When visiting Burma a century ago, Rudyard Kipling thought it "quite unlike any land you know about". Today, the traveller to Myanmar, as the country has been renamed, will still discover a land of wonder and mystery, redolent of times past.

Nowhere is this more palpable than in Yangon, formerly Rangoon, known as the "garden of the east" for its location on a fertile delta where lakes and rivers are lined by parkland shaded by tropical trees.