"On the road to Mandalay, Where the flyin' fishes play, An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the bay." -- Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling only visited Burma for two nights and a day, just a stop-off from a steamer, and never got to Mandalay. Still, with a few deft pen-strokes, he conjured a road tinged with every shade of yearning for someone who has been East and then left for the gray skies of a wintry West: every perfume, gong, sloe-eyed girl, every simmering city with crumbling temples . . .
Kipling's road was no true road, but a river, the Irrawaddy. One of Asia's mightiest water courses, this rises high in the eastern Himalayas near Burma's border with Tibet, then runs some 2,000 km south before fragmenting into a spider's web of delta mangrove channels and emptying into the Andaman Sea.