As village tracks with bone-jarring depressions suddenly release you on to silky-smooth, six-lane, concrete-topped roads that could double as airport runways, you can tell you are nearing Myanmar's remote new capital.
Built in a 10 sq km area hacked out of dense jungle, Naypyidaw - or Seat of Kings - is still teeming with an army of 80,000 bedraggled-looking construction workers, which human rights groups claim includes people in forced labour programmes.
Unlike the former capital, Yangon, where the streets are grubby yet vibrant, Naypyidaw is eerily quiet and desolate, its torpor only mildly shaken by the blasting of nearby hills, just one of the many signs of a flurry of construction activity currently under way.
Since early 2005, Myanmar's military junta has been building Naypyidaw, away from the world's glare, in the middle of a malaria-infested jungle. The place is a perfect embodiment of the junta's own delusions of grandeur, partly reminiscent of Russia's Potemkin villages, the fake settlements built purely to give a good impression to visiting dignitaries.
Its huge buildings are spread out unevenly with large empty spaces dividing them. The Stalinist feel is heightened by the behemoth statues of bygone Burmese kings and the monumental size of the buildings, which include government offices, diplomatic quarters with blue and yellow metal roofs glinting in the sun, a parliamentary building and a large military complex, the latter strictly out of bounds for anyone not in uniform.
Visitors can, however, sidle past the numerous mansions that the military leaders have built for themselves.