One of my regular interlocutors in Rangoon was the resident World Health Organisation representative, who could always be counted upon to provide hair-raising stories about life in the old capital, and elsewhere. One subject that tended to come up often, on one occasion prompted by the sight of a rat scurrying across the floor of an up-market hotel reception room, was Rangoon's rodent infestation problem. I was later to learn that Rangoon was by no means alone in this regard, with Paris, London and New York still considered among the most rat-infested cities in the world.

When I was posted to the Australian embassy in Rangoon (now Yangon) in 1974, I spent my first six weeks living at the Strand Hotel. This was before the grand old building was renovated and turned into one of the city's most exclusive hostelries. As I was sitting in an enormous bathtub one night soon after my arrival, I was surprised to see what I thought was a mongoose run across the bathroom floor. On investigating further, I discovered that it was in fact a large rat. This was my introduction to the former capital's most prolific form of wildlife.

I was reminded of this incident recently when reading Bad Lands, a memoir by Tony Wheeler, who co-founded the Lonely Planet guide book company. He described a similar experience in the Strand Hotel in 1979:

The American travel writer Andrew Harper once claimed that, during the 1980s, the Strand's rats were almost as legendary as the ducks at Memphis's famous Peabody Hotel.