Myanmar (Burma)

NESTLED between Asian giants India and China, Myanmar is a land of fascinating contrasts.a Yangon (formerly called Rangoon), its largest city, boasts multistory buildings, crowded shops, and bustling traffic. But beyond Yangon lies a land of villages where water buffalo till the soil, people view foreigners with wonder, and time is measured in the passing of the seasons.

Myanmar today echoes the Asia of yesteryear. Here rickety buses bounce along potholed roads past oxcarts hauling crops to market and goatherds tending their flocks in the fields. Most Myanmar men still wear a traditional wraparound skirt (lungi). Women apply tree-bark paste (thanaka) to their faces as makeup. The people are deeply religious. Buddhist devotees revere monks more than celebrities and daily daub gold-leaf offerings on gleaming statues of the Buddha.

The people of Myanmar are gentle, considerate, and inquisitive. Eight major ethnic groups and at least 127 subgroups inhabit the country. Each group has its own distinctive language, dress, food, and culture. Most people live on a broad central plain nourished by the mighty Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River, a 1,350-mile-long waterway winding from the icy Himalayas to the tepid Andaman Sea. Millions more inhabit a vast coastal delta and the arc of highlands bordering Bangladesh, China, India, Laos, and Thailand.