Yangon

It was November 1993 and I bumped into an acquaintance called Anne in Bangkok. She'd just come back from Burma, where I was about to go. "Take some clothes or make-up to sell," she said. "But don't get cheap stuff. Get good quality things."

I'd got my two-week visa, the longest a foreigner could get, and was wondering how to get Kyat, the local currency, without changing dollars at the official rate. "You'll get loads of Kyats if you sell designer labels, and you'll make a profit out of it, too."

So I bought a Nike and a Reebok t-shirt then took the flight with 25 other tourists to Yangon. We changed $200 into exchange certificates at the airport, as we were obliged to do, and took songthaews into town. (A sangthaew is a pickup truck converted into a small bus.)

I teamed up with two Americans - Chad and Tim - and a German called Jürgen. Chad was a lawyer working in New York City who had just been on a meditation course in Thailand. He had been living in a wat (temple) for a few months so his head and eyebrows were shaven. Tim had just finished working in Singapore as a teacher, and Jürgen was a doctor working in Indonesia.

It was late when we checked in at the YMCA, so we went straight to bed. In the morning I had lines of bed bug bites up my arm, and Tim had them all over his back.

Most people seemed to be Indian in Yangon, rather than Burmese. The men traipsed about in longyis and chewed betel. Betel stalls lined the roadside and the men leaned over drains and holes in the pavement to spit out the red juice. Down a side street near the YMCA a man whispered, "Change money?" "Sure", we said. "How much for one dollar?" Instantly we were surrounded by a group of curious, longyi-clad men. Our dealer gave us 120 Kyat to the dollar for our exchange certificates. The government rate was 7 Kyat to the dollar.

Since we were doing deals, I did a quick calculation of the worth of my designer t-shirts, based on the black market rate. I pulled the t-shirts out and showed them, but when I told them my my price they just laughed. The shops were full of pirated t-shirts smuggled from Thailand. If these blokes wanted a 'Nike' t-shirt, they could get one at a fraction of the price. I wondered if Anne had really been to Burma.

Tim, Chad and I bought a ticket for the night train to Mandalay then took separate paths for the afternoon. Apart from the t-shirts and electronic goods from Thailand, the shops looked like they hadn't changed since the 1960s. Photos of Aung San and of Burmese film stars hung on the walls inside. It was the same picture: a black and white photo of him wearing a military cap and a trench coat with huge collars.

I found a row of second-hand book stalls, with most books published before 1960. I bought one on teaching English as a foreign language because it was something I planned to do later on in my travels. Back at the YMCA, I found that Tim had been rummaging through the second-hand book stalls as well, and had bought some old copies of Time. I couldn't see what he wanted these for, because even recent copies are boring.

The old British civil service buidlings were made of cherry-red bricks, which glowed orange-red in the sunset. I hadn't seen colour like it. It looked stunning with the tropical foliage and shadows. Chad looked up and said, "You guys did a good job here", a sentiment that was unthinkable in Britain.

We got on the night train to Mandalay and were hoping to see some Burmese countryside in the last light of day, but outside Yangon a man came down the carriage and rattled steel shutters down over the windows.

Tim said, "Why are you doing that?"

"Very dangerous," the man said.

Someone else told us that guerrillas sometimes attack the trains at night. We couldn't tell if the shutters in the other carriages were pulled down. Foreigners had to travel in the same carriage, and we suspected the shutters were to stop us seeing out.