. Suu Kyi’s victory was historic, and so was the media interest: we represent the largest, legal deployment of foreign media to ever descend upon this long-isolated country.

I say “legal,” because scores of undercover journalists reported on the monk-led Saffron Revolution in 2007, which was brutally crushed by the military. That bloody event now seems impossibly distant.

By Andrew R.C. Marshall

MAWLAMYAING, Myanmar (Reuters) – Cho Cho May knows who she will vote for in next month’s Myanmar by-elections: the candidate for the party created by the former military junta. “No need to ask me that question,” she says. The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) candidate is her boss.

Finding another USDP supporter elsewhere in this normally sleepy river town is harder. When Aung San Suu Kyi, who leads the rival National League for Democracy (NLD), is on a two-day campaign tour of the region, Mawlamyaing’s streets throng with people waving NLD flags and shouting “Long live Mother Suu!” Watch Suu Kyi’s huge convoy go past — it includes a truck just to carry the flowers that people give her — and you wonder how anyone could beat her party at the polls.