The flight plan thus followed their path: we started in Calcutta, went South via the river and over the sea-- then headed East all the way to Chittagong. We then followed the Western coast line of Burma-- which is called "Myanmar" today-- South, and rounded the very Southern-most tip. We entered the Rangoon river, went North to Rangoon itself-- which is called "Yangon" these days-- then continued all the way North, following the Irrawaddy river straight to the ruins of Ava, just South of modern-day Mandalay.
In other words, this is the exact route Adoniram and Ann sailed on that fateful first voyage. With that said, let's start the pictures with Calcutta: here we are, right after take-off. As we traveled out of India, we flew well beneath some cool-looking airliners. As always, click on any of the pictures for larger versions.
After traveling East all the way across the sea, we arrived in Chittagong. Here is what the place looks like today. We landed and re-fueled our plane.
We took off and proceeded South, mountains on our left, the sea on our right. We flew over a lot of little farms and the like. The Southern-most tip of Myanmar is filled with tons of rivers. Eventually we came to the mouth of the Rangoon river-- it's amazing that this is exactly what Adoniram and Ann would have seen, except down at sea level of course.
We followed the river North a short way and reached Rangoon-proper. It's a huge city today-- in large part I'm sure because of the Christian values they helped to bring there!
I was really hoping against all odds that they would have modeled the Shwedagon Pagoda, which is mentioned numerous times in the book. Alas, the game tried its best with the satellite imagery, hah. Nevertheless, we landed and re-fueled the plane again. We saw some cool parked planes as well.
We took off and went North. We flew over what looked like infinite jungle in all directions! What's very strange though is that at about the mid-point between Rangoon and Ava, the terrain changes from dense jungle to dry, rocky-looking land. We forged ahead, following the Irawaddy river just as Adoniram and Ann once did.
And then, the big moment... we had reached Ava! Of course, none of the ruins were modeled in-game-- but you can see from the satellite imagery where the remains of the walls are, and where there are surviving buildings! You can also get a really good perspective of the exact scale of Ava. It must have been super impressive by the standards of those days-- but it's tiny compared to modern cities, stretching really only several city blocks. The last screenshot is the view from above Mandalay, looking back at the ancient ruins.
In Mandalay, a city which was apparently only built in 2002--? I saw a strange looking set of red-roofed buildings, as well as a large, exactly square-shaped area. Bizarre, and worth further research. The city looks very centrally-planned, sort of like what was the case in the old Soviet Union. In any event, we landed and thus ended our long adventure.
A couple of final thoughts: the distances between all of these places was vast: now I understand why it took them weeks and even months to get from place-to-place, with all sorts of death and other misadventures occurring along the way. Even flying in a modern twin-engine plane straight from point-to-point, the longest of these legs too hours to fly.
On a technical note, this was the first time I'd run Flight Simulator 2020 on my Ryzen 7700x / RTX 4070 Ti PC, and it was astonishing: I enabled DLSS 3 Frame Generation support, and via G-Sync on my LG C3 OLED the game was running anywhere from 85 to 115 fps! To say it was butter-smooth is an understatement.