(CNN) — Hiding under a blanket in the back of a car at a police checkpoint. Hopping on boats instead of staying on a road. Constantly looking over your shoulder, knowing that at any moment you — and those with you — face the possibility of imprisonment, torture, even death.

It sounds like a spy thriller movie. But CNN’s Dan Rivers, who sneaked into storm-ravaged Myanmar without the knowledge of the nation’s secretive ruling junta, would be the first to say that such an existence is much more frightening than it might appear on the silver screen.

Now out of the country, he recounted his adventures to CNN Wire News Editor Ashley Broughton. Calling the government’s response to the disaster “criminal negligence on a massive scale,” he said he is concerned that many more may die as a result of the government’s self-imposed isolation.

Rivers arrived in Myanmar on Monday morning, a few days after Cyclone Nargis ripped through the Irrawaddy Delta region. “The logistics were horrendous,” he said. Getting to the hardest-hit area involved an eight-hour drive on dirt roads.

On Thursday, members of his crew were told by a local official that an immigration official wanted to talk to them, Rivers said. That official took the crew members’ passports and were comparing them to a picture of Rivers — apparently taken from a picture of a CNN screen.
Not finding a match, the official allowed the crew to go.

But knowing they were searching for him, he hid under a blanket in the back of their van at a police checkpoint as the group was heading south.

They later parked the van, hopped on a boat and traveled down the river in two small boats. They reached a small village and were able to do some videotaping, but soon were stopped by a local official who told them to return to the van, where police would be waiting for them.

“For the first time, I was thinking, you know, this is it,” he said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. No one knows where we are, exactly. They could just shoot us and throw us into the river and say we had an accident. … You start to think about family, and what you’d put them through if you disappear.”

When the police officers at the van asked to see his passport, he held it in such a way that his thumb covered his surname. Not noticing, police took his middle name and radioed it in.
“They thought we weren’t who they were looking for, and basically let us go,” he said.

Later, after he had boarded a plane to fly out of Myanmar, he was called back to the gate, where the authorities “basically searched everything I had,” he said. He believes they were looking for pictures or videotapes, but he had none. He eventually was allowed back on the plane.

He said the stubbornness of the Myanmar regime was “breathtaking” — that, in the face of such a large-scale disaster, they would utilize time and resources looking for a reporter.