Mick Hartley

The Sunday Times magazine has a Travel Issue. Where to go this year? The Maldives perhaps:

My son and daughter are swimming – under the house. I can see them, through the thick glass floor beneath my feet, following a swarm of nibbling butterfly fish along the sea bed. A lone and harmless eagle ray brings up the rear, hoovering the sandy coral bottom for nutrients….

Or Bolivia:

The lake rippled with velvet shades of crimson, fringed by pearls of arctic white borax. Around it hung a mantle of lime-green grasses from which, like a high collar, rose the ashen flanks of Mount Licancabur. Against this iridescent palette of colour stood the llama, sporting an ineffable pout of disdain.

Few venture into this corner of Bolivia….

Or Botswana:

The kill was before first light. The funeral took place that afternoon.

A lioness, returning empty-bellied from a nocturnal prowl in Botswana’s Chobe National Park, spotted a baby elephant separated from its herd in the night and walking uncertainly along a shallow valley.

Her muzzle and pale stomach only inches from the ground…..

Or – why not? – Burma, where, according to Ariel Leve, “little seems to have changed since Kipling’s day”:

I’m not a boat person. Aside from the motion sickness, I don’t like being on something I can’t get off when I want to. I’ll go on a boat as long as it’s docked. Though even that is not enjoyable. It’s like sitting on a porch that sways.

But then came the chance to visit Burma – now Myanmar – to see some of the world’s greatest ancient sights and experience what it’s like to be lost in time. Eleven years ago, the regime ended 40 years’ isolation and opened the country to tourism. Road to Mandalay was a chance to visit a place that has changed little since Kipling rhapsodised about it. There was only one problem: the road to Mandalay isn’t a road; it’s a river. And the trip on offer was a cruise. Cruise people are like dog people, I’d always thought. Fanatical. They travel in packs. I called Orient-Express to discuss.

The journey takes place on a beautifully refurbished river boat that steams at a slow pace up the legendary Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) river, docking daily. There are many opportunities to get off and explore, and the river banks can be seen at all times. I found all this immensely reassuring. So I was off.

Someone from Orient-Express meets me at the airport. The first two nights are to be spent at the Governor’s Residence hotel in Yangon (Rangoon), a magnificent teak mansion with a lotus garden and outdoor pool. At the Kipling Bar, sipping fresh lemonade, I’m anxious about the boat, but there are things that distract me, like the exquisite hotel food. A part of me would be very happy to stay put. It’s so serene.

The next day, I explore the city – the tree-lined streets, the Victorian colonial buildings and the vast golden Shwedagon Pagoda, where eight hairs, said to be Buddha’s, are enshrined. Hundreds of pavilions are encircled by Buddhists offering prayers. No Starbucks, no billboards or celebrity magazines.

Clearly Kim Jong-Il, Mugabe, or indeed Omar al-Bashir, are missing a trick or two here:

The desert rolls on endlessly beneath a sky of a translucent pure blue. Time dissolves in the heat of the sun and the steady rhythm of the camels’ hooves. Is this the 21st Century, or a thousand years ago? It matters not. This is a way of life that goes back, unchanged, for millennia. Here there are no crowds, no deadlines, no newspapers filled with news of man’s inhumanity to man, only the stark beauty of a landscape that looks the same now as it would have looked to the ancient tribes of Kush, on the southern reaches of Tutankhamen’s Egypt.

Our guides, independent tribesmen with a noble spirit that we in the soft West may foolishly mistake for barbarity, fire their rifles in the air in a thrillingly reckless display of high spirits as they lead us into the village where we shall spend the night. The village is almost deserted, save for a few women who welcome us in an emotional display of tears that puts our Western conception of hospitality to shame. Their menfolk, we are informed, have gone on their annual journey across the border to Chad where they trade and indulge their passion for camel racing and pchout, the local beer brewed from the roots of the acacia tree. The women, I feel, are perhaps not unhappy to be rid of them for a while! And do I sense, unspoken, via covert sidelong glances, a certain shy regard for the handsome and dashing Janjaweed with their flashing eyes and uncompromising masculinity? – an easy unselfconscious masculinity of which we in the over-civilised West are now simply incapable.

As I stare up at the stars – so close I feel I could reach out and touch them – and hear the night sounds of the desert mingled with cries that suggest that my hunches about the village women and their secret passions were not so far from the truth, I reflect that these people, though poor by Western standards, lead lives that in many ways are far richer than ours….

[Mick Hartley travelled to Darfur with the Western Sudan National Tourist Board]