ESCAPE | FOOD&TR AVEL
sidestep the renowned Le Planteur restaurant, with its Myanmar-inflected, pan-European menu of elegant morsels, and talk my way into a Burmese cookery lesson instead. The chefs of Green Elephant Yangon present a delectable introduction to the delicate balance of lime, sesame, peanut, lemongrass and, above all, fish sauce, which results in admirably straightforward dishes pitched right in the middle of the venn diagram of Indian, Chinese and Thai cuisines. Then I catch the train heading north out of Yangon. A transport option totally ignored by tour operators, who see its walking-pace progress through townships far removed from conventional tourist trails as a disastrous downside, it turns out to offer a thrillingly unfiltered insight into the rhythms of rural Burmese life. As a freak rainstorm lashes my carriage, and a little boy who had been selling crystallised fruit hangs his body out of a window, I feel closer to the heartland of Burma than at any other stage of my journey. I zigzag from Nay Pyi Taw (the country’s new first city) to Bagan, the capital between the 9th and 13th centuries. At the former, I stay at a Hilton of immensely generous proportions doing its best to project an atmosphere of reassuring warmth in a ghost town of empty 12-lane highways and neo-Stalinist conference centres. In the centre of ‘NPT’ is a full-size replica of Yangon’s famous Shwedagon Pagoda, a shell of gilded concrete built around a Buddha tooth relic from China. Arguably no less weird than the Disneyland-for-monks of the original, it represents excellent prep for Bagan, an archaeological site as important as Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat but denied UNESCO recognition because of the encroachment of government-owned luxury hotels – grotesque pastiches of the thousands of thousand-year-old temples and pagodas that bristle among the sand and tamarind trees of the Bagan plains. My Sanctuary Retreats guide leads a necessarily scalpel-sharp tour through the different phases of
ABOVE & BELOW: Cruising from Bagan to Mandalay
BOOK IT
Sanctuary Ananda (sanctuaryretreats.com). Regent Holidays offer a 17-night trip to Myanmar from £5,450 per person, including a ten-night cruise on the Chindwin River with Sanctuary Ananda from Bagan to Mandalay, plus three nights hotel accommodation in Yangon and Mandalay and international flights (regent-holidays.co.uk). Deluxe Rooms at Belmond Governor’s Residence start from £196 per night (belmond.com).
On the train from Yangon to Nay Pyi Taw
the site, culminating in an opportunity to scramble up the sandstone passageways of the shockingly beautiful Sulamani Temple in time to see the sinking sun turn countless masterworks of masonry pink and gold. Similar moments of elegantly orchestrated perfection come to define all four days of my cruise from Bagan to Mandalay. I am also left alone, though, for several hours a day, to bliss out and watch a world of eccentric simplicity drift by: the flash of pink robes and jangling drums of a novitiation ceremony on the riverbank, perhaps, or a passing wooden boat packed with unimpressed livestock. Optional interruptions include cocktails invented by the Ananda’s revelatory mixologist, charming daily gifts, and the best westernised food I eat in Myanmar. Mandalay, the El Dorado of my journey to the heart of Kipling’s Burma, was the country’s last royal capital and remains its religious centre. As I explore the Kuthodaw Pagoda, where the Tripitaka is engraved on 729 upright stone slabs forming the ‘world’s largest book’, then travel by ferry and horse to Ava, yet another old capital and a paradise of palaces and paddy fields, I start to finally feel at peace with Burma’s ancient energies. I also find something else in Mandalay, though. Perhaps it’s the miles I’ve put between myself and the malevolence and melancholy of NPT, or the city’s bubbling excitement about the imminent Thingyan water festival, but there is a note of optimism in the super-heated summer air, which suggests, for the first time, that Burma’s future might soon be a cause for celebration, alongside its past. I can see it in people’s faces and hear it in their stories, too – an opportunity for a renewal, perhaps, of the sentiments of Kipling’s soldier, ‘for [whom] the templebells are callin’, an’ it’s there that I would be – / By the Old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea’. January 2016 | COUNTRYANDTOWNHOUSE.CO.UK | 89
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