Myanmar country, Burma or Burmese.

There is one corner in the north-east, bordering the Chinese province of Yunnan, the access is easy, here come the Chinese doing their trade at Bhamo and Hsipaw.

The situation with the mountains and dense jungle and forests left Burma untouched and unspoiled for Centuries. It was only opened a bit during colonial times after the English came in and started a railway system and dependable river communication. Since then things had changed not as much, of course today are roads, most in bad conditions, aircraft

and telephone. All this has slowly opened bringing the interior into easier communication with the outside world and the

Myanmar people got a bit less isolated.

The mountain ranges is Nature's means of attracting and holding the moisture-laden clouds which have been blown in from the sea, and either in the form of rain or snow it stores up the water evaporated from it. By thousands of little rills, or rushing torrents which score furrows in its sides, the mountain gives up its store of water to feed the thirsty plains, and with it yields also valuable ores and minerals, which are often carried many miles away to enrich people too far removed from the mountain to know the origin of their wealth.

These little streamlets are not marked on any map, but presently they join to form one combined river, by which, through the many hundreds of miles of its windings, the mountain eventually returns its gathered waters to the sea, from whence they came.

How interesting to follow the course of such a river, and try to picture to oneself all it may have to show! What kind of mountain is it from among whose rugged snow peaks first sprang those plunging cascades, which, leaping and tossing over their rocky beds, join each other at its base to form the river itself? Through what wild forests, filled with curious vegetation, may it not flow, and how strange, perhaps, are the people who, together with wild beasts and unknown birds, inhabit its reedy margins!

Of these mountains which reach down like the fingers of a hand from the great arm of the Himalaya to make the country of Burma, the first are the Arakan Yoma, known as the Mountains of the West. The habitable land along their sea-swept threshold is known as

Arakan. The mountains themselves are inhabited by a kindred people known as the Chin ; more numerous, more warlike, more organized in the north, where the width of the mountains is greater, than in the south.

East of them lies the valley of the Irrawaddy

which is central Burma, the spacious cradle. This valley is shut in still further on the east by the Shan highlands, which spread away in waves to the Salween river, beyond the Salween is Thailand.

The river opens out at Mandalay and widens as it reaches the sea. It culminates in one of the finest of deltas. South of Mandalay the parallel valley of the Sittang has its being, the outcome of the low range of Bago hills which separate it from the Irrawaddy, and of the Shan hills which in the south fall away somewhat to the east. The Salween, for the greater part of its course a river essentially foreign, enters the limits of Burma in its last hundred miles, and pours its waters into the Andaman seas under the golden spires of Moulmein, today Mawlamyine. The border mountains to southern Thailand reach down in a narrowing peninsula to Kawthaung the southernmost point of the country. This last strip of coast is known as Tenasserim. It is thinly populated and it has never played any substantial part in the country except for some wars with Thailand in the past.

The Myeik archipelago

of singular interest and beauty lies off its western face, and around 800 islands own its supremacy.

The biggest river in the east of the country is the Chindwin coming down from the mountains that lie about the upper reaches of the Irrawaddy it flows through the Hukong valley and under the Chin territories through scenery of great beauty, till it enters the valley of the Irrawaddy and adds its quota to the volume of that great river.

Before the British invasion the last capital was Mandalay

they moved the capital to Yangon and recently it was moved to Naypyidaw in the center of the country where the widening valley leaves space. Mandalay still stands for the old as the city of Shah Jahan in India stands for the glory of the Moguls. The nature of the country, of its landscape and its climate, may be gathered from its conformation. It is a long country reaching from the the Tibetan Himalayas offshoots almost to the equator front the tenth to the twenty-sixth degree of north latitude. In its extreme south the sensation of cold is unknown. It also includes one of the wettest areas on earth, this is the west coast from around Dawai or Tavoy all the way down to Ranong Thailand. The climate is mostly tropical only in the far north, on the borders

of China it can get real cold in the winter. In the the center of the country, where also the biggest tourist attraction is, that's Bagan dryness prevails.

The great Irrawaddy flanked by hills and mountains makes scenery that is as stately as it is beautiful, as passionate as it is serene.

The mountains visited by tropical rains sustain forests of primeval growth, in which, at very limited areas, herds of elephants and very few rhinoceroses, wild cattle and deer, wander and at their summit is Mount Hkakabo Razi, the highest peak in south east Asia with almost 6000 meters. more at e-books