There are worse travel strategies than to visit places with evocative names.

There’s Timbuktu, Congo, and Okavango in Africa; and Salvador de Bahia, Darien, and Patagonia in Latin America, names which purr with history and poetry. 

But Asia’s resonant place names beckon to me above all others.  There’s Sumatra, Java, and Borneo; Malacca, Vientiane, and Makassar; Kelantan, Kathmandu, and Ayudhya.  Not to mention the rivers: Ganges and Yangtze, Mahakam and Mekong. And the one I was headed towards: Ayeyarwady.

My destination was Katha, a small town on the  Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River, which has achieved a modicum of recognition.  It was here, between 1926 and 1927, that a British policeman named Eric Blair spent six months as one of 90 British police officers in Burma.  Eric Blair, who subsequently took the pen name George Orwell, based his 1934 novel Burmese Days on a fictionalized version of Katha that he dubbed Kyauktada (which is derived from the name of a district in Rangoon).