In two days, both quite busy, I scarcely got to visit any Naypyitaw neighbourhoods – or zones (ministry, military, residential, hotel, etc) as they’re officially known. But I did travel about a bit and feel I’d like to note down some of what I saw, as much for the record as anything else.

Less than 10 years old, this is still visibly a city very nearly dropped from the sky onto an unsuspecting landscape. There’s nothing organic about it, and many features seem designed actually to boost the sense of unreality – the vast empty boulevards, the neatly painted kerbs, the immaculate landscaping, the plastic flowers adorning many roundabouts. None of it bears any connection to the immediate context, and all of it breaks down the minute you leave, or even look away from, the impressive infrastructure built in the early 2000s. One minute an eight-lane highway, the next a dirt track leading to the back streets of Pyinmana. Presumably other new capitals started life like this, and only slowly managed to graft themselves onto their surroundings.

One evening I took a very brief drive around the compound used to house the bulk of Myanmar’s opposition MPs – elected members from the USDP and appointed members from the military have their own segregated spaces. This civilian compound in fact has two parts – number one for guests, number two for legislators. Both contain single-storey buildings that could readily pass for barracks facing off across open scrubland. In the MPs’ section, standard prices of roughly $12 a night for a three-bed room are discounted to about $3, meaning that legislators prepared to share can stay in Naypyitaw for around $1 a night. An important recent concession is that valuables can now be locked in rooms when MPs return to their constituencies.

The final evening I was back at the airport – sleek, modern, sparkling, cavernous, decked out almost entirely in English-language signage. Reflecting the city it serves, it was as close to vacant as any still-functioning facility is ever likely to be. According to the departure board, there was that night a single international flight (with, it turned out, some 35 passengers) – PG722 to Bangkok at 20:05. I’m pretty certain there were no domestic flights. Sitting in an eerily isolated hall pondering the door marked “Smoker’s room”, I came to believe the apostrophe was not misplaced after all.