On Thursday, April 13, 1977 - a month over 31 years ago - I flew Thai Airways from Bangkok to Rangoon.
It is now known as Yangon, and the country was then called Burma.
I was with a couple of mates and we chose Thai Airways over the slightly cheaper Burmese Air, because it offered free grog.
The flight took a mere 35 minutes and in that time three strapping young Kiwis assuaged a thirst built up over the past several months travelling on a beer-free budget through southeast Asia.
The score: Kiwis 21 beers (12 Carlsberg, 9 Tuborgs) and six glasses of champagne, Thai Airways nil.
This much I know, because the shocking events of the past week, first Cyclone Nargis and now the grotesque and inhumane response to the crisis by the generals of Myanmar, sent me out to the garage to rummage through the travel box-file with its fading, watermarked, and worn notebooks. (As such unrefined trivia indicates, these are neither literary masterpieces, nor marked by sociopolitical acumen).
We had five days.
That's about all the time the military government would issue visas for back then, and the stay coincided with the flights in and out - airports being the only points of entry and exit for tourists.
Even then, the military exercised tight control on its borders.
Three of our days coincided with the Burmese New Year, a prolonged water festival in the form of a sort of countrywide water fight.
To be soaked to the skin on the streets by hoses or ambushed by buckets of water thrown with hilarity and abandon, was considered good luck.
So good, I promptly caught a cold.
It could have been worse.
At least I didn't catch my death - as so many thousands have in the floods that accompanied last week's cyclone.
Rangoon was marked by the crumbling edifices of empire - British colonial architecture in various states of disrepair.
The streets were littered with vehicles from the '40s and '50s, kept on the road by a combination of ingenuity and desperation.
In the evenings we frequented the big old Strand Hotel, the faded grandeur of which could not disguise the elegance of its colonial bones, and whose existence was a monument to the mass of contradictions permeating Burmese society.
In the spacious lounge bar we sat on wicker furniture while fans whirled lazily overhead.
We were served whisky sours, pink gins, dry martinis and beer brewed in the "People's Brewery" by waiters who wore starchy white shirt-jackets and were identified on the bar receipt as "Boy No . . ."
For cash, we depended mostly on the cigarettes and whisky bought duty free in Thailand.
The black market operated on precise, almost regulated, terms: you got a premium price for 555 cigarettes and, curiously enough, Johnnie Walker Red Label, which on the street were tradeable for kyats at many times the official cash rate.
I exchanged my watch and a carton of 555s for a sizeable blue sapphire and smuggled it out of the country with the rest of the family jewels.
On New Year's Day, Monday 17th, we visited the awe-inspiring Shwedagon pagoda with its bejewelled massive Buddha, and later retired for a drink to a bar behind the Strand.
There we got talking to a couple of locals who offered to show us round.
One turned out to be a captain in the army, the personal assistant to a high-ranking brigadier.
Captain Myo Mint took us to the Inya Lake Hotel, Rangoon's smartest, and run by a friend he told us, and later around the university grounds.
But that was about as close as we got to the military.
Back then, they seemed a benign sort of presence, a muddled bunch of Marxist ideologues who presided over the country like "benevolent" gangsters preside over a big-city neighbourhood.
That was probably just youthful naivete and sheer ignorance.
A generation or so down the track the isolation, the corruption, and the lust for power - with all its attendant privileges - seems to have divorced the military rulers of the country from the people they govern to a breathtaking, almost psychotic extent.
How, we all wonder, can they stand by and prevaricate as the aid that could save so many thousands of lives, sits on its borders? Thirty years ago, I wasn't looking for the answer to that question, but neither was there any real indication, despite the chaos and corruption, that one day the world might be seeking it.
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
