Word: rangoon
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...arrived safely in Rangoon, armed, like all the other tourists, with a liter each of Johnnie Walker Red Label and a package of 555 cigarettes. As soon as we deplaned, the whispers began: "Whisky cigarettes? Whisky cigarettes?" The arithmetic is simple: a dollar is worth seven Burmese kyats at the official rate, but on the black market buys thirty, and $14 worth of duty-free whisky and cigarettes sell for 500 kyats in Rangoon, giving a 36-kyat exchange rate...
After hot, smelly, noisy Bangkok, full of pollution and sordid massage parlors, Rangoon looked like a blow-up of a nineteenth-century cameo. The last time we drove in a car was the taxi from the airport. First of all, they don't use lights at night--waste of energy. Second of all, most cars don't have starters or a clutch, so a couple of young gentlemen are needed to push the van off. In the city, you see no cars made after 1950, mostly just a few WWII jeeps left behind by Allied soldiers, horse-carriages, and bicycle...
Monsoon rains fall with astonishing force, beginning in the late afternoon, and flooding the 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...
That and one other experience convinced us that, even though 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...
...From Rangoon we took a night train to 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...