The Road to Mandalay

What does this evoke for you ? "Last night I dreamt I went to Mandalay again..." (the house not the town, in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca) ? Or, like me, the extremely feeble Bing Crosby and Bob Hope comedy which I must have half watched one Sunday afternoon 50 years ago ? Or the real origin of the phrase, Kipling's poem about a place he hadn't been to, written on a short visit to Rangoon, now known as Yangon, on his way to Japan, and which I only read for the first time here. It isn't as evocative as you might imagine, being packed with the dropped "h"s and final "g"s he used for authentic soldier language.

In fact, the road to Mandalay from the capital hardly existed in Kipling's time. All communication went via the enormous Irrawaddy River. The Brits sailed up to Mandalay in the 1880s to oust the King from his "Glass Palace" (Amitav Ghosh's early novel, before his wonderful opium trilogy). We learned a lot about Burma/Myanmar from this century-long saga. (One of the many ethnic groups is the Bama, but the country is now trying to create unity with the more inclusive, less colonial, original name of Myanmar.)

So how are we managing to read with so little space in our bags ? A few books were lent by friends, but most were from guesthouse book exchanges ! Not only have we picked up Lonely Planets and other guides for each country, but we've been amused and informed by:
- The Quiet American (Graham Greene's visionary discussion on war, development and personal involvement, set in early 1950s Saigon)
- L'Amant (Marguerite Duras's  autobiographical tale of a teenage affair with a rich Chinese businessman. Visual poetry on the Mekong delta.)
- Somaly Mam's tale of growing up in the horrors of Cambodian poverty and violence and her fight against prostitution
- Burmese Days (George Orwell's first novel, written after 5 years in the colonial police force)
- The Irawaddy Flotilla (The story of the 650 paddle steamers which plied up and down the river transporting people and goods, the ancestors of the aging motorised public ferry serving the same needs, which we took downstream from Mandalay to Bagan - 14 wonderful hours!)
Trials of Burma (Maurice Collis's account of being an "unsuitable" judge - he handed out the same sentence to locals and Europeans alike!)

Several of these paperbacks were counterfeit versions, usually photocopies,  but for The Quiet American some poor non-English speaker had retyped out the whole thing, with some surprising results !