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pagoda, an enormous Buddha was placed on a platform high up in a narrow niche. Only men are allowed to approach. The high platform has no railing, soas I walked around it, I had to clutch the shoulders of kneeling Buddhists who were gaining merit by pasting layers of gold leaf on the statue. The gold, thickened over the centuries, has now distorted the original shape of the Buddha.
    Pagan was once one of Southeast Asia's architectural glories. Its distant mountains and dry flat plain, with palm, neem and tamarind trees, reminded me of Marrakech. Spread over twenty square miles, it has more than two thousand temples and pagodas. After climbing to the top of a high pagoda, I watched flocks of sheep and goats pass through the temple gates as a sudden, dramatic tropical sunset illuminated the spectacular landscape. The “Visit Myanmar 1996” campaign, which promised to attract half a million tourists, spawned more than fifty guesthouses in Pagan—all of them quite empty. Souvenir shops were attached to all of the major pagodas, and peddlers mobbed me wherever I went. Most of Pagan's pagodas are in ruins or are crudely restored, and I was rather disappointed by my visit. The site was certainly worth seeing, like Borobudur in Indonesia, but not nearly as thrilling as Cambodia's Angkor Wat.
    I was much more impressed by Mount Popa, thirty miles and two hours east of Pagan, tucked into the high hills like a Himalayan retreat. As I drove toward the town, the desertlike plain turned into a luxuriant green landscape. Herds of spindly goats wandered along the road, and water buffalo immersed themselves in mud. From a distance, the enticing pagoda, perched atop a 5,000-foot mountain, looked like the Greek monastery on Mount Athos. As I climbed the 777 smooth steps (the last 500 in bare feet), grasping the handrail and shaded by a snaking roof, monkeys scampered about me. There were fine views along the way and a rewarding vista from the top of the mountain.
    The cruise concluded with a flight back to Rangoon and an abrupt end to my pampered existence. I wanted to go south to Moulmein, the third-largest city in Burma, but it was nearly impossible to reach by plane, train or ship. The crowded twelve-hour “express bus” had (I was told) arctic airconditioning and Burmese videos that blasted all night, so I hired my own car and driver for $50 a day. Ali—a half-Indian, half-Chinese Muslim—owned a ten-year-old Toyota, a used car discarded from Japan, with a steering wheel on the wrong side for driving on the right side of the road. Ali drove very fast and constantly blew his horn while passing buses, trucks, cars, pedicabs, bicycles, tongas, bullock carts, pedestrians, road menders, goats, pigs, dogs and chickens, as well as sheets of rice drying on the road. Although he never actually hit anything, there were hundreds of near misses. As he plowed through the endless potholes at top speed, I found it impossible to relax orfind a comfortable position in the cramped car, and felt as though I were bouncing on a bucking horse.
    Ali's English was rudimentary, and he called all foreign women “sir.” But his comical face was immensely expressive, he was ebullient and eager to please, and he cared for me tenderly. After establishing that I was older than he—an important distinction in Burma, where age and status are enshrined in forms of address—he showed heightened respect for my age as well as my status as a client. When asking directions to the next town, Ali would shout out its name and ask the startled bystander:
“Ya, le-le?”
which meant “Yes, or no?” The roads were not only full of holes (even washed out altogether in some places, where water from the flooded rice paddies spread over the rough surface) but also had frequent roadblocks, manned sometimes by police or soldiers, sometimes by a nodding toll collector. Ali often went around or under the barrier (if the guard wasn't