Burmese spinels

I've had a couple of recent trips to Myanmar (formerly know as Burma), and found lots of nice spinels in all colors but I focused my buying on the nice reds. The reds are outstanding due to the incredible fluorescence of these Burmese stones. Under UV light they have an unreal glow to them (see photo below); in normal daylight the fluorescence ramps up the saturation and intensity of the color. It's too bad that many of the stones that I saw were so poorly cut, but I did buy a couple of poorly cut (but deep) stones to recut because they were clean and had top color. Some rough spinels were offered including the awesome crystal shown in the photo below, which I would have bought except the owner was expecting an insanely high price. Maybe on my next trip I'll see some reasonably priced material.