Our boat was the Road to Mandalay. She had not been built for this river.
She was made in Germany a long time ago for the Rhine, and they had brought her out and changed her and given her a new name, and now she went up the Irrawaddy as if she had never done anything else.
That is a kind of grace, to be made for one thing and become good at another.
She was converted but she was not modest. She was top of the end of things.
On the upper deck there were parties in the evening, champagne cold in the heat, buffets laid out long and beautiful, and you went back twice and nobody minded.
There was the other side of it too, the quiet side, the way you could do everything or nothing and both were allowed. Teak underfoot. Forty-odd people could ride her and you never felt them.
The boat went up in the early light. The water was the colour of weak tea.
I had the new camera and I used it more than I thought I would, which is a thing I had never done before. Some things you keep without the picture. Some things you keep with it.
The pagodas came out of the mist. Hundreds.
At one stop I took a bicycle.
A man who rode with me and spoke no word I knew, and did not need to.
The children ran beside the wheels and wanted nothing. That is the part. Not the temples. The food was cheap and honest and you ate it standing up. The best thing. Then the next thing.
At dusk the flowers came down the river with the candles lit. Nobody said why. A truly romantic, soul cleaner.
The colours were gold and then they were red and then they were gone, and the river kept going north the way it always had, and I went with it, and it was enough.
She does not sail now. The war stopped her.
I did not know then that it was the last of the good years. You never do.
So I am glad I went. That is the whole of it. A door that was open for a little while and is shut now, and I walked through it once, and what I brought back is in these pictures and in nothing else. It was a once in a lifetime that turned out to mean exactly that.
Mind-blowing is the word I keep coming to, and I am not ashamed of it. Some things earn the plain word.
I went up the river once. The light was gold. I will not get to go again, and neither will most people, and that is the sadness in it - but I went, I have the memories, and the photos to share.
