Pagoda prayers, dusty roads, and Tanya Tucker: Impressions of Yangon, Myanmar
A meh Southeast Asian metropolis with an intriguing soundtrack.
Yangon has been on my radar, albeit usually way off to the side, for decades, ever since I read about Beyond Rangoon in Entertainment Weekly’s 1995 summer movie preview. The film starring future Oscar winner Patricia Arquette got half of its title from the former name of the largest city in the country previously best known as Burma. (Incidentally, Burma debuted on my radar half a decade earlier, via “Mountains of Burma,” one of many standouts on Blue Sky Mining, Midnight Oil’s 1990 post-Diesel and Dust album.)
Despite my passing interest in Burma/Myanmar, it was the last Southeast Asian country I crossed off my to-do list. (And I still haven’t seen Beyond Rangoon!) If that makes it sound more like a chore than an adventure, well, it kind of was. Yangon, which is not exactly a cushy metropolis with easy horizontal mobility, required a bit of work. Thank God for my four-star accommodations at Jasmine Palace Hotel, which put Yangon right above Vientiane in Laos, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, and dead-last Koh Samet off Thailand’s east Gulf of Thailand coast, on my list of most-to-least-favorite places in Southeast Asia.
Not that Yangon really cared what I thought of her when I arrived in July of 2017. The…
