Tweet So I’ve been away to Luxembourg and to Germany. Now I’m coming back to Burma, be it briefly, just to round things off.

You see my idea of holiday heaven is NOT sitting around on a beach all day. But 4 nights on the edge of the Bay of Bengal was part of the package, so we had to go along with it, unaware that this would prove to be perhaps the most magical part of the whole tour.  All i knew was that a day or two taking in easy at the end of our tour would probably be welcome, and swimming in warm waters DOES count as a heavenly experience. In any case, no-one is forced to spend 8 hours on the beach.  There would be villages to explore and pagodas to discover.

 We flew from Pagan to Thandwe Airport in the Rhakine, previously Arakanese, territory of Burma. Rhakine Buddhists make up the main population, but there is a large Muslim minority, known as the Rohingya, reputedly consisting of, or at least boosted by immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.

 At tiny Thandwe airport – more of an airstrip really - we went through passport control, as we were entering a different state.  At the end of the runway was this wrapped-up plane. Had Christo been here?  The men in our party had no hesitation in photographing this phenomenon. People have been arrested in Greece for photographing planes. I was scared to death – but I snapped a quick picture anyway.

 

Ngapali Beach resort was a couple of kilometres down the road. The resort was stunning, the sea beautiful, the palm-fringed, pale sand beach stretched for miles with not a soul  on it apart from the few guests at the resort and some local fishermen  and vendors. Across the road behind the hotel, the last few tantalising buildings heralded a small village that begged for closer inspection. 

 

Among the other guests was a group of teenagers  under the umbrella of the charity World Vision, who, according to their banner, were commemorating the terrible cyclone Nargis of 2009, which resulted in more than 138,000 fatalities throughout Burma. Whether these youngsters were themselves survivors of this disaster was not clear, but they were polite and charming and we had fun swimming with them and joining in their water sports (which invlved tyres and lots of waves). One thing disturbed me, however.  The singing from their after-dinner gatherings in one of the public rooms  was invariably Christian gospel-type hyped-up hymn singing.  No getting away from a somehow unsavoury missionary element to this enterprise.

The beach and the sea occupied a couple of hours daily. After that restlessness drove me further afield.  Eight of us hired a couple of run-down wooden tub-boats to head off to an island, which they called ‘Pearl Island.’ Still bruised and in pain from my fall at Heho I had to make the decision – do I opt for the larger tub, which had seats with rudimentary backs, but would require considerable acrobatic embarkation skill (no such luxury as a ladder here – you had to vault over the side), or do I go for the smaller one, which had backless bench seats but lower sides?

Later I was glad I had decided on the larger craft, in spite of raised blood pressure whenever I had to get back into it, because we hit some alarmingly turbulent seas on the way back, and the four in the little boat spent the whole journey of around an hour baling out, with the water coming in as fast as they were removing it.

 

In spite of these minor problems it was a good trip. Before we headed right out to sea, we passed a small port, where watched an attempt to haul a decrepit fishing boat out of the water using a team of water buffalo. Pearl Island was a small outcrop in the sea of rocks and sand. We snorkelled in the warm, still waters and feasted on tiger prawns before we headed back to Ngapali on stormy seas.

 

The urge to explore was fed by loud, raucous music that drifted over from the village across the sand-strewn road, in an unceasing stream for the whole of one night.  It continued the following morning, and someone told us the village was holding a festival. So, Pat and I decided to find the source of the music. We soon found ourselves a hundred years away from our plush modern resort.

We stepped back in time into sleepy lanes, neat little rush-walled houses in fenced-in gardens, an open-fronted village shop – and the inevitable monastery,  where we ran the music to ground.  Here, in the monastery garden a beauty competition was in full swing. We watched through the fence until we were spotted and hauled inside. A couple of chairs materialised and we were invited to sit and view the proceedings in comfort. The participants were all little girls  - aged from around six to twelve as far as I could make out. Each one in turn sashayed around the makeshift catwalk – a sandy path around the courtyard, while the music bellowed out from an old loudspeaker attached to the monastery building and the monks and other judges watched gravely, making notes. We stayed for a while and then slipped away. A very odd experience.

I visited the village a couple of times more. Struck the first time by the cleanliness of the streets and gardens, I subsequently discovered why. Taking another path back out to the road, I had to cross a wide, moat-like stream. All the village rubbish had been dumped there. It stank to high Heaven – a gas mask would have been appropriate. Clearly there was no sanitation, no rubbish collection and no attempt to use recyclable materials. What a contrast to the exclusive resort where we were staying. I wondered if our rubbish also ended up in the village dump.

 

On the last morning I got up early , made my way through the gradually- stirring village and climbed up to the local pagoda. The view – jungle, ocean, village and the awakening morning was magical. A fitting way to end our stay in Burma.

 

 A few more  impressions of Thandwe area:

 

As a post-script, I’m sad to say that in April this year trouble flared up between the Buddhist Rhakine people and the Muslim Rohingyas of the state. Bloodshed, rape, looting – in short, all the horrors of sectarian violence have been the result. With 75,0000 displaced people and hundreds of deaths it appears Rhakine State is now out of bounds, in spite of a recent ‘fragile calm’.   An acquaintance, scheduled to visit Burma later this year, has told me that their tour has been altered to avoid the area.

 

 

 

Tweet The gorgeous little Moselle town of Cochem is only an hour and a half from Luxembourg by train. And Cochem is a mere 28 Km from Mayen, a somewhat larger town in the Eifel Mountains . Mayen is the twin town of Godalming in Surrey, and as the German teacher at one of its secondary schools in the 1980s, I had my arm twisted, way back in 1982, to start a school exchange between the two towns.

And the rest is history. Mayen has now become a kind of home from home, and my erstwhile exchange teachers, Heinz and Margot, as well as Axel, the young Mayener who became my penultimate German assistant, extended family.

Of course those aren’t their real names. I changed them (for purposes of self-preservation) though I was confident that they would not find their way to my blog. How wrong can you be! Axel not only tracked me down, but then managed to direct Heinz and Margot  to my website, during the very week that I had given them a starring role  (marginally disguised) in my Burma blog. Let this be a lesson to all writers who adhere to the old adage that people never recognise themselves when you base your characters on them. They do!! 

So it was with some trepidation that I alighted from the train in Cochem. Would they exact revenge? What terrors lay in store for me? Would there be a repeat of the time that they forced me onto a strange bicycle that you had to pedal backwards to stop, and made me cycle all the way along the River Lahn to Bad Ems without even the benefit of bikers’ knickers?  Or would they once again drag me up a mountain path, ignoring the minor problem that the path no longer existed so we had to strike out across slippery rocks, hauling ourselves up on saplings, eventually ending up in a farmer’s field and  narrowly avoiding Death by Combined Harvester?

 So how do you make sure your guest is putty in your hands? First get her thoroughly rat-arsed.  Head off to the nearest wine village as soon as she arrives. Instead of going straight back to Mayen from Cochem, we diverted via Winningen,  a picturesque wine village on the Moselle (everything in this area is picturesque, as it happens). 

 

 By the time we got home I’d been softened up. During the following days regular top-ups of the local tipple (Rhine and Moselle wines from the best vineyards – H and M don’t drink plonk) ensured that I was incapable of adding any juicy morsels to my blog while I was there. Incapable, in fact, of putting my mind to anything other than the sheer bliss of being in a beautiful place amongst good friends, enjoying excellent cuisine and superb wines.  Of course  the subtle attempts to punish me did not go unnoticed.  Was it really by accident that we took the long, climbing path to Burg Stolzenfels on the Rhine instead of the short, direct route? 

 The castle has recently been revamped. It houses, among other things, a beautiful painted chapel and some Italianate gardens set around fountains.

 

The hike through the Eifel Mountains in the warmth of a golden evening started off innocently enough,  lovely gentle ramble through heather and erika-emblazoned meadows, scattered Juniper trees and carpets of real wild bilberry bushes. The views were wonderful and the light spectacular.

Just as I was lowering my guard, my intrepid hosts veered off the path and headed through the undergrowth into the deep, dark forest. I followed gamely, ignoring the stinging nettles and brambles that were making mincemeat of my legs. I took my punishment like a woman!

 

If you are as old as I am, you probably also watched the German series ‘Heimat’ written and directed by Edgar Reitz in the 1980s, and since extended.

 

The setting for the series is the Hunsrück area of the Rhineland, which is very near Mayen and the Moselle Valley.  I loved the first series – something deep within me connected to it – maybe tales my mother told about her childhood visits to her uncle  in rural Germany  in the early 20^th century – albeit in the east, rather than the west.  The villages and people felt familiar to me, as though I was revisiting part of my past.

 

The Günderodehaus set high above the town of Oberwesel on the Rhine, was used as a venue in the film. Now it is a rustic café with spectacular views. The menu is limited but the coffee is served in mammoth cups and I gather the wine is excellent – note, I stuck to coffee on this occasion – it went better with the cake!

 

It took some persuasion to convince mein Hosts that a walk into Mayen town centre would be a good way to spend a few hours. It may be boringly familiar to those who live there, but it’s a good two years since I last saw it and I wanted to say hallo. Margot suggested that we should look at the recently opened slate mine in the museum at the Genovevaburg,  the castle at the end of the Marktplatz that overhangs the pretty town.  If you’re ever n Mayen, it’s worth a visit, a most impressive network of tunnels deep under the castle, with a plethora of activities and displays about one of Europe’s largest mines. The views from the top of the castle are wonderful too.

My stay in Germany ended with a return to Cochem to catch the evening train back to Luxemburg. Axel drove us all back to Cochem where we started the day with a  one-hour boat trip on the Moselle.

 

 

 After this we headed to Beilstein a little way down on the other bank of river. It’s one of those picture-book villages, surrounded by steep-sided slopes festooned with neat stripes of grape vines, bulging with bunches of fruit at this time of year.  Beilstein is so sleepy that they don’t have an ATM and refused to accept my new RBS Visa Debit card when I insisted on treating everyone to lunch  No EC sign on the back therefore can’t be genuine. As for credit cards – they didn’t accept these at all. In other circumstances I would have died with embarrassment, since Heinz had to fork out for the bill. Luckily they know me well enough to realise I hadn’t engineered the situation.

 

A corollary to this – I wrote to RBS when I got back insisting that they provide me with a card that was acceptable anywhere on the continent. Today I received a reply, rejecting my complaint because  ‘Germany is a known hotspot where there are quite a few retailers who only accept domestic cards or cards issued in Europe under the EuroCard brand’ but acknowledging that ‘you will have been caused some embarrassment when you were unable to use your card in the restaurant’ and adding that they had credited my account with £25 ‘as a good will gesture’.  The lesson is – never take things lying down. If you have an issue, make your feelings known.

And the toilet-roll holder in the restaurant in Beilstein proved that the Germans DO have a sense of humour (doesn't it?)