We had a final four days in Bangkok after the beach, and so we took Sue to Patpong, the notorious red light area full of bars of bored looking girls in tiny white bikinis highlighted by ultra violet lights.  They are mostly clinging to a pole on a stage and gyrating sexlessly.  Outside wolf-like men patrol the pavements, cupping their cigarettes, proffering a limp, dog eared laminate and muttering 'ping-pong show?', which is not an invitation to play table tennis.

Outside the street is buzzing with the hum of a hundred street stalls selling fake designer bags, fake designer watches, bowls of soup and yet more fakery.  Sue was too over awed by the shopping opportunities to make a purchase, and we certainly weren't going to take her to a ping-pong show, so we made our excuses and left.  On the train on the way home Sue sighed and expressed concern for the 'poor boys'.  Who, those seedy looking hustlers?  She looked at us pityingly.  No, the ones on stage.  In the bikinis.  Of course.

Oh dear, she's seen one too many ladyboys here and is now convinced that every second woman we see is actually a man.

And so we whisked her off to the airport and whisked ourselves off to Burma, land of a thousand pagodas and one of the world's most corrupt regimes.  We made our way to immigration and waited in separate lines.  Whilst Brian got through after only a few minutes of rigorous passport and visa checking they kept me waiting much longer and I was starting to get a bit concerned that I might have signed one too many petitions to free Aung San Suu Kyi to be allowed into the country.  Glancing over my shoulder at an adjacent booth I saw the words 'blacklist checker' pop up.  Wow, not only do they have a blacklist so large it takes several minutes to run each passport through, they've not even bothered giving it a more mysterious name.  These guys mean business.  

As Brian watched me, smirking, from the safety of the luggage carousel I stood and squirmed and seriously started to consider what I would do if they refused me entry.  On the one hand the prospect of another two weeks of Marriott breakfasts seemed quite appealing, but the thought of two months of running along the beach  in order to work it off less so.

Finally.  Finally.  After what seemed like a couple of hours of standing still trying to convey the impression of sufficient dim-wittedness to not even understand the meaning of the word 'democracy' they let me in.  Hurrah.  The fools.

Traffic in Rangoon, after the constant traffic jams of Bangkok, seems calm and almost sedate when we drive from the airport to our hotel.  Motorbikes are banned in Rangoon, which makes a big difference.  Our hotel is directly opposite the Shwedagon Pagoda, a monumental golden stupa lit up at night with a million bulbs that make it glow as if it's radioactive.

We had to change our crisp dollar notes for kyat, the local currency, which involves changing money with some old bearded bloke with a calculator and a note counting machine at the back of the hotel.  Because of the astronomical exchange rate of 800 kyat per dollar we receive huge house bricks of ratty, tatty old Burmese money.   The irony being that they insist on the most freshly laundered and pristine of dollar notes, no creases, no tears, no crumples, no folds.  They inspect the notes with the intensity of diamond dealers looking for flaws and turned down one of our crisp new hundred dollar bills though,  because it had once been folded (lightly) in half for a millisecond.

The rest of our travelling crew are a mix of Australians, Canadians and Brits. On our first night we ate in a restaurant where there was no menu, instead we had to just point at strange brown gloomy dishes and hope they weren't going to poison us.  We sat next to Mr and Mrs Ordinary,  a couple from Tasmania who looked like someone's aunt and uncle.  During the course of the next half an hour we discovered they had been to more places than we had had brown gloomy dishes, and mostly on the back of trucks, clinging onto the roof of a train, bareback on a crocodile or astride a camel.  Turned out we were dining with Mr and Mrs Extraordinary.

The waiters finished off the meal by bringing round complimentary desserts; frogspawn decorated with orange peel.  I'm normally a big dessert fan, but this was the most off putting bowl of gelatinous goo that I have ever seen.  Hurrah, perhaps I will lose those Marriott breakfast pounds after all.