Tag Archives: burma

Rangoon 2: Attacked in the Night

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Ryan Murdock

As I wrote in the prior blog, I still don’t know how I found the “guesthouse” where we spent that first night in Rangoon.  At first it seemed like a great value. But in the end we got more than we bargained for…

It was a small place owned by Indian traders, on the second floor of a decrepit colonial building lost down a forgettable side street. We had to trudge up a dark stairway full of auto parts and then walk through some sort of machine shop to get to the door. I struck a deal for a tidy little room with a shower for less than ten bucks — not bad given how overpriced rooms in Rangoon were at the time.

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Burmese Days

Posted on September 1, 2010 by Ryan Murdock

rangoon2.jpg


Of all the places I traveled in Southeast Asia, I liked Burma the best.

It was by far the most traditional country in the region. It was free of Thailand’s 7-11′s, paved roads and fast food. Free of Vietnam’s scams. And it lacked that uncomfortable undercurrent of violence and broken psyches that seemed to blight Cambodia. 

Burmese people were quiet and kind. Old men in the highlands lamented the fact that young people had begun wearing pants in Rangoon, but I never once saw a pair of jeans, only the traditional wraparound longyi.

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A Postcard from the Shan Highlands

Posted on May 15, 2009 by Ryan Murdock

 

 

shan.jpgA thin mist broke over pale green rice fields in a wet hill-wrapped bowl in the Shan Highlands of northern Burma. An ox chewed its cud. Smoke rose from bamboo huts on the fringes, and longyi-clad men swung slow-motion sickles in garden plots. From over the next hill came the plaintive cry of the train from Mandalay, winding laboriously from village to village, overloaded with produce, creaking under the weight of the country’s isolation for lack of spare parts.

As we squelched along the muddy track I turned to my companion, a Shan man in his late thirties. His arms were tattooed with symbols in the Burmese script.

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