Yangon was the first stop for us in Burma. Yangon was called Rangoon by the British. My guess is that they named and spelled it like they thought they heard it from the locals. At any rate, the military government changed the name back to its old name: Yangon. Our guide pronounced the name “Yang-Go”. Many names in Burma got interchanged on a regular basis so it was hard to keep things straight. Between name changes, accents, and all, you should double check on anything I tell you that can be fact checked.

Yangon is Burma’s largest city with a population of about 4.5 million people. The only other city in Burma with over a million people is Mandalay with about 1.2 million people. Yangon is also the former capital of Burma. It is also the primary commercial center for the country. The city of Yangon was originally called Dagon when established by the Mon people centuries before. The greater city area covers about 230 square miles, so it’s really a big place. Yangon represents about 20% of the country’s economy.

The city itself has many old British buildings and lots of leafy boulevards. Most of the city has electricity and paved roads. The traffic was horrendous or about as bad as anywhere that we have visited. When our guide took us for a 20 to 30 minute drive in Yangon, our bus driver would turn off the bus two or three times during the trip, due to traffic not moving at all. It was that bad. But Yangon is still a big city with decent infrastructure. But when we went beyond Yangon to the outlying areas, they were deeply impoverished.

Burma’s Human Development Index rates 150th out of 187 countries in the world. The wealth in Burma is largely controlled by the military government and their friends, from what we could learn. Even within Yangon, it didn’t take long to discover the discrepancies. I will try and demonstrate that with the photos in this email.

We stayed at the Sedona Yangon Hotel. It was a very nice place and right across the street from Inya Lake. Shortly after checking into our hotel, Vicky and I decided to go walking around on our own, just to see what we could see. Before we went walking, we had lunch in the hotel’s lounge. You can get a sense of our hotel in the first photo where you see Pete and Vicky enjoying lunch.

The next four photos are from our walk right around the back side of the block from our hotel. If you look at the second photo, our hotel is just to the right of the photo and on the same piece of ground that you see in the photo. What you see are basically homeless people living in homemade shelters which mostly consisted of sticks and tarps. You can see some on the left side but they extended all around this empty lot. They were living in the dirt and garbage, but they did get to enjoy some very nice trees.

The next three photos are in the next block from our hotel. I don’t know what level of society these folks are but they can’t be living very high on the food chain. And again, the British left lots of nicely planted tree-lined streets.