It is clear that the road was a great enterprise, which has been accomplished in a remarkably short time. At the moment it is very good in many places and only lacks a surface finish in others, but there are some places where it is still narrow and many more where the bridges over the culverts are not yet finished and the detours to the side are inconvenient and bumpy. The road is continuously a mountainous one, climbing and descending, winding in and out, but there is only one place where it seemed as though the grade was so steep as to cause real inconvenience. The most obvious question that occurs to anyone's mind is what the rain will do to some The route from Rangoon to Lashio (which is the head of the railway and the scene of considerable activity, as it is the seat of one of the big ammunition dumps) is for the most part over a well-made, much-travelled road, though the last part from Maymio to Lashio still leaves much to be desired, and we that—a distance of 641 miles—in two days. The remainder of the journey, approximately 710 miles, took us five full motoring days, but the road was almost continuously through moun-nous country, and it was impossible to go much beyond an average of 15 miles an hour.
In the second half of the journey the longest distance that we covered in one day was 157 miles, and that was rather too much, as it meant Passengers and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.