Rough Guides - The Rough Guide to Myanmar (Burma)

This Rough Guide is one of a new generation of informative and easy-to-use travel-guide ebooks that guarantees you make the most of your trip. An essential tool for pre-trip planning, it also makes a great travel companion when youre on the road.

From the section.

Detailed area maps feature in the guide chapters and are also listed in the , accessible from the table of contents. Depending on your hardware, you can double-tap on the maps to see larger-scale versions, or select different scales. There are also thumbnails below more detailed maps in these cases, you can opt to zoom left/top or zoom right/bottom or view the full map. The screen-lock function on your device is recommended when viewing enlarged maps. Make sure you have the latest software updates, too.

Throughout the guide, weve flagged up our favourite places a perfectly sited hotel, an atmospheric caf, a special restaurant with the author pick icon . You can select your own favourites and create a personalized itinerary by bookmarking the sights, venues and activities that are of interest, giving you the quickest possible access to everything youll need for your time away.

Until recently the least-known nation in Southeast Asia, Myanmar is finally getting the attention it deserves. For half a century, the country languished in self-imposed obscurity under the rule of its despotic and enigmatic military rulers, little visited and even less understood. All that is now changing, and with breathtaking speed. Following recent economic and political upheavals, the national landscape is being transformed in ways that were unimaginable even a few years ago, and visitors have begun flocking to Myanmar in unprecedented numbers.

Ironically, its precisely these decades of suffocating political isolation, combined with economic stagnation, that have helped preserve much of Myanmars magically time-warped character into the twenty-first century (albeit at a terrible human cost). The old Burma immortalized by Kipling and Orwell is still very much in evidence today: this remains a land of a thousand gilded pagodas, of ramshackle towns and rustic villages populated with innumerable red-robed monks and locals dressed in flowing, sarong-like longyi, their faces smeared in colourful swirls of traditional thanaka . Its a place in which life still revolves around the temple and the teahouse, and where the corporate chains and global brands that have gobbled up many other parts of Asia remain notably conspicuous by their absence.

Its also a uniquely diverse nation. Physically, Myanmar encompasses landscapes ranging from the fertile plains of the majestic Ayeyarwady River to the jungle-covered highlands of Shan State, and from the jagged, snowy Himalayan peaks bounding the northern edge of the country down to the emerald confetti of tropical islands dotting the Andaman Sea in the far south.