You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude on other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveller's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller."
So begins Paul Theroux's book "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star", a repeat journey of what he wrote about in "The Great Railway Bazaar" thirty years earlier when he travelled across Asia and back again by train. On that first trip he must have visited Rangoon in Burma at about the same time I lived and worked there, but we never met and so his worst nightmare never came true. Instead, my worst nightmare came true when I read about his revisiting Rangoon in the early 2000s and facing in total disbelief the unreality of seeing that hardly anything had changed.
I lived and worked in Burma in 1975, when the people, frustrated by the military repression, had already taken their refuge in Buddhism, which preached patience and compassion. Thirty years later, their patience and compassion had remained unrewarded, and Burma was still as decrepit and low on morale as it has been since General Ne Win and his dreaded Tatmadaw had turned it into a brutal dictatorship in 1962.
I had not only loved the country and its soft-tempered and helpful people of slender, soft-voiced beauty with creamy skin and the loveliest smiles and gentlest manner, but also fallen in love with one very special person whom to this day I still remember with deepest fondness and profound gratitude for the truly wonderful five years she has given me.
Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. I'm still trying.
