Word: burma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...main reasons they only give you a week is to make it physically impossible to visit the "forbidden areas" of Upper Burma. The government has no control over its border areas nor much of the northern part of country where hill tribes live. The famous Golden Triangle, where much of the world's opium is produced, is the intersection of Thailand, Laos, and Burma, and the area is primarily controlled by various guerrilla groups and drug smugglers. The most common smuggling route, now that many Southeast Asian countries are cracking down, is through Burma to Bangladesh...
...streets. In Rangoon, I escaped into the People's Patisserie for tea and was accosted by a gang of exuberant youngsters calling out "Howareyou! Howareyou!" I found Tom at the teashop near our hotel, engaged in polite conversation with several Burmese men. Nightlife is next to nonexistent in Burma, but teatime is really more like Happy Hour, and the teashops fill up with carousing beer drinkers...
...about 70 percent of the Burmese economy is black-market and the government often appears hopelessly out of touch with society, people take it seriously. We went to the Rangoon train station to try to get a Burmese to buy us train tickets instead of doing it at Tourist Burma at the official rate. The same people who wanted to buy our dollars, Walkmen, cassettes, cosmetics, T-shirts and even underwear, wouldn't touch our money to break that rule. It's as though the government tacitly cedes certain areas to the black market, and the people steadfastly leave...
...Mandalay. Burmese trains are kind of like riding a horse all night, only you're in a chair. In Mandalay, even the Jeeps disappeared, and the streets were empty except for horse-carts and rickshaws. We took a horse-cart out to Sagaing, "the spiritual center of Buddhism in Burma," where about 500 monasteries surround a pagoda on a hill. We were escorted up the hill by a group of uniformed school kids entranced by Tom's sunglasses (every little kid we met on the trip, in the smallest, remotest villages, yelled "Rambo!" when he caught a look...
...night the boat stopped in Pakkoku. Tourist Burma had told us we had to sleep on board, but that turned out to be another official lie. We guessed that since Pakkoku wasn't on any of our maps, it must be a tiny village; it turned out to be a city of 200,000. We stayed at a family inn called the Myayatanar, where innkeeper Tint San spoke impeccable English and his son played "Ob-la-di, ob-la-da" on the guitar. They took us into town to the festival that was going on that night. We expected another...