Myanmar Rivers, another way to visit Burma

Burma (since 1989 renamed Myanmar) is a former British colony that in 1962 closed its doors to the world. Isolated, the culture and way of life of this devoutly Buddhist country escaped the changes that affected her Sourth-East Asian neighbours. Today, along the banks of her great rivers, life continues undisturbed by the worst excesses of the twentieth century. Here is a rich and vibrant culture, supported by a healthy domestic economy, and populated by an overpoweringly friendly people. Even the most travelled of travellers find themselves in a world that is beyond both experience and imagining.

The Irrawaddy gives Burma its life. Named after the Hindu eravati or 'elephant river' the river in Burmese consciousness, like the Ganges to the Indian, is a spiritual entity; provider of the wherewithal for life and happiness; material and spiritual well being. Rising in the southern Himalayas, it dessects the land from north to sourth for 1350 miles, emptying through a nine armed delta into the Indian Ocean. In colonial times, before railways and car roads the river was known as the 'Road to Mandalay'. To follow the Irrawaddy's entire course, from its undiscovered source lost in the Himalayas to the Delta, would be to run the gamut of Burma's varied climatic zones. North of Myitkyina in the Kachin Hills, where the M'la hka and N'mai kha Rivers rise and join forces at Myithson to form the Irrawaddy, is an area of rain forest with high rainfall. At Bhamo, the firthest point to which the Irrawaddy is navigable by large vessels (about 930 miles, from the Delta), the river skirts across the edge of the Shan Plateau cutting through a series of gorges or defiles, the upper two of which are staggeringly impressive. Just above Mandalay the river emerges from the forested hill country to enter the enormous Upper Burma plain known as the Dry Zone account of the low rainfall. This was and is the home of classical Burmese Buddhist civilisation - the ancient Pyu cities, the first empire of Pagan and later empire of Ava. Below Mandalay, just above the confluence with the Chindwin the Irrawaddy seems to break up into a myriad channels and streams separated by sandbars and gleaming white islands. Here the river is several miles wide and just to cross from one bank to another can be a day's sail, zig zagging through the maze of dune covered humps. Yet here, when it rains, the water level will rise a hundred feet drowning this archipelago of silt and sand, washing it away in a brown torrent at speeds of up to 8 miles an hour. Desert becomes ocean and the fishermen and cultivators who have camped on these fertile islands are up and gone for duration of the monsoon.

South of Pagan the river narrows again and travels through a desert of scrub and cacti, the hottest part of Burma, with a rainfall of 25 inches a year. By Prome, still narrow but good and deep for navigators the river cuts through wooded hills to break out in to the flat plain of lower Burma. Here the rainfall jumps from 25 inches to 200 the weather is very humid rather than very hot. The cultivation of cotton, ground nuts, beans and pulses give way to paddy. In colonial times this was the 'rice basket of Asia' and by the 1850s had been reclaimed from swamp and jungle to feed the hungry millions of the Indian Empire. (Burma population has quadrupled since the 1930s and the country is no longer the rice exporter she was.) This thousand square mile Delta reaches from the Gulf of Martaban, south-west of Rangoon to the Upper Andaman Sea with its great rice port at Bassein on the edge of the Bay of Bengal.

The Chindwin joins the Irrawaddy just above Pagan, and though a tributary, it too is one of the great rivers of Asia. The Chindwin is even more treacherous to navigate than the Irrawaddy. Rising in the wet hills of Assam, the Upper Chindwin dissects successive mountain ranges to divulge its vast cargo of melten snow into the aptly named Dry Zone of Upper Burma. The Lower Chindwin can be miles wide, yet with an average dry season depth of only three feet.

The Irrawaddy and Chindwin are of interest not only on account of their geographical variety, and moving natural beauty, but because along their banks the main vestiges of a millennium and a half of Burmese Buddhist civilisation are dispersed. Burma is like Egypt in the respect that it is a country diminated by a river. This is most convenient for the traveller, as both ancient sites and centers of contemporary life and culture are situated close to the river banks. In many instances the places we visit could never be reached by land as there is no access by road. As the old Irrawaddy Flotilla found, the river proves the most logical and practival means of penetrating the real Burma.