The Golden Land, Burma or Myanmar, has got a grip on me. I remember the news of the 8-88 uprisings and massacres, and finally made it there in 1995. My second visit wasn’t for another 20 years, but my third was just two after that. Once the seat of many mighty empires, from Arakan to Bagan, Burma got caught in colonial games, the Japanese war, its own civil wars, greed, kleptocracy, narcocracy.
Peaceful, brutal, complex and contradictory, home to some of the world’s longest running civil wars, where a Nobel Prize winner is the puppet of a military regime carrying out Asia’s worst human rights abuses since Pol Pot.
Hiking opportunities in the many great hills may be interrupted by an outbreak of fighting (or sold off to China). Golden temples dot the length of Burma. Ethnic groups too many to list contribute to a little known but really good cuisine, too.
(Since writing that in late 2020, Burma has defaulted back to brutality, overthrowing an elected government, imprisoning opposition and turning its guns on its people. Again.)
