Burma 1984
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan 2018
Burma 1984
The group had free time for our final morning in Burma. While some slept, other explored the old centre of Rangoon on foot, some went shopping, and several groups took the opportunity of re-visiting the Shwedagon Pagoda by taxi (taxis here being those large, old American cars of 1940s vintage). Many of the unforgettable memories of Rangoon were gained during such tree time. Images such as small girls catching crickets in the streets to eat, old men eating discarded straw baskets for breakfast, the locals who kept offering members of the group the black-market rate of 20 kyats to the $1 when the official rate was 8 kyats to $1, the experience of having to pay in some shops in US dollars because the local currency was unacceptable, the old cars and buses. In other circumstances, these may have been repulsive images, but by now they were part of a Rangoon we had grown to appreciate, even though we knew we could never completely understand it.
Everyone In the group had been challenged and changed by their experience in Burma. We had learned, as Michio Takeyama pointed out in the 1946 book “Harp of Burma” that “Burmese live every phase of their lives in accordance with a profound teaching, and cannot be considered uncivilised. It’s wrong to ridicule them because they don’t have the kind of knowledge we do. They possess something marvellous that we can’t even begin to understand”. As John F Cady stated in his “History of Modern Burma”, “The country casts a kind of spell over its friends which they cannot break even if they would.”
Our return flight to Bangkok was smooth and and uneventful (Thai International Airways Douglas DC-8, Flight TG306). As soon as we arrived in Bangkok, we knew we had left Burma by the lack of bureaucratic formalities, the noise and fumes of Bangkok, and what must be some of the world’s worst traffic congestion which saw a trip of a few kilometres from Don Muang Airport to our hotel take almost an hour.
Monday
7 May 1984
Day 13
Rangoon to Bangkok
