Golden Land
We will not sell a Myanmar departure that we would not personally join. If the situation on a route is unsuitable, the date comes off the calendar and we say why rather than quietly rerouting.
Flavours Of Myanmar
Ask for green tea salad at a Mandalay teahouse; in Yangon, follow the colonial-era streets and graze at one stall after another. Indian and Chinese kitchens both left their mark, and what came out of it tastes like no other cuisine in the region.
Unique Experiences
Billions of dollars in gold plate the Shwedagon Pagoda. Out on the dry central plains, brick stupas stand in their thousands. Turn any corner here and something out of the ordinary is waiting.
Local Encounters
On Inle Lake, get into conversation with the fishermen and growers who raise their vegetables on rafts floating over open water. Buy a bunch of flowers, take part in an offering, and you stop merely watching the culture from outside.
Top Highlights
- What Mandalay calls the world’s largest book stands at Kuthodaw — the Tripitaka cut into 729 marble slabs, some of them cracked in 2025.
- Walk the downtown grid of Yangon, street upon street of painted colonial buildings still standing shoulder to shoulder.
- Traders at Mandalay’s Railway Bazaar spread fish and fruit straight over the rails, shifting when a train comes.
- Go up over Bagan in a hot air balloon before dawn and watch the temples of the deserted capital surface out of the mist.
- Climb the 777 steps of Mount Popa, a volcanic plug crowned with a monastery and its gilded shrines.
- Watch the Intha on Inle Lake work a conical net with both hands while one leg coils round the oar and drives the boat.
- Ride the Yangon Circular Railway on its three-hour loop past market gardens, trackside stalls and paddy fields.
Myanmar Map and Infos
Capital
Nyapyidaw
Currency
Kyat
Language
Burmese
Population
54 Million
Religion
Buddhism
Time
GMT+6.30
Present-day Myanmar — Burma for most of the historical record — traces its population to two waves of arrival: Indo-Aryan peoples who moved in from roughly 700 BC, and the Mongol armies of Kublai Khan, which came through in the 13th century.
Anawrahta (1044-1077) was first to unite the land under one crown.
The British East India Company put its first agents ashore in 1612, but for generations the Burmese resisted every effort by Britain, the Dutch and the Portuguese to plant trading stations round the Bay of Bengal. Only the Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-1826, followed by two further wars, gave the Company the whole country. By 1886 Burma had been absorbed into British India, and in 1937 it was made a separate colony.
The country turned into one of the main fronts of World War II, since the 800-mile Burma Road was the route Allied supplies took into China. Japan came ashore in Dec. 1941 and held most of the ground by May 1942, cutting that line. What followed was some of the harshest fighting of the whole war, and by the Japanese surrender in August 1945 Allied forces had taken back nearly all of Burma.
Burma became independent on Jan. 4, 1948. In 1962 General Ne Win, on the left of politics, took power by force, banned rival parties, suspended the constitution and announced what he called the “Burmese way of socialism”. After twenty-five years of poverty and repression, huge crowds came out in 1987 and 1988, and the State Law and Order Council (SLORC) broke them up. In 1989 the generals changed the country’s name to Myanmar.
In May 1990 the National League for Democracy (NLD), then in opposition, won the elections outright, and the army refused to recognise the result. Its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, took the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. From 1988 onward the military held power without interruption, while armed insurgencies in the south ran on decade after decade without resolution.
The seat of government left Rangoon on November 13, 2005 for Pyinmanaa, a purpose-built compound in the hills. That December more than 1,000 delegates convened to begin drafting a constitution which the authorities presented as a step towards democracy; by late January 2006 the session had broken up with little to show. Demonstrations spread through 2007: many civilians were detained, roughly 70 died and some 40 monks were badly beaten and killed. The SPDC announced a constitutional referendum on 7 February 2008, with elections due by 2010.
Between 2011 and 2012 the administration, still backed by the military, set in motion administrative, economic and political change. Aung San Suu Kyi, who led the pro-democracy movement, was released from house arrest and drawn into negotiation; a National Human Rights Commission came into existence; amnesties freed more than 200 political prisoners; new labour legislation allowed unions and strikes; controls on the press were relaxed; and the currency system was overhauled. ASEAN then endorsed the country’s claim on the 2014 chairmanship. The United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, landed on 1 December 2011 to press for further progress — the first trip at that level in over fifty years. President Barack Obama followed a year later, the first serving US president to make it.
After the government repealed the laws that had prompted the NLD to boycott the 2010 general election, Suu Kyi’s party contested the 1 April 2012 by-elections, taking 41 of the 44 seats and sending her to the lower house as member for Kawhmu Constituency. The NLD won the general elections of 2015 and 2020. On 1 February 2021 the military again assumed power and declared a state of emergency; that emergency was lifted in July 2025 and a general election was held in phases from December 2025. Armed conflict continues in several regions.
Journeys in Myanmar
Places we cover in depth, and every published departure that includes Myanmar. Sixteen travellers at most, and each one can be run privately on your own dates.
