NGAPALI BEACH

Myanmar's Great Sun-And-Sand Destination Meets a New Sort of Traveler

I noticed the guy long before we met. A gray-haired accented foreigner with a baseball-style bamboo hat with a tiny Swiss flag sticking out the top. At the Thandwe Airport, where foreigners looking for 'escape' flies in for a few days to the Ngapali Beach resorts. Locals were meeting him warmly with embraces, as he loudly barked out praise and salutations. Turns out, the long-retired self-confessed 'millionaire' from Zurich is doing something special here, and in other needy places: overseeing charitable projects himself. He's built schools in Cambodia, dams and 'houses for the aged' in Myanmar -- he's done projects in Slovakia too. 'Never give money. Find out what they need and get it for them,' he told me frantically afoot at a leafy, laid-back squid restaurant on the Ngapali Beach road, where we met the day after arriving by plane. 'If there are 37 students that need 37 books, a school and a teacher, I arrange it. But never just hand over money -- it'll end up in the wrong pockets.'

It all started when he broke away from a tour group, years ago, and met some children begging, and after getting to know them, an eight-year relationship was formed. They’re now at a university with $300 in a savings account (which he started with $30). Breaking out of conversation, he would walk away suddenly to harass, in a good-naturedly way, a restaurant owner, whom he's known for eight years ('you do nothing but sit around!'). Returning back to me, teetering foot to foot, to explain more about why visiting Myanmar is good ('we cannot change the government, but we MUST help the people'), and a bit about his life ('I had a dream at 30 to retire at 55, and I did'). What exactly is it that he does now? 'There is no name for it. Well, other than Just Do It.' Mr. Hansruedi Schreiber is 69.

Ngapali Beach doesn't usually bring this sort in. A handful of $150-and-way-up resorts dot the 3km beach, like the newish Aureum Palace (run by Myanmar leader's son-in-law -- don't go) or the startling luxurious Amata (with $420 bungalows with satellite TVs in an area with electricity access only a blip of the day). Some visitors bee-line here after arriving Myanmar, like the American couple complaining out loud how hard it is 'to pay a bill' -- must be newcomers. The beach is lovely -- facing the turquoise Bay of Bengal (or 'Bagel' in one misprint of a local brochure), and occasional ox-cart tracks in the mostly empty gold-sand beach, as local fishers and hay-movers still prefer the beach for intra-village transport to the one-lane, seriously dodgy road. At dusk, it's nice to listen to the chugging motors from a stream of fishermen heading to sea, where they soon dot the darkened horizon with lights -- looking like a skyline over in India. They're squid fishermen, using the light to attract 'sea monkeys' and other assorted critters that will make up the menu for the $2/plate restaurants the next day.

Somehow, in an impoverished country with more than its fair share of unrest, it just feels a little odd sticking around an insulated, luxury resort like this for long. The main reason to come is to meet and talk with locals that have so long been shut off from the world. Unless, of course, you're here to build a dam.