Southern Myanmar is a long tail of land that, for more than 1,200 km, abuts Thailand, the Tenasserim Hills and their subranges forming the border. Time was now against me, which meant I couldn’t fly to Myeik, the most southerly airport open for tourists, because of the painfully long time it would take me to wend my way north again by bus (there are no flights between airports in the south; everything goes through Yangon). Instead, I opted to fly to Dawei, about halfway down (as it were), and head out to Maungmagan on the coast, and make my way back overland from there. Once released by the airport – although it was a domestic flight, passport and visa checks were carried out, as they have been almost every time I’ve crossed a state border here ... read more

Looking back on my eight days wandering around Myanmar’s two most famous archaeological sites, I realise that so much of what I would say about one is by reference to or in contrast with the other, I thought I’d write about them together. (My apologies: this will mean even more photographs than usual.) Bagan tends to be regarded as THE must-visit site in Myanmar. Even Yangon’s Shwedagon Pagoda and Inle Lake, with its leg-rowing fishermen, take a back seat to this extraordinary 40 square mile area and its two/three/four/ten thousand temples, pagodas and monasteries (no-one comes up with a consistent number either of those constructed or of what remains) from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries when Bagan (Pagan) was the capital of the Pagan Empire, the first kingdom to unify regions that would later constitute modern-day ... read more

Animal, vegetable and human sustenance apart, I’ve come to the conclusion that water in Myanmar has three key roles. With fishing and tourism, it is a way of life, of making money, surviving. In a country that has what I’ve seen politely described as “erratic” roads, it is a vital conduit for transport. And here, where over 65% of the population is still rural, it can be a welcome place to relax and have fun. My watery travels managed to reflect all three roles, but, for the sake of your digestion, I’ll post these as separate blogs. After scampering round the capital-fest that is the Mandalay region and to fortify myself before the temple-a-thon that is Bagan, I opted few days of luxury on the shores of Inle Lake. There’s the option of staying in the ... read more

I fell in love with Leh before I’d even got there. The mountains, the views, the people, the air; its whole aura, somehow. If I lived in Delhi, this would be my bolthole from the summer’s heat. On a clear day, the view from the Delhi flight is phenomenal, snow-capped peaks and winding streams of glacier-flow, no apparent sign of human activity until you near Ladakh’s capital and spot the first signs of cultivated fields beside grey-green rivers, a stark contrast to the barren, unforgiving landscape around. As with Paro in Bhutan, it seems incredible that there’s any stretch of flatness big enough for an airstrip, and indeed the airport itself is up the hill from the planes. Too excited to remember to check my seat pocket before getting off the plane – you’d have thought ... read more

Three things I didn’t know about Shimla a week ago. It is the administrative capital of Himachal Pradesh and, although originally “devised for an anticipated peak population of 45,000, at the most 60,000”, its metropolitan area now contains nearly 300,000 people. This is no sleepy remnant of a colonial past but a bustling, busy place. The ridge on which it sits forms a watershed between the Gangetic and Indus river systems. It cleaves the subcontinent in two, one system flowing into the Arabian Sea, and the other into the Bay of Bengal. Despite recent saturation coverage in the British media about the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence, I had managed to miss that it was in Simla, as it was then known, that the key independence negotiations took place. And, appropriately, given the way in which ... read more