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This is a fascinating country in all sorts of ways and seems to be most popular with European and Japanese tourists, some Australians of course, but they are everywhere.
Since childhood Burma has been a romantic and exotic place for me. It was impossible to grow up in the Australia of the 1950’s and not be familiar with that great Australian bass-baritone Peter Dawson’s rendition of Rudyard Kipling’s 'On the Road to Mandalay' recorded two decades or so earlier:
Come you back to Mandalay
Where the old flotilla lay
Can't you hear their paddles chunking
From Rangoon to Mandalay
On the road to Mandalay
Where the flying fishes play
And the Dawn comes up like thunder
out of China 'cross the bay
The song went Worldwide in 1958 when Frank Sinatra covered it with a jazz orchestration, and ‘a Burma girl’ got changed to ‘a Burma broad’; ‘a man’ to ‘a cat’; and ‘temple bells’ to ‘crazy bells’.
It was raining in the mountains on Easter Saturday.
We'd decided to take a couple of days break in the Blue Mountains and do some walking. But on Saturday it poured. In the morning we walked two kilometres from Katoomba to more up-market and trendy Leura for morning coffee and got very wet.
After a train journey to Mount Victoria and back to dry out and then lunch in the Irish Pub, with a Cider and Guinness, we decided against another soaking and explored the Katoomba antique stores and bookshops instead. In one I found and bought an unread James Bond book. But not by the real Ian Fleming.
Ian Fleming died in 1964 at the young age of fifty-six and I'd read all his so I knew 'Devil May Care' was new. This one is by Sebastian Faulks, known for his novel Birdsong, 'writing as Ian Fleming' in 2008.
Today, with good cause, Adolf Hitler is the personification of evil.
Yet without him my parents may never have married and I certainly would not have been conceived in a hospital where my father was recovering from war injuries.