Yangon is a large busy city at the Yangon River. Big rusty ferries full of shouting street vendors selling everything from jackfruit to toothpaste cross the river. The other side is called Dala, and it’s a different world. It feels like a river delta village, with small bamboo and wood houses spaced widely, with forests,…

The country is full of Buddha statues, many golden, or covered in plaster, or plain brick. But on closer inspection, many of those are monks, not Buddha. Buddha is actually the title of someone who has achieved enlightenment, not a specific person. But with a capital B it usually refers to the first buddha, the…

Inle lake is up in the eastern mountains, so it’s pleasant and cool after the humid heat of Mandalay. The lake is very shallow and is now, at the end of the rainy season, at its largest. There are many villages in the lake, where all houses are built on stilts and are reachable only…

Mandalay is not a beautiful town. The city center is loud, busy, and ugly. The enormous palace ground has an authentic moat and wall, but the interior is mostly an army camp now plus a hastily built imitation of a few of the old buildings. The city doesn’t really have much in the way of…

Google‘s shoddy Blogger app finally posted the previous article on the 15th attempt, but not without losing the photos. Here they are. Do they test this stuff at all? Or only on the company network?… Read the rest

Yangon has the largest and the most golden pagoda, but Bagan makes up for that with numbers. They grow them like mushrooms. On forty square kilometers there are 2000 of them, mostly made of brick but there is some marble and gold as well. For rich people it’s chic to rebuild pagodas, so many of…

There are many pagodas around Yangon, more than one would think people would need, and I have seen a number of them today including one on an island in a lake, where no shoe may be brought to the island. But the largest and most famous one is Shwedagon. It’s almost a hundred meters tall…