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 my friend's motor scooter the night of my birthday. I must seem the part of a bum or beggar wearing them, but I've grown attached. Like moss.

A last breakfast of instant coffee, fried eggs on spongy bread, and a bunch of filched bananas stuffed into my bag. Nyi Nyi, my trusty driver, was waiting for me out from on the motorbike. He had insisted upon driving me to the airport on his moped, saving me half the price of a taxi fare. Novelty factor aside, half the price of a taxi fare was all I had left on me, anyways. The Mandalay airport is some ways out of the city, maybe a good twenty, thirty kays or more. We left the sprawl of Mandalay behind and hit the high road. Burma had one final surprise left in store for me yet.

Nyi Nyi stopped us for a top-up at the petrol station just as we turned onto the highway. Feeding at the bowsers like a pair of road lionesses were two vintage roadsters. Pity I was out of film by this point. As it turned out we were sharing the road with the final leg of a classic car endurance rally. All the way to the airport we were passed by this colonial road convoy. Kipling-era cars on the road to Mandalay. All us small road folk were awed by a procession of vintage Bentleys, Jags, and Rolls Royce Silver Ghosts hammering by on the burning white asphalt. I watched two Chinese girls in the back of a pickup ahead of us, their shawls whipping in the wind, as they waved to the passing drivers in their open-tops. It was a scene right out of the colonial glory days. Driving goggles, scarves, leather riding jackets, even a few safari pith helmets. I guffawed along with the rest of them.

And in such a fashion did I bow out of gold-brown Burma, blowing the last of my kyat in the airport on instant sachets of Royal Mandalay Tea (my favourite new perishable commodity), sneaking my bananas onto the plane, and watching the dry, rolling landscape of golden nipples recede into mist from the portside window.