Arrival at Yangon International Airport (RGN), where our team meets you and takes you to the hotel.

Yangon does not give itself away all at once: it is a city of muted tones and hidden gold, of longyis, cheeks painted with thanaka and a bustle that only catches fire as the afternoon fades.

Today the camera rests, but the eye starts working: the first day is for tuning your eye to Burmese colour and light.

Dinner at the hotel and rest.

Accommodation: The Strand Hotel

Flight to Heho and the climb onto the Shan plateau, eleven hundred metres up, which brings cool mornings and a sharper light.

The drive to the lake crosses rice paddies and Shan villages, a first taste of rural Burma.

On the way we stop at the nineteenth-century Shwe Yan Pyay teak monastery, famous for the oval windows of its prayer hall.

The picture is clear before you step out of the car: a novice in maroon robes framed inside the oval, against the black of the interior.

Always with respect and consent: people live here, they do not pose.

Accommodation: Sanctum Inle Resort

Inle is a shallow, luminous lake inhabited by the Intha, "the sons of the lake", who live on stilts and grow tomatoes in floating gardens anchored to the bottom.

We set out early on purpose: the reward at Inle is the dawn mist, when the first light cuts through the fog and the water steams.

The icon is the Intha fisherman and his leg rowing, a real technique — he wraps one leg around the oar to keep his hands free for the conical net — which today is also re-enacted at golden hour for photographers.

Shoot low, almost at water level from the boat; a fast shutter to freeze the net and the drops; or place him against the light and turn him into pure silhouette.

We sail on to the Paung Daw Oo pagoda, whose five Buddha images have disappeared under centuries of gold leaf; the Nga Phe Chaung monastery; the villages of Inpawkhone and Ywama, where they weave silk and the very rare lotus fibre, spun by hand from cut stems; and the traditional boatyards.

In the afternoon, Indein: up a side creek hides the stupa forest of Shwe Inn Thein, hundreds of seventeenth-century spires eaten away by time among tamarind trees, where the raking light bites into the brick.

We come back through the floating gardens and, if the sky plays along, sunset on the wooden bridge of Maing Thauk, the "mini U Bein".

Accommodation: Sanctum Inle Resort

We leave the lake for Kakku, in the heart of Pa-O country, near Taunggyi.

A complex of 2,478 Buddhist stupas packed into rows, many of them leaning and crowned with small bells that ring in the wind, presided over by a forty-metre central spire.

Local custom means a Pa-O guide comes with us, and that same custom keeps the place little visited: here you photograph almost alone.

Composition is everything.

Use the telephoto to compress and stack the spires until they become a solid forest; the wide angle to give scale; and look for the lines that run away down the aisles.

The Pa-O women, in indigo and black with brightly checked head towels, bring the colour.

At midday the light is flat, so we save the good part for the afternoon, when it comes in low.

In the afternoon, back to the lake.

Accommodation: Sanctum Inle Resort

Flight to Bagan, capital of the kingdom of Pagan between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and the cradle of Burmese civilisation: of the nearly ten thousand original monuments, more than two thousand temples, pagodas and stupas survive, scattered across a plain on the banks of the Irrawaddy.

The dust in the air and the haze soften the light and, far from being a problem, they hand you depth: the spires emerge in successive planes, each one fainter than the last.

Worth knowing before you arrive: since 2018 climbing the temples has been forbidden, for conservation and in the wake of the 2016 earthquake.

Sunsets are now watched from purpose-built viewpoints and mounds.

Accommodation: Aureum Palace Hotels & Resorts Bagan

We set out before dawn to a viewpoint to watch the plain wake up.

Late November coincides with the start of the balloon season: with the first light they rise in silence and drift over the temples while the mist pools between the spires — the most recognisable shot in Bagan, from the ground as well.

Early in the morning, by the Tharaba Gate, the line of monks receiving their alms, an intimate everyday scene.

Then, the great names.

Shwezigon, the golden bell-shaped stupa that set the model for all Burmese Buddhist architecture.

Wetkyi-in Gubyaukgyi, with its Indian-inspired spire, holds inside some of the oldest frescoes in Bagan: absolute gloom, no flash, push the ISO and find something to brace against.

Htilominlo, and a session with monks at the Lawkananda monastery.

In the afternoon, the Ananda temple, whitewashed, on a Greek cross plan, with four standing teak Buddhas lit by hidden skylights; wait for the shaft of light on the face.

Then the white Thatbyinnyu, the tallest in Bagan, and the colossal Dhammayangyi, the finest brickwork on the plain, bound up with the legend of the cruel king Narathu.

Accommodation: Aureum Palace Hotels & Resorts Bagan

Morning at the Nyaung U local market, the best stage for everyday life in Bagan: vegetables, thanaka, monks with their bowls, shafts of light falling between the awnings.

Get close with a 35 mm and work the gesture.

We go on to the Manuha pagoda, built on the orders of the Mon king Manuha while he was held captive: his Buddhas, too big for the halls that enclose them, read as a metaphor for his imprisonment — an extremely powerful image.

Then the refined Sulamani, with good interior light, and once again the walled Dhammayangyi.

We close in Minanthu, the quietest of the eastern clusters — ox carts, tamarind trees, village life — and its lacquerware workshops: a bamboo frame, successive layers of thitsi sap cured and polished, fine engraving.

A slow craft, perfect for photographing hands and process.

Last sunset from one of the finest viewpoints on the plain.

Accommodation: Aureum Palace Hotels & Resorts Bagan

Road journey north, following the Irrawaddy plain.

Mandalay was the last royal capital of the Konbaung dynasty, until it fell to the British in 1885, and it is still the religious and cultural heart of the country, with more monks and monasteries than anywhere else.

On the way, Amarapura and the U Bein bridge: 1.2 kilometres of teak salvaged from the old palace at Inwa around 1850, the longest wooden bridge in the world, laid across Taungthaman Lake.

We arrive just in time for sunset, and here is the picture of the day: monks and villagers crossing in silhouette, fishermen casting their nets.

We hire a small boat to shoot low, right over the water, to gain the reflection and isolate the figures between the pillars with a telephoto.

Accommodation: Pullman Mandalay Mingalar Hotel

Golden wood and Mandalay Hill

We go back to U Bein at dawn: a different light, mist, almost nobody, and the rowers heading out to work.

Then the Mahamuni pagoda, which guards the most venerated Buddha image in Myanmar, thickened without pause by male devotees until it has built up some fifteen centimetres of gold leaf over the body; with luck we coincide with the ritual washing of the face or with the applying of the gold, pure devotion.

We go on to the finely carved Shwe In Bin teak monastery, and the surroundings of the old Royal Palace and its moat.

Kuthodaw holds "the largest book in the world": 729 marble slabs, each under its own white stupa among frangipani trees; photograph the repetition, the rows running away from you.

Nearby, Atumashi and the exquisite Shwenandaw Kyaung, the Golden Palace monastery, entirely of carved teak and the only important survivor of the old palace complex.

If the schedule allows, the gold-leaf beating workshops, with their hypnotic hammering, give portrait and process in equal measure.

We finish by climbing Mandalay Hill for sunset over the city and the Irrawaddy.

Accommodation: Pullman Mandalay Mingalar Hotel

Return flight to Yangon and a visit to the colossal reclining Buddha of Chaukhtatgyi, some sixty-five metres long, with a serene face and the soles of its feet inlaid with the one hundred and eight auspicious signs in glass mosaic: photograph the soles as pure geometry, and the whole with a wide angle to give the scale.

As the afternoon fades, a walk through Chinatown: woks, smoke, neon and street life.

Accommodation: The Strand Hotel

Shwedagon at dawn

Sunrise at the Shwedagon Pagoda, the spiritual summit of the country: a great golden stupa of nearly a hundred metres, crowned with diamonds and rubies, ringed by shrines and by the eight planetary posts where each devotee bathes the Buddha of the weekday they were born on.

Dawn and the blue hour are magical, when the gold turns from cold to molten.

Take off your shoes, slow down and photograph the devotion and the geometry of the platform.

Afterwards, colonial Downtown, the largest ensemble of architecture from that period in Southeast Asia: the Secretariat building, where General Aung San and six ministers were assassinated in 1947, and the peeling façades of Pansodan.

We end at the Botataung pagoda, beside the river, a hollow stupa you walk through inside like a golden labyrinth of mirrors around a relic.

Option to return to Shwedagon in the blue hour.

Accommodation: The Strand Hotel

Breakfast and transfer to Yangon International Airport for the return flight.