FROM KIPLING TO SINATRA IN BURMA
Burma is a hidden country. Sandwiched between India and Thailand, it is essentially the drainage basin of the Irawaddy River, rising in the glaciers at the southeast corner of the Tibetan Plateau and flowing south for 1,350 miles to the Bay of Bengal.
Out of a welter of tribal regions and warring principalities, it emerged into history only about a thousand years ago with the Pagan Empire. It established Buddhism throughout what is now Burma, and constructed over 10,000 Buddhist temples during the 10th-13th centuries. 2,200 remain in the plains of Pagan today, one of the world’s most wondrous sights — especially by hot air balloon as you can see by my picture above.
It was Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) who made Burma the ultimate of the romantically exotic with his poem Mandalay in 1890. Then came Frank Sinatra.














