‘This is Burma’, wrote Rudyard Kipling. ‘It is quite unlike any place you know about.’ How right he was: more than a century later Myanmar remains a world apart. To travel here is to encounter men wearing skirt-like longyi, women smothered in thanakha (traditional make-up) and betel-chewing grannies with mouths full of blood-red juice – and that’s just at the airport! One of the most fascinating aspects of travel in Myanmar is the opportunity to experience a corner of Asia that, in many ways, has changed little since British colonial times.
