As to historic sights, the obvious landmark is the 2,500-yearold Buddhist pagoda of Shwedagon (shwedagonpagoda.com), best visited at dusk when the Burmese gather with their families to make offerings, prayers and small talk. Striking a different cultural note entirely is traditional Burmese boxing. This high-kick, bareknuckle event is regularly hosted at the national stadium on the city’s outskirts (a good travel outfitter, such as Remote Lands or Abercrombie & Kent [see sidebar], should be able to get you into an afternoon training session). To understand the country at a more intellectual level, then I’d suggest a visit to two bookshops: Nandawun (myanmarhandicrafts.com), and The Pagan Book House (located between Maha Bandoola and Merchant streets), which sell hard-to-get English-speaking titles on Burma. For food, you can pay anything from to 0 a head in Rangoon. My favourite street-eat recommendation is Shwe Li BBQ on Kabataye Road, a relaxed, open-air Chinese barbecue restaurant for Uighur-style lamb served with tamarind, ginger and garlic dipping sauce. The new place in town for easy-going Western food is called 50th Street (50thstreetyangon.com), which works for a pizza and beer. Chicer restaurants include Le Planteur (leplanteur.net) in a red brick colonial manor house on Kaba Aye Road – expensive, though it offers a very good French-Asian fine dining menu, from white tuna carpaccio with sesame, lime and bergamot, to lobster and fish “bouillabaisse” with lemongrass and ginger. BEACH BOUNTY Burma’s nearly 2,000km of shore may be washed by the cobalt waters of the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, but beach tourism remains a relatively new concept. The sands are unsullied and the lodging simple – like Thailand 30 years ago. The up-and-coming hot spot is Ngapali, which now has the country’s first upscale beach hotel, the 28-bungalow Amara Ocean Resort (amara-ocean. com). The other coastal region attracting interest is the Mergui Archipelago towards the country’s southern border with Thailand. GETTING THERE I’ve travelled with two companies I can recommend in Burma: Abercrombie & Kent (abercrombiekent. co.uk), which keeps an office in Rangoon, and Bangkok, and New York-based Remote Lands (remotelands. com). Other agencies offering sophisticated access include UKbased Cazenove+Loyd (cazloyd.com), which is now offering specialistled, fixed-departure tours of Burma, and Audley Travel (audleytravel.com).
This is where Burma’s famous sea gypsies, or Moken people, live (although their nomadic lifestyle is changing very quickly). The luxury boats cruising this largely uninhabited string of whitesand-rimmed islands come up from Phuket – a necessary expense when the Burmese boats still aren’t up to much in terms of creature comforts. So far the only land-based hotel of note to have opened is Myanmar Andaman Resort (myanmarandamanresort.com) on Macleod Island, more an eco-resort than high-luxe hotel, but with its own mini-spa and dive centre. INTO THE HEARTLAND The most popular triangle travelled by first-time visitors to Burma takes in Rangoon, Inle Lake and the temples of Bagan with a cruise on the Ayeyarwady in or out of Mandalay. The tourism infrastructure is thus relatively well developed with frequent and easy flight connections. Heho, a 70-minute flight from Rangoon, is the access point for Inle Lake, a beautiful stretch of freshwater with floating gardens and stilted villages, where the women weave from lotus stems, and the men fish while using their feet to control the boat paddles. The best places to stay are Golden Island Cottages (gichotelgroup.com), which is made up of modest stilted bungalows, and the grander Inle Princess Resort (inleprincessresort.net), Aureum Palace Hotel (aureumpalacehotel.com) and Inle Lake View Resort and Spa (inlelakeview.com). Two nights here will suffice – making sure you lunch en route at Viewpoint (inleviewpoint.com), a small eco-resort with a very good restaurant. Then head on to Mandalay, Burma’s second-largest city and a 20-minute flight from Heho. This is where you pick up a boat for a cruise on the Ayeyarwady River, running from Mandalay north to Bhamo on the Chinese border, or south to Bagan, which is a vast plain and UNESCO World Heritage Site dotted by some 2,000 pagodas, stupas and temples. The best way to see the temples is by hot air balloon, using local specialists Eastern Safaris (easternsafaris. com). The long-established luxury option for Ayeyarwady cruising is the Orient-Express-owned Road to Mandalay (orient-express. com). The German-owned, teak-boned Amara I and Amara II (amaragroup.net) are also elegant. New to the scene is the 20-suite Sanctuary Ananda (sanctuaryretreats.com), launching next December, and the 50-guest ship Orcaella, launched last July by Orient-Express. Operating between January to April and July to December, Orcaella offers seven- and 11-night cruise itineraries on the Ayeyarwady between Rangoon and Bhamo. She also cruises the Chindwin River, winding her way through western Burma as far north as Homalin, 30 miles from the Indian border. HEAD TO THE HIGHLANDS Touring Burma’s tribal regions has a first-contact feel to it. This is not only because the country has been closed for so long, but because the terrain can be tough to penetrate, from Nagaland in the far northwest where the region’s former headhunters dress themselves in hornbill feathers and animals tusks, to Putao in remote Kachin State bordering both China and India. Accommodation can be basic to poor, from camping to local homestays. An exception is the Jean-Michel Gathy-designed Malikha Lodge (malikhalodge.net) in Putao (Gathy created a clutch of Amanresorts as well as the new Cheval Blanc Randheli resort in The Maldives). Another interesting tribal region is Eastern Shan State, the “golden triangle” area bordering northern Thailand, China and Laos. The different tribes concentrated in this area include the Akhu, Ann and Akha people; you can base yourself in the town of Kengtung, where there are simple but clean local hotels. Loikaw is also worth a detour for the Padaung – the ”long-necked” tribe who coil their necks in brass. The encounters feel substantially more genuine than the zoolike gaze-and-gawp experiences that occur across the border in Thailand, where the tribes dress up for tourist snaps. BEFORE YOU GO: Despite recent political changes, Burma remains a country very much in development – mobile coverage can be sporadic and wifi is only reliable in larger hotels and major urban centres. ATMs are few and far between and many establishments remain cash-only with but a few accepting credit cards. Best to check before travelling.
