The Bumps

As I sipped from a cup of coffee and sunk my teeth into a bacon and egg bagel sandwich, the portly American manager badgered her Lao employees then complained about them to her disinterested breakfast clients.

“You have no idea how hard it is in Laos to find someone who can get up on time and decently work a latte machine!” It was a modern-time American mass-consumer echo of the French Indochina rice-listening parable.

The manager continued waddling through the café, occasionally asking us about our order. “Is your coffee hot? Are your eggs cooked?” Truth be told, my mug was lukewarm and my sandwich downright runny. I cravenly hid behind my precious week-old English language newspaper feeling faintly sorry for everyone involved in this scene.

We were in Luang Prabang, Laos’ foremost tourist showpiece. It was the home of the Lao monarchy, until the end of the Vietnam War when communist inspired Pathet Lao forces rounded the royal family up and locked them away in a nearby cave. For the next four years, they slowly starved to death. However, that was then and this is now. Since the fall of the Soviet bloc governments and the opening of legalized private enterprise in communist Laos, Luang Prabang has transformed itself into a premiere South East Asian tourist mecca- and all the dodgy coffee shops, pizza restaurants, and smoky sports bars that entails. Not to mention the backpackers. Loads of them.

The Luang Prabang night market sells a decent array of local tribal crafts.

Katlijn on a sunny day by the Mekong.

But I’m not here to disparage Luang Prabang. Despite the annoying preponderance of western youth backpacker culture, it is still a sunny happy place nestled between green mountains at the confluence of the Khan and Mekong Rivers. No trip to Laos is complete without a day or two spent strolling through the relaxed palm-lined streets, the dignified crumble of stately French colonial buildings, and the gleaming rooftops of an ancient Buddhist heritage.

A bird's-eye view of the KhanRiver winding through Luang Prabang and the surrounding mountains.

Wat Xieng Thong's elegant roof-top sweeping low to the ground is typical of classic Lao temple architecture.

Starting from the snowy peaks of the Tibetan plateau and making its way to the delta region of Vietnam, the Mekong is one of the world’s great rivers. There are two ways to visit the Mekong from Luang Prabang: a twelve-hour leisurely float through a serene world of fishing traps and rolling jungle scenery, or a harrowing forty minute white-knuckler as your speed-boat hurtles up-river and the Mekong valley rockets past you. The former involves a good book, plenty of time for self-reflection, and a slow numbing of the senses brought on by a full-day of continuous on-board boozing. The latter involves a crash helmet, frequent collision, and a suicidal disposition. Wisely, we opted for a delightful twelve hour drift into a quiet lao-lao induced coma.

Making its way through Tibet, China, Myanmar, and Vietnam, the Mekong's famous waters have flowed past some of the most dramatic and bloodiest events in human history.

We came to sometime after sunset at a tiny fishing village called Pakbeng. Arriving from the other direction was a larger, and much louder, boat loaded with what sounded like a cargo of backpacking frat boys. Alas, the quiet lao-lao induced coma can only be enjoyed going up-river as the down-river boat takes on all the backpackers riding in from Thailand. Not much can be said of Pakbeng itself, except for one thing: I have checked my diary carefully now and shortly after we spent a night at one of Pakbeng’s many cruddy hotels, I had my first occurrence of a mysterious re-occurring skin irritation Katlijn and I subsequently referred to as “the bumps”.

Mysterious re-occurring skin irritations are, as you might imagine, an integral part of the South East Asia low-budget travel experience. Backpackers, in general, attribute any skin irritation to a generic phenomenon they call “bed bugs”. Despite having no idea what bed bugs actually are, backpackers nevertheless always arrive at this diagnosis with certainty, though the details of the inevitably woeful prognosis vary in a unique kind of morbidly creative flourish especially reserved for this sort of ailment (“they carry diseases”, “they lay eggs… underneath your skin”, “they’re still living…in your sleeping bag !”).

Bed bugs have therefore taken on the stuff of legend. Probably because of this odious and inflated reputation, nobody seems to ever have had bed bugs though, oddly enough, they “know somebody” who did and so can rattle off a long list of potential remedies that run the entire gamut of common sense from skin ointments to setting fire to your entire backpack.

Unfortunately, there was no shameful hiding my bed bugs from the frat boys the next morning. I didn’t have a choice- I was covered in the bumps. While a few of my fellow backpackers treated me and my potentially contaminated backpack like the bubonic plague, most were genuinely understanding and the ensuing debate on the nature of bed bugs and potential solutions to the problem served as an effective ice breaker. Together with our new-found friends, we whiled away twelve hours together on the Mekong playing cards underneath a steady stream of drunken backpackers making their way to the on-board bathroom. Needless to say, we saw a lot more cards and booze than scenery on the return journey.

Not for the faint of heart, Luang Prabang's morning market stocks some curious produce.

Alarmed by my rapidly spreading bed bugs and the developing backpacker lore surrounding them, Katlijn and I made our way to the local hospital back in Luang Prabang. South East Asian former communist block medical facilities are, in a word, deplorable. Any self-respecting tour guide will tell you to take you and your mysterious re-occuring skin irritations straight to Bangkok if symptoms persist- and with good reason. The local Laotian hospital looked like a converted bomb shelter with all the clinical sterility of your local fast-food burrito outlet. I tripped over an obsolete French medical text on the way in and we made our way through an eerily vacant cement bunker towards a very bored and unimpressed receptionist. She eventually led us to an examination room filled with a collection of macabre medieval medical contraptions. We were left a long time alone with our thoughts of all the sawed off limbs and leechings that probably occured in this very room.

“Whatever you do,” Katlijn warned me, “ don’t let them stick anything in you.”

A nurse finally came in to examine me. She proceeded to poke at the red bumps on my leg and give me a blank look. Finally, she muttered a few consoling words in French and suggested I go home and take a shower.

The backpacker circuit concensus for a bad case of bed bugs seems to be tiger-balm, though in my experience, this remedy has about the medical efficacy of a particularly stinky placebo. However, I was desperately itchy and willing to heed any medical advice I could get, no matter how dubious but just short of burning my backpack. I had a long scolding hot shower and bathed my entire body in about half a bottle of tiger balm. Within moments of lying down in bed, a painful burning sensation seized control of my entire body which, in all honesty, was moderately more pleasant than my untreated bed bugs.

The next morning, I found myself reeking of Menthol hiding behind a two-week old English language newspaper listening to a corpulent American woman berate her lethargic Lao employees to a motley crew of indifferent backpackers nursing their hangover with mugs of lukewarm lattes.

As much as I loved sunny happy days on the banks of the Mekong at Luang Prabang, I desperately needed a change in scenery. It was time to move on.

Party-on Aka dudes !

"One Chinese does work of two Vietnamese. One Vietnamese does work of four Cambodians. Eight Laotians like one Cambodian," explained our Laotian waiter while beaming with pride at his restaurant's lackluster service. In a similar vane, a famous colonial proverb from the days of French Indochina roughly translates to, "The Vietnamese plant the rice, the Cambodians watch it grow, and the Laotians listen to it grow." It is a well-known fact, not to mention a source of great national pride, that Laos is THE laid-back land of under-achieving layabouts.

At least this is the image of Laos which is carried around the globe by legions of crusty-haired, guitar-toting travelers who inevitably flock here to fill their days with such noble pursuits as hanging in a hammock and drinking from those wonderfully Asian super-sized bottles of Beer Lao. So successful is Laos' anti-tourist campaign, that it has become a staple in the South East Asia low-budget travel circuit and a kind of modern hippie pilgrimage site trying desperately to rekindle the magic of 1960s Shangri-La. In other words, contrary to the undiscovered country you might expect to find, there are a lot of backpackers here.

Katlijn enjoys a typical Laotian snack of lime juice, soup, and a basket of sticky rice.

Unlike Thailand, Vietnam, and parts of Cambodia, Laos doesn't yet have the infrastructure to cater to anyone but the ubiquitous backpacker, but this is all changing. Snaking through the hills of Northern Laos, past charming thatched huts of ancient tribal people watching curiously from the roadside, is a sleek two-lane highway- as refined and modern as anywhere in the world. Laos just happens to exist along the shortest path between two of the world's great emerging economies of Thailand and China and, fortunately for a land of rice listeners, huge amounts of money is coming in from abroad to upgrade Laos' roads and facilitate their trade.

Our shiny black minivan glided into the remote town of Muang Sing, just south of the Chinese border. After dropping us off amid this backwater, we watched in silence as the anachronistic van glided further north disappearing into the horizon with its valuable payload of Singaporean and Malaysian businessmen. We silently turned around and walked into town through endless fields of rice paddies and the prevalent stench of farm animals.

A carved wooden gate is typical of Aka villages in Northern Laos. Interestingly, the appropriate etiquette is to walk around the gate rather than through the gate. These entrance-ways are reserved for use by their animist spirits.

Many of the carvings around these doors represent phallic symbols of fertility.

Muang Sing was the starting point for our trek to visit the Aka people, one of Laos' many remote semi-nomadic tribes occupying the picturesque hills along the Mekong River. Our guides were a good-natured farmer/teacher named Saw who loves British Premiere League soccer, and his trusted side-kick who loves green soccer socks pulled up to his thighs. They cooked us our food, guided us through the jungle, and spoke English, Lao and the local tribal languages. Like most Laotians, they smiled a lot and professed to the national ideal of working as little as possible and indulging in plenty of Lao Lao.

"Lao Lao" is the most important word in a Laos backpacker's local vocabulary. In it's simplest form, it roughly translates to "a dodgy rice spirit aged in rusty Vietnam war-era scrap metal." However, it can be used strike up a conversation with just about anybody in Laos who doesn't speak your language. Merely mention the word in passing to a random bent-over rice crone, and you will almost certainly be rewarded with a toothless grin, a tour of his personal shrapnel ridden distillery, followed by several drunken hours in a joyous linguistic exchange of profanities and Lao Lao synonyms. Truth be told, Lao Lao tastes like a bad sake with bits of rust floating about in it. However, the fact that it is often served to you out of a spent artillery shell using an old American GI helmet adds a certain macabre charm to the entire binge drinking experience, somehow making the whole language exchange with your new Laotian farmer friend all the more funny.

In addition to our guide, Saw, we were accompanied by a Scottish backpacker, James, an Aussie couple, Mark and Sara, and a token tribal guy who didn't really do much, but served the important role of earning the trekking company a coveted spot in the Lonely Planet's eco-friendly tourist page.

Our party from left to right: James, Saw, Katlijn, Mark, Sarah, the token Aka guy, and Saw's side-kick.

Mark crouching between our guides, Saw and his side-kick.

Our first day in the Lao jungle helped us better appreciate how miserable life must have been during the war: the pouring rain, the dangerously steep and slippery jungle terrain, the manically delusional Asians: "breaking your bone not possible !" Saw persisted in the face of commonsense. It was like a real-life 'Nam experience. James even slipped in the mud and impaled himself on a bamboo stick.

After a long, wet, eight-hour slog we were delighted to stumble into a clearing at a remote Aka village. Gazing for the first time at a Laotian tribal village in the heart of a green tangle is truly one of the Indochina's most inspiring experiences. A gorgeous patch of bamboo huts and water buffaloes amid the green jungle-clad remoteness. Thin muscled bodies of men returning at dawn from their work. The full splendor of an ancient and forgotten slash-and-burn agricultural society unveiling in the sunset.

Arrival at our first remote Aka village.

James entertaining the local Aka kids. He was delighted to find one of the locals selling Beer Lao to passing travellers.

Aka villagers making green tea.

The villagers had built a special bamboo stilt house for visitors, which transforms into a kind of foreigner animal house whenever Western backpackers pass by. We announced our presence with some awkward naked fumbling at the village shower, soon attracting a devoted crowd of Lao-Lao toting party goers who followed us back to our thatched abode and the most happening club-scene in the jungle. Our Scottish friend, James, was in his element here: a master at the art of drunken linguistic exchanges, he used a tiny picture book to teach the Aka people a remarkably diverse and creative anthology of drinking games. As our evening descended into bizarre blend of Scottish bar culture and Aka fart jokes, a number of pretty young tribal girls joined us to end the evening with a traditional massage. Lying on my stomach with a tiny girl crawling up and down my spine, I vaguely remember James' robust Scottish accent bellowing proposals to his masseuse, until this whole weird surreal world started spinning about me in a metallic rice-wine induced deluge, and I passed out for the night.

Massage is an important part of Aka culture. It is tradition, not only for each village girl to massage weary travellers, but also her father-in-law.

Slightly inebriated, Saw and his side-kick sit in the animal house and show off their tasty Lao mealtime creation.

The Aka village under a blue sky, shortly before we departed the next morning.

Our second day of slogging through the jungle began in the aftermath of a night's worth of Lao Lao and rust-poisoning reverberating through my skull, but ended more pleasantly with gorgeous panoramic views and sunshine. Though I never thought it possible, the second Aka village we arrived at late the next day was miraculously more gorgeous than the first.

Banana leaf lunch-time in the jungle. Absolutely delicious !

Water buffaloes bathing in the mud: an integral part of the tribal economy.

Aka swing set with tribal village in the background. Teenage Aka boys and girls meet and flirt with each other in this swing set during special inter-village celebrations. About six months before marriage, a new thatched hut is built for the girl, and her secret fiance is tacitly allowed to sneak out to stay with her over night. Most Aka girls are married by the time they are fifteen years old.

Saw instructed us to walk another half hour to find the village shower: a small waterfall descending a steep embankment. We arrived during the height of the tribal bath time and were met with a god-like display of finely toned, muscled, and bronzed naked men- perfect specimens of human beings that look like Michelangelo sculptures come to life. These were bodies that could only have been conceived from a life-time of natural foods and manual labour.

As we self-consciously stripped our clothing off, I heard Mark's disheartened Aussie accent mumble under his breath, "bloody oath, it looks like a body building convention here." Needless to say, our white, hairy bellies fumbling between their sculpted Asian pecs, was a damning testimonial to Western decadence.

James allays the pain with a giant bottle of Beer Lao while Mark and Sarah attend to his recently impaled hand. When James fell on the hard bamboo pole and needed stitches, Saw suggested he visit an Aka doctor who turned out to be the village tailor. Fortunately for James, Mark and Sarah had brought along their first-aid kit.

Aka village school. Very few skilled teachers are willing to hike out to these communities. Our guide, Saw, was such a teacher and use to hike 68 kilometers in one day to reach remote villages to teach their children.

While Saw swung lazily in his hammock, we spent the night slowly acclimatizing to the Aka's noble way of life: admiring a spectacular night-time electrical storm, sipping idly from giant bottles of Beer Lao, and letting the local ladies kneed our weary calf muscles. We all looked at each other thoroughly contented. It occurred to me, with great surprise, that somehow our pilgrimage deep into the dark Aka heart of the Lao jungle, far away from the backpacker circuit, together with our tribal hosts, we had somehow managed to rekindle the magic of Shangri-La.

Our post jungle trek celebration with Lao-style home-made flat noodle soup.

Into The Backyard of Asia

Arrival into Bangkok after being smack in the middle of the third world is always a bit of a shock. The remote drone of modern multi-lane freeways, the banal scent of air-conditioned taxi cabs, the prevalence of American fast-food culture. However, nothing says, "look, I'm back to civilization !" quite like setting foot into the gay swank of an ex-pat luxury apartment. The roof-top pool, the fuzzy clean carpets, the fluffy white towels: post-Myanmar cyclone R-and-R in Geert's apartment is surely backpacking at its most decadent and debauched.

However, Katlijn and I were determined not to succumb to the comforting dystopia of a Thai fat cat. After a night out bowling with Geert's friends, a spicy dinner with some money boys, and a much-needed appointment with their hair-dresser, we were once again ready to head off into the big-backpacked, dingy-hotelled, noodles-for-breakfast universe that is budget travelling in Indochina.

The ruins of Sukhothai, Siam's first capital, is an obligatory stop when travelling to North Thailand. The elegant lines of the standing Buddha are typical of Buddhist imagery from this era.

A Giant Buddha statue and reliefs near Sukhothai.

While I can understand the allure of green jungles, white beaches, and bronzed Thai girls for the Western vacationer, and yes, the food is great and the sun always shines, Thailand has nevertheless always fallen short of truly capturing my imagination: too modern to be a great third-world destination, too sleazy to be a great first-world destination, and too many backpackers to be a great backpacker destination, it always struck me as Asia-minus, somehow watered-down for mass-tourism and mass-consumption. As Katlijn idly noted on our characteristically clean, punctual and spacious Thai bus while gazing blankly at a shoddy Chinese music video production on a flat screen TV, "it doesn't even feel like we're travelling anymore..." Somehow during our visits to India and Myanmar, the world "travelling" had taken on a darker and more nefarious connotation.

In a desperate bid to re-discover the true Asia and get back to the dirty business of real travelling, Katlijn and I had decided to deliberately avoid any place where a tourist might want to visit: we headed straight for Laos.

Just before leaving Thailand, this Thai Buddhist scholar showed us some of the tribal communities living along the Thai-Laos border.

The Htin tribal people are particularly skilled at manipulating bamboo to make everything needed around the house.

A tattooed elderly of the Mlabri tribe: probably the most primitive people we visited in Asia. The Mlabri are still mostly hunter-gatherers living deep in the jungle of North Thailand. It is hard to imagine such a primitive people only a day's drive from Bangkok.

The slash-and-burn agricultural practices of the other tribes in the area have destroyed much of the habitat needed to sustain hunter-gatherers, and the Mlabri people are in decline. As their lifestyle is not conducive to a Thailand embracing the future, the government is trying to encourage the nearby Hmong and Htin tribes to teach them how to build thatched huts so they stay in one place. Many of the Mlabri are having difficulty adjusting to this sedentary lifestyle and come across quite depressed.

Pork fat cooked on an open fire in a bamboo pole is a real Mlabri treat enjoyed by both young and old. Like this old man, many of the Mlabri people do not wear clothes.

Andrew tries his hand at getting a fire started with flint (harder than it looks).

Laos ! The backyard of Asia ! A country that only barely manages to occupy a vague association in the deepest recesses of the Western collective mind: "Laos ? Doesn't that have something to do with Vietnam ?" Always over-shadowed by its more famous neighbours: it isn't the economic miracle of Vietnam, it lacks the captivatingly abominable history of Cambodia, and even during its grand moment in the international consciousness, it was but a tragic side-show in a larger war. Digging deeper into its history, it only becomes more apparent that not much was ever said of Laos. The British thought of it as buffer state, while their French colonial counterparts pronounced it "useless."

But how does Lao food taste ? Who lives there ? What is the capital of Laos, anyway ? Like us, you probably never bothered to ask these questions, but are doing so now. And so, as we stepped off the bus and settled ourselves into a sheltered long boat destined for the far side of the Mekong river, Katlijn nudged me in the ribs and whispered eagerly,

"Look, just across the river. THAT'S LAOS !"

My god, she was right. In an instant, the overwhelming feeling of cynicism that Thailand always seems to bring out in me, vanished. I couldn't have been more thrilled. We were going to Laos.

There was a big storm in Yangon

"There was a big storm in Yangon."

That's what a Mandalay hotel owner told me when I enquired about some images of fallen trees I saw in The New Light of Myanmar newspaper. It didn't sound like anything to worry about at the time.

Our thirty-day visa was about to expire so Katlijn and I had arranged for a flight to a town called Tachilek on the Thai-Myanmar border. We planned to cross by land into North Thailand, hitch a bus east, and slowly make our way into Laos. Our travel guide had warned us that the local travel agents and government officials in Tachilek were notoriously corrupt, regularly telling travellers that the border is either closed or that they had to pay through the nose to cross into Thailand. Thus, we didn't believe a word the Myanmar officials told us when they said we wouldn't be able to leave the country.

Andrew getting help from the Bagan locals to fix his rickety Burmese rental bike.

As Katlijn and I fought with the airport police to let us into Tachilek, we watched in wonder at a group of armed military personnel in green uniforms posing for a picture in front of aid boxes apparently bound for some place called "The Delta Region". At long last, we reached an uneasy compromise with the airport police: they would let us visit the city if we took their friend's taxi at only a slightly extortionate rate. We threw our cumbersome backpacks into the truck, and sped into town.

All-aboard Pyin U Lwin's morning rush-hour pickup service.

With an abundance of newly paved roads and cell-phones, Tachilek is Burma's most Thai city. However, unless you are an aging expat on a Visa border-run, Tachilek has little to offer except perhaps South East Asia's premier shopping destination for cheap cigarettes and dodgy Chinese imports. Within moments of arriving, we knew we didn't want to linger long.

A typical street in Myanmar.

Before us lay a short bridge spanning a small river into Thailand. Bright Thai flags and royal yellow ribbons decorated the Thai half of the bridge, while the Myanmar half matched this with somber ruddy flags and silver helmeted police guards.

"What do you mean you won't let us cross into Thailand !?" Katlijn demanded.

The grumpy passport official shook his head. "No go to Thailand from here."

"Can't go to Thailand !?" I barked back, "Everyone here speaks Thai, all the money is Thai, that gentleman behind me is trying to sell me fake viagra! This bloody well is Thailand! Just let us cross the damn bridge!"

Dinner for two, Myanmar-style.

Katlijn and I were adamant. There was no way we would pay the bribe. However, unlike previous experiences, our usual tactics of escalating loss-of-face didn't seem to be working this time around. A sympathetic Thai woman even offered us her cell-phone so we could make empty threats to contact our embassy. At one point, I actually managed to get hold of somebody at an embassy in Yangon. The direness of our predicament was made clear to us as I tried desperately to explain our situation in faltering school boy French to a befuddled Parisian embassy worker while a group of Burmese military personnel listened in unimpressed. It was clearly time to throw in the towel.

"Wow, these guys are good." Katlijn observed as we glumly walked back into the charmless town of Tachilek through a dense mob of pirated DVD salesmen and porn magazine peddlers.

The bridge to Thailand: so close, yet so far away...

"Why don't you just give them a bribe ?" Suggested the kindly Thai woman. In fact, that was the suggestion of nearly everybody we talked to from restaurant workers to hoteliers. They even suggested an appropriate amount (about thirty dollars to start with) and persuasive techniques (display the money to the official while asking for his stamp). Following the same advice from local travel agents, we marched back to the bridge to pay-off the officials.

At this juncture, we'd like to apologize to the staff at the Tachilek Myanmar-Thai border crossing because, frankly, we really did think you were a bunch of corrupt military bastards. However, after two officials refused us, nay "freaked-out" would perhaps be more appropriate, when we casually waved a fan of bills on the table while motioning conspiratorially towards the stamp, I am guessing you truly were not able to let us cross into Thailand. As it turned out, there was actually a law requiring us to leave through our port of entry, and as foreigners, we were likely closely monitored. We apologize for any trouble we might have caused you, but we really badly wanted to leave Tachilek as you might have guessed from the rather sizable sums and varieties of money we were heaping in front of you.

The Wells-Fargo-inspired Burmese budget cab service.

Frustrated and dejected, I slumped down on the bed of an uninspiring over-priced Tachilek hotel room. Outside our window on a yellow poster just across the river, I could see the smug face of the King snickering at me from Thailand. The only redeeming feature of being stuck in the nether-region between Thailand and Myanmar is the noticeable absence of government censorship. I flipped on the television to BBC and, for the first time, learned that the "big storm" we had heard about was, in fact, a "deadly cyclone".

"You don't suppose they heard about this back home, do you ?" wondered Katlijn sheepishly.

A ten dollar, thirty second phone call to Canada quickly confirmed that, indeed, they had. Over the roaring static of my overseas connection I could barely make out the distant panicked sound of my mother picking up the phone in the middle of the night. It turned out that our families had mobilized at least four foreign embassies who had been searching for us to no avail for several days causing serious distress on the home-front. I'm guessing the remote Pa Laung tea outposts between Namhsan and Hsipaw weren't exactly the first places they would have looked.

"CAN'T LEAVE MYANMAR ! HAVE TO FLY TO YANGON !" I yelled across the planet.

"But Yangon is a bloody disaster zone..." echoed back the faint, though distinctly alarmed, voice of my mother half a world away.

It sounded like a good argument to us. Katlijn and I marched back to the the bridge.

"... so you see, you have to let us cross the bridge because, well, I don't know where you get your news from, but I have have it from some very reliable sources that Yangon is a bloody disaster zone."

"Airport fine !" announced the grumpy guard. Katlijn and I launched a final spirited protest, but it was clear that our campaign to cross that bridge was in its last throes. When asked who made up these ridiculous rules, a couple of them were genuinely sympathetic and thumbed behind them to the picture of Senior General Than Shwe hanging on the wall.

"He does."

As I reclined back into the corrupt passenger seat of a corrupt Air Bagan airplane, it occurred to me that the one of the great tragedies of Myanmar is how we are always fighting with the wrong people. We roared off the ground leaving behind, hopefully forever, the frenetic sleaze of Tachilek.

Guard tower reflected on the water surrounding the Glass Palace in Mandalay. The last king of Burma, King Thibaw, lived here before being ousted by the British and exiled to India where he died of old age.

The plane landed in the ancient capital Mandalay, home to Burma's final dynasty. Then took off again, flying over the former capitals Sagaing, Inwa, and Amarapura. Past Bagan and Taungoo and Bago, all once thriving bright capitals since destroyed and forgotten. Finally, we touched down into Myanamar's most recent addition to its long and complex history of fading ex-capitals.

Post-hurricane Yangon looked like the disaster zone we had heard about: largely without electricity, filled with collapsed buildings, dirt and rubble everywhere, potholes in the street, and street urchins drinking unclean water- which is to say it hadn't changed much since the last time we were here. Truth be told, Yangon always looks a bit like it has been recently ravaged by a cyclone.

The most noticeable difference was that the formidable trees that once lined its streets, providing respite from the cruel April sun and adding to the city's dignified, if somewhat unkept charm, had all been sadly blown over. Many of them caused significant damage to nearby properties, the rest had mostly been cut up and cleared off the road. Despite some of the doomsday prediction I had seen on the television, the airport was functioning normally and, only days after the tragedy, Yangon was largely up-and-running again.

This massive old tree was up-rooted by the storm and hurled like a projectile into a house. In the aftermath of the storm, Burma received significant aid from their traditional allies of Russia and China. However, their neighbors in India and Thailand are so dependent on Myanmar, both for their natural resources and as an ally to quell their own smoldering insurgencies, that they lack the political clout to convince the junta to receive much-needed aid from most of the rest of the world.

The source of Yangon's rapid clean-up still remains a great mystery to me. The military police who roamed the streets were organized into largely feckless work gangs consisting of one poor sod with a hacksaw and about twenty cheroot-smoking layabouts watching him cut branches. A CNN reporter tried to explain the contradiction by suggesting he heard eye-witness accounts about armies of axe wielding monks diligently cleaning the streets by night- an account which, in our experience, sounded laughably ridiculous.

Back to work: a Burmese man crushes us up an icy-cold fresh lime juice.

That isn't to say there was no damage to the city. The hotel we stayed in had a tree in its roof, and we talked to several distraught locals who lost their homes. While Yangon may have fared better than expected, the same cannot be said of the surrounding Delta region. For obvious reasons, we were not able to visit, but one of our backpacker friends was in Yangon during the cyclone filming a documentary on Myanmar. He made it outside Yangon and got footage of nearby villages. According to him, where there used to be small communities of precarious houses, there was now nothing left except for several neatly stacked bundles of bamboo poles and orderly piles of thatch materials.

"... And the worst part of it was, all the people came running up to me when I got my camera out and kept smiling the whole time, and, you know how its, some of the kids toyed with my leg hair and whatnot. I just couldn't sell this stuff to any of the major networks ! 'Can't you just look a little upset for the camera ?' I kept asking 'Why are you smiling !?' your whole village was just wiped out by a cyclone !' "

A smiling people ruled by brutes, grasping out for a sense of inclusion in the world, a victim of its own wealth, Myanmar is, in the end, a paradox.