"Toward a new, modern, developed nation," reads the official government slogan posted outside the airport - a government that claims 2001 as a "winning" year despite a recent report by the Asian Development Bank that the country spends only .17 percent of its GDP on education and .3 percent on healthcare, with an annual inflation rate of 27.2 percent. Already, a sign announces the entrance to the government's Department of Medical Sciences Stress Management Center.

But not yet.

We wander the crowded streets, stopping in a country music bar and eatery called City Point, where fried fish sandwiches are served up with cuts of Me and You and A Dog Named Blue and Let Me Be There in the Morning.

A friendly taxi driver - many speak decent English - takes us to Shwedagon. We pull off our shoes, climb a wide stair lined with shops selling Buddhist prayer beads and statues - and up to the temple for the end-of-day ritual and a sprinkle of broom lady dust.

INLE LAKE The flight from Yangon takes less time than the taxi ride from the small airport to the lake itself, a bumpy sway past ox carts, military transport trucks and the occasional tourist bus. Fields glow with yellow blooms and the gold of stupas that dot every sweep of landscape. The earth is red enough to make Georgia clay cry with jealousy.

The lake is a yawning but shallow inland sea, the Lake Okeechobee of the land stretching some 14 miles long, ringed by mountains and sheltered with a sky that, by night, seems filled with glitter. Our hotel is two-thirds of the way down lake; the ride in a motorized canoe takes an hour.

We aren't alone. Dozens of other water taxis hum about the lake, loaded with monks, farm wives with huge baskets of tomatoes and beans, tourists. Surprising numbers of tourists.

Our hotel is an upmarket version of a traditional lake village, a series of simple woven grass cottages on stilts. (Ours have indoor bathrooms; the locals mostly use the lake.)

The lure of Inle - along with its physical beauty - is the traditional ways that dominate. Fishermen angle with wooden fish traps tall as Michael Jordan. The lake's chief crop is tomatoes grown on fertile floating islands of seaweed and soil anchored with bamboo poles.

Men - never women - row flat-bottomed canoes in the region's traditional way, standing with one leg wrapped around the oar for a powerful stroke that doesn't tire arms and shoulders. In October, crews of 40 or more men race this way on ornate ceremonial barges at the annual Phaung Daw U festival.

The daily market rotates among five villages. Most farmers and shoppers come as we do, by boat; others by foot or ox cart, loaded with emerald chilies and saffron-colored corn and beans the size of a child's fist; tomatoes, fish fresh or dried or salted; tangy fried tofu snacks. The country may be poor but the land is rich, and no one seems hungry. Tribal women - there are eight major primary ethnic groups living near the lake - wrap their heads in bright plaid cloths to block the sun. Men and women both wear longyis and carry bright woven shoulder bags.

The people are friendly, laughing with us, happy to have us snap their photos, delighted when we show them their images in the video display of a digital camera. All, that is, except the man who runs the gambling booths, where shoppers plunk down their kyat on a decorated square and hope the giant falling dice will land with a matching symbol. "No photos!" he snarls. A new security recruit for Vegas.

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