Royal Beach Motel Ngapali

... any tourists and those that are here are all staying in the same hotel/resort. There are some Myanmar tourists here though and, although they think we are mad for trying to get a sun tan, (and going into the sea with just shorts on), they are friendly enough and I end up playing beach football with a group of local guys for a couple of days. My time here runs out and I head off back to Yangon for a couple of days before I fly home. This is probably the last sun I will see for a while.

... my subversive ideas? Perhaps they are a plant. Westerners want to feel good about letting the people know they are on their side. This is a safe way for us to feel good and to keep us away from the population at large? Pretty outlandish, but at the same time, I have heard enough stories for my mind to be focused on these things. The next morning we bought delicious fruits (Avocados and Bananas) for the train ride to Mandalay.

... Resort was open it sure was quiet and little visited. Nevertheless the road passed through a nice wooded area of the Lan Thar village and when I reached the resort it's a pleasant, quiet vantage point at the far north end of the beach. Quiet because the resort has been abandoned for 4 years. I stood there quietly chuckly, taking a break, soaking in the serenity of the place, snapped a couple pictures of the long ago abandoned buildings, and noted ...

... Fresh seafood. Amazing sunsets. Cool fishing villages and markets. Quiet streets. Very generous, kind people. And still relatively untouched by tourism.  I finally added a few photos and it has been almost a year since my visit. I plan to come back to this place again in 2009...maybe for my birthday again. 

... Danijela had, in the three days she'd been in Ngapali, hooked up with an American couple, Suzanne and John. Now, on my first day in Ngapali, we celebrated Suzanne's birthday at Bamboo (with a wonderful chocolate birthday cake) and during the conversation it turned out, they'd met an English guy, who lived in Malaysia, was an underwater phtographer and was called... Matt. This bloke is everywhere!

... There are tons of local restaurants with excellent seafood for next to nothing. Two giant prawns would set you back $3.50, 15 medium shrimps, a whopping $2.75 with crab for about the same price. Great food, incredible beach... no wonder we keep extending our stay here. 3 nights turned into 7!

... pain in our hearts. Completely exhausted now we walk back to town, to see if we can get a bus out of hear. Stopping at a monastery so S. can wash, I fall asleep on the ground for an hour. When we make our way slowly to town, a woman starts talking to S. What are our plans? After we explain her, we insists on coming to her house to rest before we do anything else. The change to be with local (non-monk) people for a bit sounds really nice. We stay. As a good luck ...

... was a treat - the fresh barracuda centrepiece was excellent, but one small charge included appetizers, soup, three vegetables, dessert and coffee. We must have chosen well. We arrived early and were first to dine, but 40 minutes later they were lining up. The other spots we passed on the way home were pretty much deserted. Just off the shore a bit south of us was a lovely restaurant on a small peninsula. At high tide it became ...

... venant de Bagan, il faut s'arreter a Pyay, y passer une journee a attendre et reprendre ce fameux bus le soir. Bref, on sommes allees dans un petit hotel adorable juste sur le bord de la plage et je dois dire que ca fait vraiment du bien! Comme on est au bord de la mer, on peut manger du poisson grille, ce qui change de leur friture a tout va!

Rob and Anjali now board an Air Mandalay flight to the coastal town of Thandwe close to Ngapali Beach. The Lin Thar EWWWW lodge As soon as our flight landed, coming in straight over the ocean, we knew that our remaining time in Burma was going to be chilling out on the spectacularbeaches we saw from the plane. Ngapali Beach is pretty small - when we got off the plane there were representatives from six hotels waiting at the gate to whisk us away to their resorts ...