You're listening to a download from the BBC. This is from our own correspondent. We make an edition of the programme for BBC Radio 4, but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the BBC World Service. It's presented by Owen Bennett Jones.

Reporters based abroad have to accept they're on call 24 hours a day, but it can be wearing. The story goes that one former correspondent,

Bob Jobbins, got a call at four in the morning, not because of some major story breaking.

It was just a query about how to spell a name. From his bed he growled, I'll get back to you.

Then he got hold of the producer's home number and called him with the spelling.

At four in the morning, UK time. Perhaps that's why he went on to become Newsroom editor.

Anyway, in 1984, he was in Burma. Sometimes you arrive in a country knowing virtually nothing about it,

except perhaps a few random, out-of-date statistics, or half-remembered

quotations, and you stumble on a scene which sets the mood for the rest of the trip. In Rangoon,

it was a young girl sitting on the steps of a pagoda looking across the river. The wind was blowing

flurries of rain through the palm trees, and the endless tinkling of the golden bells on the

pagoda took on a brief vigour. It was a scene I was to see repeated with variations throughout

the country, a constant reminder of the importance of religion, the charm of the people, and the

almost tangible serenity of Burmese life. Burma has deliberately cut itself off from the outside world,

preferring isolation to what its leaders fear would be,

the destruction of its traditional way of life.

So it's not easy to visit.

Certain people are just banned, academics and journalists among them,

and even tourists are allowed visas for only seven days.

Arriving in Rangoon is still like being lost in time. You enter a modern aircraft in Bangkok

and get out in a city which, visually at least, is still in the 1950s. The Baroque American-made

taxes, the bulbous British cars of the immediate post-war years,

...