Orcaella

25-cabin vessel run by the Belmond (formerly Orient-Express) group, which also operates Yangon’s historic Governor’s Residence hotel, where I spent the night prior to embarking. A sister ship to the larger Road to Mandalay, which has been ferrying passengers between Bagan and Mandalay since 1996, the Orcaella was launched almost four years ago to offer longer and more intimate cruises, including trips along the shallower reaches of the upper Irrawaddy and its tributary the Chindwin when the rivers are at their highest in August and September. Constructed in a Yangon shipyard, the Orcaella is not as pretty as her sharp-prowed, German-built older sibling. But what she lacks in outward elegance is more than compensated for by the roomy cabins, appointed with sliding glass doors that open onto Juliet balconies, tasteful wicker and hardwood furnishings, and the biggest ensuite bathrooms I’ve yet to see on a riverboat. As for intimacy, we have that in spades. There are only 17 passengers on this late November cruise, just a third of the boat’s capacity. And with 54 staff and crew aboard, service is especially coddling.

River travel is an unhurried affair, and it attracts an equally sedate demographic; apart from my photographer friend Martin Westlake, our fellow passengers are elderly couples from Switzerland, Britain, Canada, and Australia. Martin and I, both in our early 50s, are quickly dubbed “the young ’uns.” But they’re a game bunch, showing up in numbers for sunrise yoga sessions and afternoon tai chi lessons on the pool deck; eagerly attending the daily lectures on Burmese culture, history, and politics given by Soe, our cruise director; and trundling down the gangplank each morning for the day’s shore excursion. Even the seventysomething Englishwoman with the bad hip doesn’t miss an outing.

And I don’t blame her. An eight-night trip on a 65-meter-long river cruiser with sketchy Wi-Fi requires as many diversions as you can get. That’s perhaps particularly true on this part of the Irrawaddy (also spelled Ayeyarwady), an almost 600-kilometer stretch between Yangon’s Twante Canal and Bagan. Though pretty enough, the scenery we drift past at a steady seven knots appears Yangon unchanged from one day to the next—a flat latte-colored river bordered by flat green countryside broken only by the occasional village, pagoda, or high-embanked town, with the distant hills of the Arakan Mountains teasingly glimpsed to the west.

By day three—the only day of the cruise without a trip ashore —a few of us are beginning to feel restless. The has anticipated this. A “famous astrologer” has been brought onboard to read palms throughout the day. (To his wife’s annoyance, Brian from Byron Bay is told he will have an affair in the next few months, providing us with a running joke for the rest of the cruise.) Before lunch, chef Yuri, a talented young Thai from Udon Thani, gives a cooking demonstration, headlining it with a Burmese tea-leaf salad. In the afternoon, Soe shows us how to tie a longyi. And we get to keep our longyis because we’re expected to wear them at a cocktail party that evening.

There’s also an impromptu entertainment. After dinner— delicious as ever—a troupe from the village we’ve tied up to, Lakponbu, performs a dragon dance for us on the sun deck. “This is so