Thailand is rightly proud of its frequent appearances on lists of the world’s best islands, cities, restaurants and spas. These attest to the country’s enduring appeal to millions of foreign tourists, even as a military junta tightens its grip on power. But a slew of less flattering statistics says much more about the health of Thailand’s society and the ability of its leaders to improve it. For example:

Road deaths – Thailand has the world’s second highest rate (after lawless Libya), with at least 14,000 deaths in 2012. The World Health Organization says the actual number could be more than 24,000.

Plastic pollution – Thailand is one of five countries responsible for most of the eight million tons of plastic dumped in the world’s oceans.

Teenage pregnancy – Thailand has the second highest rate (after impoverished Laos) in East Asia and the Pacific, and it’s rising rapidly.

Human trafficking – Thailand occupies the lowest tier (with North Korea and Syria) in the U.S. State Department’s annual ranking of countries for their efforts to combat human trafficking.

Black economy – Thailand is seventh on a list of top ten developing countries for illicit capital outflows, third if you re-plot the data as a percentage of GDP. These outflows totalled $35 billion in 2012.

Gun crime – Amazingly, Thailand’s gun homicide rate is almost equal to that of the United States.

Of course, Thailand is a relatively big country, and all big countries contain good and bad. But what takes the breath away is how blithely the two seem to coexist here. Look at Koh Tao, where two young British backpackers were murdered in September 2014. Seven months later, despite fears that the culprits remained at large, Tripadvisor released its list of the world’s top ten islands. Koh Tao came fifth.

Kids in a Rohingya camp

My three-year-old daughter runs unsteadily down a steep road covered in wet leaves. “Careful,” I tell her. She doesn’t fall, but soon she is far ahead of me. I glance back to check on my son, then turn to see my daughter slip off the road and into a shallow canal. She lands awkwardly, striking her head against a concrete pillar, then falls face down in the water. I start to run, realising with horror that she will drown before I reach her.

Then I wake up in a dark hotel room in western Myanmar, muttering “Thank god, thank god.” I was dreaming.

The dream was easy to explain: I was channeling my anxiety about children I had met in the Rohingya displacement camps dotted along the coast of Rakhine State. Naked, pot-bellied kids much younger than mine tottered through a squalid landscape there was no waking up from. I asked many Rohingya mothers what they worried about the most, and they replied, in this order: Our children getting diarrhoea; our children not going to school.

Later, they have another worry: Our children leaving. Thousands of Rohingya, many children among them, leave on boats to seek jobs in Malaysia; they are routinely waylaid by human traffickers and held for ransom in Thailand. At an internet shop in one displacement camp, I listened to Rohingya parents – mostly mothers – struggle to piece together families torn apart by poverty, exploitation and distance. Some argued with traffickers for the release of sons and daughters. Others had tearful reunions with children now working in Malaysia.

A woman called Robizar spoke via the internet to her 18-year-old son Abdul, who had left ten months ago. He had reached Malaysia, so Robizar no longer worried about his safety. She just missed him, terribly. “Son, I can’t tell you how it feels to hear your voice,” she said. Then she buried her head in her arms and wept.

Please read my Reuters story “Reunions and ransoms: a day online at Myanmar’s Rohingya camps” and see Minzayar’s amazing photos from the internet huts

Rohingya boys at a Maungdaw school

Northern Rakhine State in western Burma has been off-limits to foreign journalists for decades. Since 2011, when President Thein Sein and his avowedly reformist government took power, only a handful of us have ever visited the region.

That’s a shame, because it’s hard to understand Rakhine State’s tortured politics and geography without going there. It is the poorest part of the second-poorest state in a very poor country. It is also home to most of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims, who are now fleeing by boat in unprecedented numbers.

We – the photographer Minzayar and I – needed permission to travel to Maungdaw, one of Northern Rakhine State’s three townships. It was surprisingly easy to get. We sailed upriver from Sittwe, the state capital, with a crisp official letter that would soon be creased and softened by all the Rakhine police and bureaucrats who scrutinized it.

At the jetty in Buthedaung, we were encircled by five men, none of them in uniform, clutching pens and notebooks. They hailed from Immigration, Special Branch, the police, the Border Guard Police and the army. Our letter was passed around reverentially. Then one man wrote down our names while the others leaned in to copy him. It was like being mobbed by cub reporters.

From Buthedaung, Maungdaw was a short drive on a bad road through parched mountains. There, government officials insisted on accompanying us at all times. Other men – we assumed Special Branch – trailed behind on a motorbike. It felt like the old Burma, not the new one.

One morning, Minzayar and I gave our minders the slip to visit Rohingya villages. Afterwards, we were summoned by Khin Maung Win, the affable chief of Maungdaw District. Like many officials we met in Rakhine, he seemed to disdain and fear the Rohingya, who he called “Bengalis.”

Armed militants might be lurking in the villages we visited, he warned. They could abduct us, hold us until nightfall, then spirit us over the border to Bangladesh and into the hands of ISIS. This seemed farcical, but Khin Maung Win was serious. “Bengalis have a habit of crowding around you, and if you say something wrong they might get physical,” he said. “It’s in their nature.”

Please read my recent Reuters dispatches from Northern Rakhine State on the great Rakhine exodus and the threat of Rohingya militancy

A rescued Rohingya at the Thai mosque

We found Akram sprawled helplessly on a makeshift wooden bed in a village mosque in southern Thailand. His teenage body was malnourished and covered with fly-blown pressure sores. His breathing was rapid and shallow, and he gasped for breath as he told his story.

Akram was one of about 25 Rohingya Muslims rescued from a nearby human-smuggling camp sixteen days before. I counted six young men who moved through the mosque’s grounds with the help of wheelchairs, walking frames or crutches. At the camp, Akram had been beaten, starved and left for dead. Yet what he had endured was unremarkable by the standards of his long-suffering people.

The Rohingya are mostly stateless residents of Rakhine State in western Myanmar. Apartheid-like conditions there have compelled tens of thousands of them to cross the Bay of Bengal in smugglers’ boats bound for – they hope – Malaysia. But the boats come ashore in Thailand, where the Rohingya are held at secret camps until relatives pay for their onward passage to Malaysia. It is effectively a vast kidnap-and-ransom operation.

Akram, then 17, ended up at an overcrowded camp in a deserted rubber plantation near the Malaysian border. By day, the guards forced the Rohingya to squat on their haunches; by night, to lie in a foetal position. If they moved, even to stretch, they were beaten. After a month locked in these stress positions and weakened by chronic diarrhoea, Akram was paralysed.

He suffered two more months of this torture. Then the guards heard a rumour of a police raid, and fled along with the Rohingya who could walk. The others crawled through the rubber trees until local Muslims found them. Fourteen Rohingya were now recuperating at the mosque. Three were at a nearby hospital. Three had died. The rest had been spirited away by relatives.

The local Muslims had saved many Rohingya lives, but you had to wonder how much they knew about other camps in their area – probably more than they dared to say. “There are many camps in these hills,” said Akram’s friend Yasin, 17, who had escaped the same camp.

Akram’s muscles were so atrophied he still couldn’t stand up, but Yasin seemed in better shape. Before leaving the mosque, I saw him riding carefully around the grounds on a borrowed mountain bike. He was smiling. Then he got off the bike and his legs crumpled beneath him.

Read my Reuters report on a recent rescue operation by Thai police

An anti-Yingluck protester and her placards

Yingluck Shinawatra is a soft-spoken, guarded, exasperating interviewee. Her answers, at least in English, manage to sound both rehearsed and rambling. But then she is having a bad week.

I profiled Thailand’s first female prime minister for Reuters in the run-up to a February 2 general election that anti-government protesters have vowed to disrupt. Ten people have been killed and hundreds injured since the protests began three months ago. Bangkok is braced for further violence on Sunday.

Yingluck is a hard study. Her big brother Thaksin, who was toppled in a 2006 military coup, famously described her as his “clone”. Today, her public persona – bland, solicitous, unfazed – seems crafted to remind the world that she is not her brother, a notorious hothead.

Thai politics is dominated by men. I watched Yingluck, a former company president, chair a meeting of about hundred people to discuss the election. Not counting reporters, she was one of perhaps five women in the room. Only when you get closer to Yingluck does her entourage swell with female advisors, female bureaucrats, female bodyguards.

For protesters, Yingluck’s gender makes her a target of abuse. “Paying taxes for a whore to travel,” read a placard at one Bangkok protest site, referring to her frequent overseas trips. A university lecturer suggested on stage that young men should be dispatched to molest her. Another speaker, who was a doctor, offered to give her vaginal reconstruction surgery.

Yingluck’s opponents are trying in vain to “to exploit her femininity to make her break down,” said Suranand Vejjajiva, her chief of staff. But while rightly condemning such misogynist abuse, her aides (and Yingluck) routinely extol the supposed political benefits of femininity in a way that might also be viewed as disparaging.

“Being a female, and being a (former) manager of companies and new to politics, she is willing to bend more, to listen to people,” said Suranand. Another close advisor told me Yingluck’s gender meant she focused on “resolution not revenge.”

I asked Yingluck how she felt about the abuse she got from protesters. She replied in a voice so hushed I could barely hear her. “I think first thing we are the public people,” she said. “We have to be very patient. One thing that I think is that people who know me they know the answers.”

As I said, exasperating.

“To reach the edge of the ‘Heart of Darkness,’ here at the old capital of Joseph Conrad’s horror, this Kinshasa, once evil Leopoldville, center of slave trade and ivory trade,” he laments, “and to see it through the bilious eyes of a tortured intestine!” Mailer then wonders: “Was it part of Hemingway’s genius that he could travel with healthy insides?”

I often recall Mailer’s words when I’m in Burma, which has inflicted more torture on my intestines than any other country. That includes a savage bout of food poisoning during a recent trip to lush and rugged Kachin State, in the far north. You would think that after 18 years of reporting from Burma’s remotest corners I’d have all the antibodies. But not for whatever was lurking in the fried prawns at Mandalay Airport’s transit restaurant.

I’m not the only seasoned traveller susceptible to King Thibaw’s Revenge. In Rangoon I bumped into Stuart McDonald of Travelfish, the backpacking guide to Southeast Asia, and was delighted to discover that he’d been really sick too. With something close to awe, Stuart told me how food poisoning in Bagan had fricasseed his innards and put him out of action for days.

This is why an essential tool for any Burma visitor is some kind of anti-diarrhoeal drug. That’s usually Imodium, although here’s a photo of a brand I bought in Thailand. It not only alleviates the condition but, in a single word, captures the experience.

Anti-diarrhoeal tablets from Thailand

Murderer or martyr?

This is a photo of Mahrosu Jantarawadee, 31, a Malay-Muslim insurgent who last month led a raid on a remote military base in Thailand’s war-torn southern provinces. The marines stationed there were waiting for him, and Mahrosu and 15 other militants died in a hail of bullets and shrapnel.

Peace talks begin in Malaysia today in a bid to end this brutal nine-year conflict that has now killed more than 5,300 people. In Bacho, the district where the abortive raid took place, Mahrosu is hailed as a shahid or martyr who died fighting a holy war to protect his religion and culture from a Thai Buddhist government.

The internet has projected his heroic status far beyond Bacho’s rice fields and rubber plantations. A Che Guevara-style print of his face has been posted and re-posted on Facebook. “Your good deeds were as fragrant as jasmine flowers,” runs a folk song written after his death and popularized on YouTube.

The Thai military’s response to the martyrdom of Mahrosu has been calibrated. It wants the world to know it has eliminated a militant whose “good deeds” include bomb and gun attacks that killed at least 25 people, one of them a Bacho schoolteacher who was shot dead in front of his seven-year-old daughter. But it doesn’t want to feed the Mahrosu myth. “We have never regarded Mahrosu’s side as the enemy,” a Bacho marine commander, who refused to crow about foiling the Bacho raid, told me. “We are all Thais.”

Thai soldiers should understand the mechanics of martyrdom by now. The oldest shahid in Bacho’s graveyards were buried there in 2004, after soldiers and police dispersed a protest at a town called Tak Bai. Eighty-five Muslim men and boys died, mostly by suffocation after they were piled four or five high in army trucks. Tak Bai helped radicalize a whole new generation of insurgents, who soon gave the Thai military more of its own dead to honor.

Please read my story on the conflict for Reuters or watch Thailand’s Tropic Gulag, a documentary I co-produced with Orlando de Guzman.

Tun Aung, a practicing medical doctor and Islamic leader, was arrested in June 2012 after clashes between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine State killed at least 80 people. He was accused of inciting unrest in the town of Maungdaw, although Amnesty International said credible eyewitness reports suggested that Tun Aung “actively tried to defuse the violence.”

He was not allowed to choose his own lawyer, nor to meet privately with his state-appointed one, “giving him no chance of a fair trial,” says Amnesty. Even so, Tun Aung was sentenced to a total of 15 years in jail.

Seven of them were for offenses under the Emergency Provisions Act (1950), one of a number of laws “commonly used to arbitrarily detain activists or criminalize dissent” under Myanmar’s old junta, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP). These laws, which still remain on Myanmar’s books, help create “an environment conducive to politically motivated arrests,” says AAPP. At least 200 dissidents remain behind bars, says the group.

Amnesty has designated Tun Aung a prisoner of conscience and called for his immediate and unconditional release. He could be granted a presidential amnesty “before too long,” reported The Irrawaddy. Maybe. Or President Thein Sein could decide that keeping 200 or so people behind bars is no big deal. After all, Myanmar’s more developed Southeast Asian neighbors still routinely incarcerate citizens for their political views.

Indonesia has about 76 prisoners of conscience, most of them jailed for peaceful political expression in the restive provinces of Papua and Maluku, says Amnesty. At least 31 activists and dissidents were jailed in Vietnam in the first nine months of 2012 alone, estimated Human Rights Watch. And dozens—perhaps scores—are serving lengthy sentences in Thai prisons under draconian laws that forbid even mild criticism of the country’s monarchy.

The house looks unwelcoming, and perhaps it’s meant to. It is painted a penitential shade of beige and ringed by a high fence topped with razor wire. “To protect against enemies,” said a guard through a mouthful of betel juice, before shutting the heavy wooden gate that separates Naypyitaw’s famous new resident, Aung San Suu Kyi, from a curious world.

Suu Kyi rented the house after she and 42 other National League for Democracy (NLD) candidates won seats in April by-elections. I visited Naypyitaw twice to research my Special Report for Reuters on the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Men in green arrive at parliament

The parliamentary complex is, like the city itself, sprawling and half-deserted. Suu Kyi walked its well-polished hallways with a slow, loose-limbed stride not often seen in public, where her bodyguards must hustle her through media scrums, and where fans sometimes lunge or yank her aside. She seemed at home there.

”I don’t know about ‘at home,’ but my dog seems to like this place,” she told me, hurrying up the steps of the Lower House building. (Her dog, Tai Chi Toe, is a gift from her son Kim Aris.)

In Myanmar’s half-cocked democracy, the constitution reserves a quarter of parliamentary seats for military delegates. Most are mid-ranking army officers, all are men. They keep their distance from Suu Kyi, and not only because she wants to re-write the constitution and eject them from parliament. They’re also star-struck. “They want to make friends with her, but they are a little shy,” said NLD spokesman Ohn Kyaing.

The military delegates wear uniforms and occupy one side of the chamber in a solid block of green. Suu Kyi sits nearby, ramrod-straight, studiously taking notes. Most of the MPs applaud the speaker’s pronouncements, but not Suu Kyi. “Why should she clap?” said her personal assistant Dr Ma Nge, watching with me from the press gallery. “This is work.”

By Orlando de Guzman & Andrew Marshall

If you don’t like hospitals—and who apart from health professionals does?—then you’ll hate Dhaka Hospital during one of the Bangladesh capital’s regular cholera epidemics.

Last October, when we filmed Dhaka’s Cholera Wars for Al Jazeera, the emergency ward was seething with men, women and children, many of them severely dehydrated and fighting for life. Patients moaned as nurses connected them with intravenous needles to bags of saline. Hospital orderlies pushed away trolleys piled with buckets of diarrhoea and vomit.

And all the while more patients arrived, by wheelchair or stretcher, or half-carried by fretful relatives, until they spilled out into makeshift wards set up in the parking lot.

It looked like pandemonium, but it wasn’t. The Cholera Hospital, as locals call it, is efficient and deceptively high-tech. (Look closely, and you’ll see that medical staff track each patient with handheld computers.) And it is unrivaled at treating large numbers of patients with potentially fatal diarrhoeal diseases such as cholera. “If you arrive alive at our hospital,” its director Mark Pietroni told us, “then you leave alive.”

We quickly realized that what we were filming was not a hospital, but a factory of miracles. Its staff save thousands of lives.

Dhaka has two cholera outbreaks each year: roughly, one before and one after the monsoon. Left untreated, cholera can kill in hours and it spreads quickly, which is why it so terrifies people. “You can start being ill at ten the morning and be dead by two in the afternoon,” says Pietroni. But treat it promptly, and even the sickest patients make a full recovery. Patients who were stretchered into Dhaka Hospital were walking out—albeit gingerly—within 24 hours.

Dhaka Hospital is part of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), a world leader in its field. One morning, while filming around the centre’s sprawling compound, a grey-bearded figure shambled past. “That’s Richard Cash,” explained a staff member in a reverential undertone. “He should have a Nobel prize.”

Now 70 years old, Cash pioneered the use of oral rehydration solution (ORS), a simple mixture of salt, sugar and water, to treat cholera and other diarrhoeal diseases. ORS is thought to have saved more than 50 million lives.

Today, ORS is the primary weapon in Dhaka Hospital’s fight against cholera. Treatment is free, but that doesn’t mean only the poorest go there. So do affluent Bangladeshis, who know the hospital’s no-frills appearance belies a standard of care offered almost nowhere else. We often saw sick children cradled by mothers in fine sarees and gold jewellery.

While we were filming in Bangladesh, another cholera epidemic was raging in Haiti, which had been devastated by a powerful earthquake in January 2010. By late October, the Caribbean country had reported about 3,800 cases and 280 deaths, a mortality rate of more than 7%. During the same period, Dhaka Hospital probably treated at least half that number of cholera patients, and we didn’t hear of a single death.

We left Bangladesh with a new appreciation for the staff of Dhaka Hospital and the ICDDR,B—and for the people of the world’s most densely populated large country. The poverty of Bangladeshis, and the disasters they endure, are well-documented. We hope that Dhaka’s Cholera Wars also shows their courage and resilience in the face of an age-old disease.

Watch Dhaka’s Cholera Wars on Al Jazeera