This is Burma

"This is Burma," Rudyard Kipling once wrote. "It is quite unlike any land you know about."

Well we're not supposed to call it Burma these days - nearly everyone I speak to calls it Myanmar - but his words still ring true. Here indeed is a country very different from any other I have travelled through and that is quite a few.

My flight from Bangkok was delayed. Through a dense early morning mist the mysterious shape of the country finally began to reveal itself. I could pick out the pin gold flashes of religious stupas. There was the very real sense of entering an unknown country. It was exciting and enthralling, the pleasurable tinge of being on the cusp of having new things revealed to me. Here was a country that we really know so little about from the inside.

Yangon used to be called Rangoon under the British. In some ways, architectuarlly at least, its like they never really left. Here is a city which has been fermented by years of neglect and troical rains, still glued to its past. The lifestyles of many of its people are still....

see the photos here:
http://www.alitravelstheworld.com/myanmar/