Scottish historian takes to the water as he recreates river cruises
Pandaw River Cruises, a small Edinburgh firm, has succeeded in navigating the Ganges between Varanasi and Calcutta in India, the first passenger service to do so since the 1920s.
Creating tourism opportunities on another great Asian river comes on top of Pandaw’s pioneering of the Mekong in Cambodia and Vietnam, the Irrawaddy in Burma and Borneo’s Rajang...
... The steamers were built on the Clyde, then dismantled and shipped to Mandalay to be re-assembled. The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company became known as the greatest river fleet on the planet. At its peak in 1930, it had 602 ships running from Rangoon to Upper Burma.
The fleet was scuttled in 1942 to stop it falling into Japanese hands during the Second World War, and may have disappeared forever if it hadn’t been for a young Scots historian, Paul Strachan. In 1995, he came across the rusting hulk of one of the scuttled vessels, the Pandaw, in the mud near Mandalay.
Strachan’s great-grandfather had been a ship’s captain for the Irrawaddy Flotilla and this prompted the historian to turn entrepreneur. He revived the company, renovating the Pandaw and putting her back into service in 1997.
The flotilla’s Cinderella story has not been without setbacks: The military rulers of Burma, or Myanmar, have been the target of international sanctions since they cracked down on peaceful demonstrators in 1988 and 2007, killing an estimated 3,000 people.
Although an outspoken critic of the junta, Strachan has simultaneously tried to bolster tourism in a country that receives just 1% of the tourist numbers of neighbouring Thailand...
Read entire article at Herald Scotland
Creating tourism opportunities on another great Asian river comes on top of Pandaw’s pioneering of the Mekong in Cambodia and Vietnam, the Irrawaddy in Burma and Borneo’s Rajang...
... The steamers were built on the Clyde, then dismantled and shipped to Mandalay to be re-assembled. The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company became known as the greatest river fleet on the planet. At its peak in 1930, it had 602 ships running from Rangoon to Upper Burma.
The fleet was scuttled in 1942 to stop it falling into Japanese hands during the Second World War, and may have disappeared forever if it hadn’t been for a young Scots historian, Paul Strachan. In 1995, he came across the rusting hulk of one of the scuttled vessels, the Pandaw, in the mud near Mandalay.
Strachan’s great-grandfather had been a ship’s captain for the Irrawaddy Flotilla and this prompted the historian to turn entrepreneur. He revived the company, renovating the Pandaw and putting her back into service in 1997.
The flotilla’s Cinderella story has not been without setbacks: The military rulers of Burma, or Myanmar, have been the target of international sanctions since they cracked down on peaceful demonstrators in 1988 and 2007, killing an estimated 3,000 people.
Although an outspoken critic of the junta, Strachan has simultaneously tried to bolster tourism in a country that receives just 1% of the tourist numbers of neighbouring Thailand...