The final Burma morning. I woke under the blow of the electric fan and into the epilogue of my journey. I was almost out of money. Stuffed into my pockets was just enough to cover the hotel and my ride to the airport with a few bucks to spare. Inwa had swallowed up my wallet like a landlord's sweaty hound. Two wallets in as many years out of the same pair of pants. A well-travelled pair of pants, it can be said, with a gaping hole in the knee from when I crashed ...

I put in the hard yards for my final day in-country. After an early breakfast of eggs, tea, and bananas, I jumped on the back of Nyi Nyi's moped and we left the city, crossing over to the other side of the Irawaddy River by the mighty Irrawaddy Bridge, bound for Mingun. This is a place right out of Indiana Jones. The monumental base of an unfinished stupa like a stone mountain rising from the banks of the river. If finished it would have been a feat of Herculean ...

Rooftop breakfast buffet of rice and some sweet-yet-savoury cakes. Sitting in the morning sun on the terrace with a fat hardback and the crows. I filched some packets of instant Mandalay tea, precious as gold to me, truly, and some bananas for the bus. Then the mini-van was tooting for me downstairs and I bundled up my books, headphones, camera, and backpack and nudged on in. Stupas are just about the only constant in Burma, stupas and heat. They're studded all...

Slept in late again. Just sleeping off the heat-stroke, I told myself. Missed the free breakfast. Realised I'd had "I Will Always Love You" stuck in my head for a good four days running. In particular the sticky part just before the second chorus. It was like a persistent leech sucking on my pre-frontal cortex, and I had no salt or lighter flame to burn it off with. The night before I'd found a woman selling postcards and renting e-bikes from her roadside shack. ...

Day three had me stumbling out of the night bus at four in the morning and into the clamour of waiting taxi drivers at the Bagan highway bus station on the outskirts of town. The Burmese plains get cold in winter and I was still in t-shirt and shorts, breathing steam in the dark. I had no hotel booking and only a rudimentary knowledge of where the place I had marked down on my map was located. I took the first offer of a taxi that came to me, even though I knew i...