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 about the landscape on almost every hill. There's a simple reason behind their profusion. The wealthy have believed for hundreds of years that by building stupas during their time on earth they get bonus points in heaven. I read that in George Orwell. Clever boy. Outside the bus windows as you traverse the Burmese countryside you get the impression that things haven't changed here for hundreds of years. Take away the bus, the windows, and the recently-completed highway, and you're back in the middle ages. Buffalo pull carts of hay along dusty back-roads, teak houses rest on their slits with flowering plants and wooden farming tools housed underneath, monks in red robes walk the land barefoot as the generations that came before them. Change has been slow, but now that the doors to international commerce have been thrown open, it's picking up pace, fast. As one fellow traveller said it, "Catch it while you can." One can surmise he was referring too the timeless qualities of this exotic land, not STDs. The bus was rocking out to a soundtrack of Burmese pop covers from the 70s and 80s. "Magic Man," "Lemon Tree," and some Michael Jackson. In Vietnam you just get that karaoke and K-pop s*** or disjointed folk music at best. We reached Mandalay, the one-time colonial capital, around mid-afternoon. After Yangon it proved a bit of a let-down. Modern-day Mandalay is a grid of concrete drab shoebox structures with the occasional Burmese teak house or colonial-era row house squeezing through. Most of the city was bombed to bits by the Japanese artillery and the British Royal Air Force in turn back in the Second World War. Pity. The fort (hastily and somewhat poorly rebuilt after having burnt down) rests in the centre of town, walled off and moated behind red walls. It's less impressive than it sounds. I took a cheap room in E.T. Hotel (at $7 a steal for Burma, although it was on the roof and the bathroom facilities were shared, but hey, free breakfast) and wandered off for lunch, oily chicken rice and a pint of Mandalay beer with complementary peanuts at a beer house. As with their South East Asian brethren, the Burmese are partial to a near beer in the heat of the afternoon. My mission for the day, aside from reaching Mandalay itself, and exploring the eponymous Mandalay Hill, was finding a post office. I tried the one in Bagan twice and both times it was deserted. The guard was sleeping on his motorcycle under a tree. I could have walked behind the wooden counter and stamped it myself. My printed map had the post office marked out as just a few blocks away from my hotel. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday, something I only realised after reaching it, and the post office was closed. Fortunately, the Mandalay post office shack was open right outside the doors. Finally. I sent those babies off en-masse and snatched up a dozen or so or these beautiful hand-painted cards for about fifty cents apiece to stick up on my walls. Then I went back to the hotel and found myself a driver. Honestly, I could have walked to the Hill (not sure if anyone actually refers to it as that), it was probably only a kay or so from the hotel, but after days of wandering under the merciless sun, I was ready for a little two-wheeled convenience. I found those wheels in the form of the amiable Nyi Nyi, who was hanging around the hotel's downstairs sitting area with a bunch of other drivers. Normally a backpacker hotel would be the last place to source a driver, especially coming from Vietnam. But Nyi Nyi had an aura about him. I have this thing with faces. If I like someone's face, it puts me at ease, and I feel I can trust them. If not, sometimes things can get a little irrational. This extends even to things like movies and the cafes I'll hang out in. I'll avoid a film or a place if there's a face there that's putting me off. Leonardo DiCaprio, great actor, but I still don't like his face. Joseph Gordon Levitt, he may be a half-decent actor, but I hate his mug. And so on. Nyi Nyi, I liked his face. It was a trustworthy face. And so he ended up being my driver for my final three days. Even drove me out to the airport when I left. But I digress. Mandalay Hill. It's a rump of mountain rising up on the north end of town, just past the moat of the fort. It has a famous pagoda on top that offers three-sixty views of the city. It has history too and a little and little-known fort of its own up there the British fought to re-take from the Japanese during the War. I plodded my way up the covered staircase, one of several that snakes its way up to the summit. All the way up I encountered cats and dogs lazing on the steps. It was a strange affair. Cats and dogs on the stairway to heaven, I thought. Sounded like a poem. I also encountered a young Burmese girl who walked with me up to the top. She wanted to practice her English, she told me. It's a thing, as I soon realised. Locals come here every afternoon in search of beleaguered foreigners sweating their way to the top for a little English conversation. But I was happy for the company. I was looking out for the British fort on the way up. I read about it in my printed pages. It was a little off from the main walk, and most people pass right by it without even noticing. According to the guide, there was a shrine to the fallen soldiers, and the fort was accessed through a drab concrete structure just after that. I found the pillar and the concrete structure, but no fort. My new friend lost patience and continued on without me as I examined every corner of the structure. I took me a while before I realised that what I was looking for was right in front of me. The concrete structure was the fort. Or rather, an addition to it. The fort itself (and "fort" is a somewhat misleading term) was a white stone building of some three stories and the covered concrete addition was built right into it. It's a little hard to see from the inside. I had to walk out and down some steps away from the path to see it properly. No wonder people walk right past it. At the top of the Hill was the stupa, as promised. But at this point I'd seen so many of the things that it was the little diversions on the way up that made the biggest impression on me. Strangely, there is an elevator at the top that takes a slice out of that panoramic view. And an escalator to reach the elevator. And a road to reach the escalator. And so on. As for the view itself, while for the most part panoramic, the views were obscured by the blankets of smog that lay upon the whole region. A smog of woodsmoke and raised dust more so than car or coal fumes in Burma. But smog nonetheless. It was almost sunset, that esteemed time of day, and the crowds at the summit were growing in number. After the sunsets of Bagan, however, I felt I'd fed long and deep from the goblet. So to speak. So I began my descent, not unhappily, in the company of the Hill's many pets. On my way down I left a short poem at the shrine of the fallen. I'd been reading a lot on the history of the that ravaged this place and had a little moment there beneath the cherry blossoms and potted plants arranged about the memorial white pillar. I tore it out from my notebook and stuck it under a candle. What else? I wandered the streets of Mandalay that night in search of a cinema. I found one on the roof of a mall. When the elevator doors opened I thought I had made some kind of mistake. I could see the night sky and the lights of the city. I walked out confused into a massive covered area like an aircraft hanger. This is the cinema? I was thinking. Couples were up there romancing at the railings over the city views. I did a short lap and found entrance to the actual cinema behind the giant air ducts. I think I just took the wrong elevator. There were no good movies showing. There rarely after in this part of the world. Pity. Back down on the street a Muslim man on his moped offered me a lift back to the hotel. He was friendly, but … something about his face. I said no and found a bakery that sold pizza. It was full of giggling girls and I was the butt of their indecipherable joke. I ordered Mandalay tea and microwaved pizza and drifted once again into the pages of history.