In the wake of an intrepid Aussie

Some books can change your life. When I first came across Dust on my Shoes, by Australian traveller-writer Peter Pinney, my eyes all but peeled the print from its pages, such was my youthful enthusiasm for his epic tale of travelling in the late 1940s overland from Greece via the Middle East, Afghanistan and India to Burma's Chindwin River.

Whether among minstrels in the Sahara or smuggling rum in Central America, Pinney (1922-1992) lived his life all the way up. He made an art of outwitting border guards and baiting colonial desk-wallahs, of befriending eccentric locals and staying one step - rarely more - ahead of broke, if not busted. Every few years he would pull up a deserted beach somewhere and write a rattling good book about a freedom road that is now pretty much gone, as the Beatles said, "forever not for better".

Following Dust on my Shoes, I read everything Pinney wrote - and in a lifetime crammed with adventure, he found time to pen a dozen books. I give equal credit, blame and thanks to him for showing that chronic, creative wanderlust is a magnificent anti-career path.

The little town of Kalewa overlooks the Chindwin River in remote, northwest Burma. An old Buddhist pagoda on the western bank crowns its hill. Rain trees shade the beach below, where people come to wash and chat each evening. Other than a growing population and a few satellite dishes, Kalewa's riverfront probably doesn't look dramatically different from how a 27-year-old Pinney and his resourceful Dutch companion Robert Marchand, 31, found it in 1949. They had worked their way overland from Europe, living off their outrageous if not larcenous wits while heading ever eastwards. Upon reaching northeast India, border officials detained them and absolutely forbade the pair to attempt to enter Burma.

Characteristically, they said something like "stuff that" and legged it anyway, escaping east from Nagaland through hazardous jungle terrain and mountain passes, at times in the company of Kula headhunters.

Upon reaching Burma they found their path again blocked, this time by the Chindwin River in monsoon flood and a communist insurgency on its other side. To top it off, the British district officer arrested them, pending deportation back to India.

Determined, nevertheless, to cross the river and press on to Mandalay, they climbed the hill to Kalewa's monastery and asked the Buddhist abbot for a letter of safe conduct for once they had somehow crossed the swollen river. The monk first insisted on reading their palms but, foreseeing a great misfortune in Marchand's hand, he refused to assist in their plan.

When I learned that RV Katha Pandaw would make an expedition cruise to the upper Chindwin, and in monsoon season, I grabbed the chance to join it. Burma, as is well known, is changing rapidly, with trainer-wheels democracy and the junta of paranoids-in-epaulettes who've run the country for decades stepping ever-so-slightly aside. It is a delightful and courteous land, a place of beauty and occasional decrepitude where the 1950s are inching into the 21st century. And we would see it from a classic vessel travelling north through a riverscape of valleys, teak forests and a thousand stupas.

After boarding north of Rangoon, we initially head up the Irrawaddy River to Bagan's treasury of 3000 temples. "Are you stupa-fied yet?" our Burmese guide quips that night. Far from it.

I note that even the little, lost-in-time riverside pagodas now often are powered by portable solar panels, and some townsfolk who come to pray own mobile phones.

We join the Irrawaddy's main tributary, the Chindwin, and witness Burmese time in rewind, with daily rambles ashore through market towns where streets are still called The Strand and old European forts, warehouses and abandoned mansions recall the country's repudiated colonial past.

We wander through pagodas dense with intricate art, meet cheroot-smoking folk who smear their faces with white thanaka paste - local sunscreen - and sometimes just take the pulse of the day by sitting in a riverside chai shop. Rafts of precious teak logs head downstream while skinny canoes edge crab-wise across the current. Near Monywa, we visit Thanbodi Temple and its forest of half a million Buddha statues, plus an absurdly tall 125m Standing Buddha with a 100m-long Reclining Buddha at his feet. Understandably, even devout Burmese sometimes call the place Buddhist Disneyland.

Our good ship Katha Pandaw is a teak-and-brass descendant of last century's Irrawaddy steamers. Just add 16 ensuite cabins, good food, a wizened skipper, for'ard viewing deck, and ample gin and tonic. At Sitthaung we see the remnants of one of its forebears. In 1942, when the Japanese invaded British Burma, the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company pre-emptively scuttled its extensive fleet. Two decades ago, Scottish entrepreneur Paul Strachan raised and refurbished an original steamer, which then became the first of his fleet of a dozen luxurious, modern Pandaws that now ply the Mekong, Irrawaddy and Chindwin rivers. The company promises frankly: "No TVs in the staterooms . . . no captain's table or other such inanities."

We reach Kalewa towards the end of our 1000km two-week journey. I hike up the hill that, some 64 years earlier, Pinney and Marchand climbed in order to consult the abbot of Moat Htaw monastery. From here, the broad river seems deceptively benign even in monsoon tide. Fishing pirogues drift on it. Women whack washing on slap-stones at its edge, and labourers climb the bank unloading beer kegs from cargo boats.

The two adventurers scanned the same topography, with the Naga Hills which they had just crossed lying behind them to the west and, beckoning somewhere ahead, the proverbial road to Mandalay. Their Chindwin River, however, was turbulent and in full flood.

Whirlpools and unpredictable eddies churned its surface. Regardless of the roiling current and the monk's warning, they purloined a canoe and set out to take their chances. The canoe capsized mid-stream and the seemingly indestructible Marchand was swept away. Pinney, rescued by villagers at the last minute, barely escaped with his life. Stunned, he wrote in Dust on my Shoes, "Marchand was dead. The debonair, the cynical, the light-hearted, proud and resolute Marchand . . . the Chindwin had claimed him, and rendered no return."

With our river journey over, like Pinney, we leave the Chindwin River at Kalewa. For us, it's a bone-rattling bus trip to an airfield a few hours away and then an easy return flight to the pleasures of Rangoon. For Peter Pinney, expelled from Burma, it was a sombre turning-back: "Along the road to India I walked, away from the dawn, away from the river and out of the town, alone; and looking down I marvelled that there was so little dust on my shoes."

FACT FILE

Bangkok Airways fly Bangkok-Rangoon daily. Obtain a Burma visa before arrival. bangkokair.com.

Pandaw Chindwin cruises start from $US3150 ($3497) per person. pandaw.com.

In Rangoon, stay at the five-star Chatrium Hotel (chatrium.com) or moderately priced New Aye Yar (newayeyarhotel.com).

For more on Peter Pinney, see dustonmyshoes.com.

John Borthwick was a guest of Pandaw Expeditions and Bangkok Airways.