Not wishing to support a corrupt regime, Joyce Morgan sets off in search of a politically correct road to Mandalay.

Subversive words are whispered among the Westerners in the queue at Rangoon airport arrivals hall. "You're about to see your first example of official versus unofficial Myanmar," says an American backpacker behind me as we edge our way forward.

Every visitor to the repressed country still better known as Burma must change $US200 ($364) cash into 200 foreign exchange certificates (FECs) - by which means the government can siphon greenbacks into its treasury. FECs are worthless outside the country and can't be exchanged when you're leaving. But you can't pass customs without buying them. The trick is to acquire as few as possible so you aren't stuck with them at the end of your trip.Word passes down the line that it's possible to change less than $US200. So when I get to the customs counter I ask if my partner and I can change $US200 between us. She pauses for a nanosecond.

"I can help you," she says. "Can you help me?"

This is code for "Yes, if you pay me a bribe."

About $US5 a person seems to be the going rate being whispered along the queue and that is what she asks for. She allows us to cash $US100 each, half the official amount. But in the ensuing chaos of the arrival hall she forgets about collecting her present from me. There are plenty more cashed-up foreigners behind. So, 20 minutes after arriving I learn my first rule of travel in Burma: one way to a clear conscience is to encourage corruption.

I have returned to the country I last visited in 1987 to revisit cities such as Bagan, where more than 2000 temples and monasteries dot a small, ancient town like a pointillist painting. And I am resolved to keep my Western riches from the junta that has kept the democratically elected Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for almost seven years.

Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace prize winner, once asked tourists to stay away, arguing that tourism lined the coffers of a military regime with an appalling human rights record. But with her release from house arrest in May - this time after 20 months - and the lifting of some political restrictions, it is likely that some who agreed to adhere to the boycott may rethink their decision. Certainly, it lay behind my decision to return to the magical country I had avoided for more than a decade.

June is low season in Burma because of the satanic heat and the mixed blessings of monsoonal rains. But, whatever the month, it is a sociable destination, in part because of the bonds forged from surviving some of South-East Asia's toughest travel. The government has the monopoly on all comfortable modes of transport, including most trains and internal flights. So avoiding the government means long rides on some of the worst roads and buses I've encountered in more than 20 years of Asian travel.

Avoiding lining the Government's pockets starts before you arrive in Burma, with your choice of airline into the country. Biman Bangladesh and Thai International are among the alternatives to the partly government-owned Myanmar Airways. Once inside Burma, among independent travellers there's a gleeful sharing of ways to outsmart the Government's grip on the tourist dollar. In Sagaing and Ava, near Mandalay, I learn of two enterprising trishaw drivers who have guided a Swiss couple around the officials collecting entry fees. They save $US5 which - surprise, surprise - is what they end up paying their drivers. Call it income redistribution.

At tranquil Inle Lake, with its stilt villages, distinctive leg rowers and daily floating market, an Englishwoman pays a boat owner an extra $US1.50 to depart on a day trip before the collection office opens at 7am. I depart an hour later on a day trip that includes a visit to a monastery where monks make cats jump through hoops. "Why do you teach them to do this?" I ask an elderly monk. I expect him to tell me it's good for the cats' karma. "No reason," he says. "Just for fun." And perhaps to earn the monastery a few kyat.

While tourists willingly part with money at "Jumping Cat Monastery", backpacker attempts to dodge entrance fees at government-run sites are sometimes driven more by the desire to save a few bucks than to keep money from the hands of tyrants. And these evasions are not immune from guilt. In Bagan, where there's a $US10 fee to enter the archaeological area, some of the money appears to go towards maintaining and restoring the crumbling ancient Buddhist monuments. Before a 1975 earthquake reduced half of them to rubble, Bagan had 4000 temples, payas, pagodas, stupas and monasteries. As I bump through the town on a horse-drawn cart, teams are at work everywhere, from the smallest bell-shaped pagodas to the elegant, gold-topped Ananda Pahto Temple.

Horse-drawn carts and bicycles are the main forms of transport around the pancake-flat town. The near absence of motor vehicles adds to the peaceful, otherwordly feel of what was once one of Asia's greatest spiritual centres. It remains, with Indonesia's Borobodur and Cambodia's Angkor Wat, one of its most memorable sights.

Bagan residents have paid a high price for tourism. In 1990, about 5000 people were forcibly relocated with virtually no notice or compensation. Bagan is unrecognisable from the place I recall in 1987, when ancient temples, houses and stalls stood side by side. The area has since been divided into Old Bagan - a ghost town - and New Bagan, where houses, shops, cafes and accommodation have been shifted. The only new building in Old Bagan is a monstrously ugly museum on the edge of the Ayeyarwady River, out of style and scale with its surrounding.

While Burma's most popular destinations - Bagan, Inle Lake, Rangoon, Mandalay and the trekking town of Kalaw - are rewarding, moving between them is excruciating. Unwilling to undertake a 19-hour direct bus ride between Rangoon and Inle Lake, I break the trip into bite-sized chunks. I leave Rangoon (where some of the fine - if shabby - colonial architecture is being replaced by glossy high-rise) for Bago, a couple of hours north.

Bago is awash with once-banned imported whisky. Bottles line the shelves of cafes around town where locals imbibe with more gusto than anywhere else in the country. It is an obvious change from the 1980s, when many shoe-string travellers would fund their Burma trip with Johnny Walker Red Label and 555 cigarettes - for some reason, the only brands in demand - picked up duty-free en route from Bangkok. Travellers arriving on one-week visas (all that was permitted then) would exchange their forbidden fruit for a fistful of kyat on the black market, sometimes even before they had left Rangoon's arrivals hall, and live on the proceeds for the week.

Bago has some fine monasteries and pagodas and a grotto of seated Buddhas reachable by bicycle or cycle- rickshaw - enough to make the small town with one main street and a handful of hotels a pleasant enough pit stop. Unlike Pyinmana - which looked like a good idea on the map - about halfway to Inle. Even if Pyinmana had anything to recommend it, I doubt I'd have seen it. I spend most of a day in my windowless hotel room where the carpet emits clouds of dust and the jackhammers upstairs ensure I don't get too cosy. But it is preferable to the mind-blowing heat outside.

Train is the only feasible way out and when it arrives a mere three hours late I'm elated. I overnight in Thazi before catching a bus for the final six hours on the winding road up to cooler Inle. I fold myself into a minibus whose seats are so tightly spaced a grapefruit couldn't fall between. I've avoided a government aeroplane and a 19-hour bus ride, but it's taken four less-than-fun-filled days to reach Inle.

The long-haul buses are among the (relatively) more comfortable options. The local bus or pick-up, essentially a ute with a reinforced roof, is reminiscent of a university prank squeezing as many people as possible into a vehicle. On a local bus I took from Sagaing to Mandalay there were 38, plus an unknown number of souls clutching the roof. Half of Burma's vehicles are left-hand drive and half are right-hand drive, a relic of a 1970 change to which motorists still seem to be adjusting.

I reach the end of my bus travel tether in Bagan. Unable to face the slow road to Mandalay, I opt for the government-owned boat, a luxurious if empty behemoth that cost $US15. I confess it was the most relaxing 12 hours in three weeks of travel. I also catch a private train for a 17-hour trip from Mandalay to Rangoon, much of it spent cross-legged to avoid the mice which scamper around the carriage as soon as dusk descends. I was later told, but couldn't confirm, the government gets a cut even from the private trains.

It is easier to avoid the Government's clutches when finding accommodation, since the range of privately run hotels and guesthouses in the main centres is more extensive than during my last visit. But the most visible presence is the military. This is a country where photographic shops display images of golden temples on one wall and gilt-framed portraits of smiling generals the other.

I visit a National League for Democracy office in one town. Inside is an old man with a warm handshake and twisted teeth stained red from a lifetime of chewing betel nut. I try to keep our conversation within the three walls of woven bamboo, but his deafness requires us to shout at each other across the room's only table, and loudly enough for the whole town to hear. It is as though no disability should silence the power of his convictions.But, elsewhere, politics is a delicate subject. When a seemingly garrulous drunk calls out to me at a streetside cafe, the waiter warns me the man is military intelligence, then begs me not to tell anyone he's exposed the secret everyone knows.

A trekking guide I hire for a day in Kalaw, a cool, former British hill station a few hours from Inle, expresses - eventually - a view I encountered around the country, usually in hushed, reticent tones. We walk together through the region's pine forests and, along the way, share tea (and medicine) with desperately poor tribespeople living in communal longhouses. Other travellers rave to me about their encounters with "unspoilt" hill tribespeople, but the poverty and poor health conditions make it a profoundly depressing experience.

We pass loggers blatantly removing huge teak trees from the dwindling forests. In five years, the forests in the area will have gone, my guide tells me. As we near my guesthouse, after nearly nine hours of skirting around talk of democracy and the military, he tells me why he believes tourism is good for Burma. Certainly, it supplements the private economy - himself included - but there's another reason. "If the tourists are here," he says in a voice as soft as the fertile soil underfoot, "it is harder for the Government to hide its abuses."

The most outspoken critics of the Government I encounter are in Mandalay. It's a bustling city that lacks the romance its name somehow conjures, without any of Rangoon's colonial architecture or atmosphere. It also lacks electricity much of the time, which turns its broken pavements into a nocturnal obstacle course.

But it is home to Burma's best known dissident artists, the Moustache Brothers comedy troupe. One of the three brothers, Pa Pa Lay, was released last year after five years in jail for the crime of telling a joke at the military's expense. (His plight gets a passing mention in the recent Hugh Grant movie, About a Boy). He remains silent through the show, performed to a Western audience by his extended family in their house. His brother, Lu Maw, comperes the show of mostly traditional music and dance items, interspersed with political banter.The brothers have been blackbanned and the members of the "KGB", as Lu Maw dubs local military intelligence, have watched the show. They even videoed the inside of the brothers' house, with its framed photo of Pa Pa Lay and Suu Kyi standing together. But, so far, the show has gone on. If it is to keep doing so, Lu Maw has some advice: "Tell your friends."