Captain Greybeard

When the Beatles sang Eight Days A Week, they took their inspiration for the title from a punishing work schedule; they should have visited Burma (Myanmar) where, according to the Buddhist calendar, there actually are eight days in every week. True, two of them are Wednesday, which is divided into separate 12-hour days in order to tally with the eight planets that form such an important part of the religion and its beliefs. But eight there are, and nowhere are they more apparent than at the simply magnificent Shwedagon Pagoda, the largest, richest, and most sacred of all the Buddhist [...]

Visiting India is not a spur-of-the-moment thing. You have to plan in advance. To start with, visas must be sorted out beforehand, and every passenger on board mv Voyager had obtained pictures of the peculiar size and shape required by Indian authorities and paid £100 and more for the requisite piece of paper to be stuck inside their passports. Filling in the forms is easier these days because they can be completed online, but they still require all sorts of unnecessary information such as spouse's mother's maiden name, and a gazetteer of countries visited in recent years. In my case, [...]

Tucked up in the back of a tuk-tuk is a great way to explore a new city. And then again it isn't. I'm spending Christmas and the New Year on board Voyages of Discovery's mv Voyager, and I will be making a welcome return to the city of Yangon, or Rangoon, in Myanmar (or Burma). We left behind a chilly London and flew overnight from Heathrow to Colombo, Sri Lanka, where the ship was spending two nights. Fully refreshed by the second day, we left Voyager temporarily to take a gentle stroll around the Fort district just beyond the port [...]