MYANMAR - Dawei and Mawlamyine

We approached the Thai border, having done some research on the crossing and knowing there would be a 6km ‘no mans land’ to pass through before the Myanmar border guard. Diana made things easier for everybody by losing her departure card from her passport, so we had a good 10 minute discussion as the man seemed to not understand she just didn’t have it. After filling in a new one, and my passport sailing through with all the necessary paperwork completed, we were technically in ‘nowhere’.

Goodbye Thailand!

As soon as we got through someone asked if we wanted a lift to the other side. Not fancying a 6km walk with all our bags, we said yes, and after a while he looked at us with a very apologetic face saying his car was too full, so we started our walk, thumb extended hoping for the best. After around 3km of walking a lovely tarmacked road, being ignored by everyone apart from people driving in the wrong direction, we were lucky enough that someone in a pickup stopped. Naturally cautious that we may be illegally trying to enter the country, he wanted to look over our passports, visas, everything. After being sufficiently pleased we were allowed in the country, we dumped our bags in the back and hopped in the cab.

After a 2km drive up a dirt track we would have completely missed had we not been picked up, as the tarmac road was still going off somewhere into the distance, we arrived at a passport check. The man checked the passports thoroughly, asking where we were going. Replying with ‘Dawei’ seemed to be the correct answer, and we hopped back into the pickup towards the border town of Htee Khee.

The pickup driver dropped us off in the middle of a dusty car park surrounded by various shacks. He pointed over to one shack in particular and told us to go get our passport stamped here. We thanked him again, and hopped out to grab our bags. Only he seemed to have forgotten we’d had bags and started driving off. Cue the scene of us running along behind a pickup truck trying to fling our bags out of the back, trying to signal to him we needed him to stop. Luckily we succeeded in retrieving all of our belongings.

We headed over to the allocated ‘passport shack’ and were greeted by a room full of men, young and old, sitting, smoking and watching TV. Football to be exact, two British teams, although I won’t pretend I bothered remembering which. After a few moments, a couple of people begrudgingly got up and went behind the desk where they asked for our passports. After some photocopying, checking, writing, stamping and once again asking if we were going to Dawei, we were done here and had the next task of finding a taxi to take us the 5 hour journey to the town we were definitely expected to go to. Meanwhile, everyone else resumed their post of watching the football.

We headed down a small incline to what looked a bit like a town, and asked at the first shack populated with people we could find if they could arrange for a taxi to Dawei. They repeated Dawei to me (they seem to love talking about this place) and once we were all confirmed we were on the same wavelength, they gestured for us to sit down. We placed our bags behind us and took in the surroundings. In this split second, our bags had been whisked away and placed in a vehicle, we had no idea which but we carried on waiting, assuming we’d be repatriated with them soon enough. About 10 minutes later, they asked if we had had our passports stamped already, which we confirmed we’d done. At this point, we were pointed in the direction of the vehicle containing our bags and took a seat.

Our driver eventually turned up, except he seemed to have some number of errands to perform first, it took around 30 minutes, 10 different stops around the town and one random other man in the passenger seat before we set off in the correct direction. The road, well, didn’t really exist. A dirt track took the place of the road at first, where our driver managed to slam a wheel into a rock at around 50kph. Fractionally more terrified than we had been before this occurrence, we travelled for another 45 minutes or so before stopping at a café, where although both hungry and thirsty we couldn’t buy anything as we had none of the local currency.

Our driver set his mind to replacing the wheel he’d buckled, which started off how it would carry on, with him trying to tighten the wheel bolts to get them off rather than loosen them. Someone came over and stopped him and showed him the correct way to turn them. Next he placed the jack in a precarious place under the wheel, and sure enough, once the wheel was removed, the jack slipped and the front of the car plummeted. Fortunately no limbs were in the way, but this now caused a new issue in getting the car back up. We soon got an idea of how helpful the community is here though, as they soon came through from the back with massive lengths of wood and bric-a-brac to lever it back up. I guess they were planning to build a shed or something?

Whoops.

Meanwhile, an old man was walking around in his traditional Longyi, or to us in the west, skirt. He’d had enough of all this, converted his top into a bra by twisting it up so that his rotund belly was on display, made himself a betel nut (a concoction regularly chewed by locals here, consisting of a leaf wrapped around a nut, tobacco and various other things. Similar to paan in India, responsible for many red stains all over the floor where people spit out their progress) and sat about playing with a jack rather than helping. I briefly popped over to help out with the car, but there were already plenty of them and they all spoke the same language. Plus, bits of wood were snapping left right and centre, I was happy out of it.

Eventually they manage to get the wheel back on the car and we were off. It took another good hour or two before we were back on a nice smooth road surface though, and after passing through about 3 passport checkpoints and our driver paying tolls to several people on the way, we were finally in Dawei.

View from the road on the way to Dawei

We asked the driver to take us to a cheap hotel. Unfortunately we didn’t know what to really expect here – we’d been warned that the cost of accommodation would be a lot more than we were expecting, but we didn’t really know what that meant. We arrived at the first hotel, which, for what we’d been used to, didn’t look very cheap. Diana went in to find out the price, and immediately came back out asking the driver to take us somewhere else, as they’d asked for $80 a night. The driver took us to another place, when Diana realizes he may have actually said $18 and wasn’t sure. We pop into the next place, they’re asking for $25 which is better, but not ideal. We asked our driver if he could take us back to the first place so we could check the price again, but he didn’t really understand English, so took us to another random hotel. Eventually we found one for $20 and couldn’t be bothered to look around anymore, so we holed up here just before it started to get dark.

The hotel itself looked a lot more impressive than the room. A grandiose entrance, doormen, fancy marble everywhere. Once we got to the room however, it was a basic, just-about-clean-enough-to-live-for-a-couple-of-nights affair. We ditched our things and headed off for the first order of business, getting local currency.

Enquiring at the desk where the nearest ATM was, we head around the corner and get our first experience of a town in Myanmar. Honestly, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Although on the drive here we’d been through a few villages, this seemed quite modern. A department store, flashy neon signs everywhere, pavements… I felt it would have been a little less advanced. However, this was a town close to a border, so we’d see. We got to the ATM and went through the usual wonderment of whether we’d have our card blocked, whether it would work, and whether we’d be trying to cope without any cash for a while. The screen letting us know the maximum amount we could withdraw was slightly more over the top than we were used to, as we were able to withdraw a maximum of 300k. I’ve never withdrawn 300k of a currency from a cash machine before. Luckily, we were allowed our money, and it was provided in 5k notes, clean and crisp. Each note valued at approx. £3 each, we now had a small brick of notes to worry about, as well as a ridiculous amount of dollars. And the dollars weren’t even allowed to be folded or they were totally useless to us.

Money money money!

Next stop, food. On the way we passed by a mobile phone shop and figured, as we may need to call some hotels in advance, we’d get a SIM card. This is when we first realised how much of a language barrier we may be experiencing here, as trying to ask for a SIM card almost entirely required miming of putting something into my phone and making a phone call. A SIM was produced, exactly what we needed, and she held up 3 fingers to show it cost 3000. Working this out to be under £2, we figured we’d go for it, and got handed two green pieces of paper apparently worth 1000 each. This money was already baffling us. Transaction completed, we walk around to try and find somewhere to eat.

We found a street place which had a cart with various pots of food. After looking over the options for a while and realising a vegetarian option wasn’t happening, we pointed at a couple of things and rice and waited to see what we got. And what we got was an incredibly oily, spicy chicken something with rice. Not entirely inedible, but not the finest cuisine we’ve had on our entire journey so far.

The following day we got up early for a luxury we hadn’t had with any hotels so far, inclusive breakfast. I’d pretty much forgotten about this though, so I was confused why Diana was in such a hurry to leave the room when we had no real plan until she reminded me. We got there later than everyone else had been so we had the room to ourselves, and were brought a plate of two bananas, a water jug, and after a while, some sort of onion soup. Not exactly a breakfast of kings, but we had it anyway, and got our first introduction to the wonders of coffee in Myanmar. The jug of hot water was accompanied by a number of sachets, which were labelled as ‘3 in 1’. This was a combination of coffee, sugar and creamer, in various different ratios – a ‘just add water’ affair. Well, once we’d got over the initial shock of how sweet these are, the addiction set in. Different brands used different ratios of the three, but one thing was for certain, they weren’t healthy, but definitely a bit of a boost.

Breakfast?

After this, we had a look around some of the markets and got an idea of what the locals were like. One thing was for certain, people definitely weren’t used to seeing Westerners in the markets. After getting plenty of practice at the Burmese for Hello (“Min Ga La Bar”, took us a fair few attempts to remember it properly, along with Thank You – “Chee zoo tin bar day”) we concluded there wasn’t a great deal of things to do in this town, but at this stage I also needed my next rabies shot, so we thought we’d check out where the nearest hospital was. We had little trouble finding it, however it wasn’t the greatest condition ever, and the easiest way we could tell it was a hospital was to look up on the balcony of the run down building, seeing people on stretchers with IV’s attached to the supporting columns. I’ve not been to many outdoor hospitals before, but we figured the shot could wait until Yangon.

Walking around from here, we’d heard there was a pagoda nearby. This would be our first of many experiences of pagodas, so filled with childish optimism we headed off to see it. It seemed to be closed, and as soon as we arrived it began to rain quite heavily, so we took shelter under the covered area we were in. After a while, a man opened the door from the inside and invited us in rather than sitting outside and we got our own private viewing, they turned on all the lights and we sat in front of a huge statue of Buddha for a while until the rain died down. After this, we headed for a nearby tea shop, as we’d heard these were very common around Myanmar, and ordered one of their finest 3 in 1s. Along with this came a separate jug of Chinese green tea, which we found was free and unlimited, and seemed to be common to every teahouse and restaurant we went to.

Our own private viewing

Diana and her private Buddah moment

Local teahouse

On our way back we found another pagoda, this one a much larger area than the last. In fact, it even offered free Wi-Fi, bizarrely enough. I presume for all the monks on their smartphones. We spent a while looking around, when a tuktuk full of school children arrived. All looking at us, smiling and laughing and somewhat confused, a few of them approached us, poking Diana’s white skin and trying to pull out my arm hair, as if a couple of aliens had just beamed down in front of them and they couldn’t quite work them out. Confident we were humans in the end, they let us go, and we continued on to our next task of booking a bus ticket to the next destination, Mawlamyine.

You're going to see a lot of these...

It wouldn’t be too difficult to find a bus there – there was an entire area devoted to booking bus tickets through various different companies. After working out it would take around 10 hours to travel, we decided we’d get an early bus, 5am to be exact. We then had the option of air-con or non for about £2 difference, so decided we’d take the air conditioning option and asked at our hotel if they could arrange us a rickshaw to the bus station for the following morning.

After a disgustingly early wake up of around 3am, we shuffled our stuff out to the front where the guy on the reception called up a rickshaw driver. Sitting outside and watching rickshaws driving up and down with nobody in, we figured we probably should have just hailed one down, but we hung on for a while until eventually they turned up. Lobbing everything into the back, we were taken to a very dark bus depot, and before we were allowed entry a police officer requested our passports. We got the feeling we would be getting this a lot. Asking where we were going, how long we’d been here, what our purpose in Myanmar was and what colour underwear we had on that day, he was sufficiently satisfied and asked someone who I assume was a budding police officer to show us to our bus. Through a small labyrinth of buses we were taken, and we eventually ended up in a dingy little shed with a few seats. We handed our ticket over, everything checked out and, apart from the inevitable power cut, we were on our way to Mawlamyine.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the smoothest ride ever, so catching up on a few Z’s wasn’t happening very easily. I managed to get some for a little while, and Diana who was awake a lot longer informed me I’d missed the coach turning into a local bus, filling up with school children taking them some of the way to school in the morning. Eventually, many windy roads and unfinished roads later, we arrived. We also realized that we had booked the AC bus, but it seemed it was just the same bus, only the left hand side didn’t have vents above them. This seemed preferable, as the bus was freezing cold, and as we were wearing clothes to deal with 30 degree heat outside, a bit of a shock to us. But eventually, we arrived without too much of a problem.

As per usual, we got off and were amassed by tuktuk drivers, all hoping for a fare. As soon as they spotted us, and the colour of our skin I’d assume, suddenly we were prime targets and everyone else pretty much ignored. I’d assume we were a fair game for 10x the usual price. We told them a guest house we’d found the name of before we arrived, Breeze, and we were on our way.

Similarly to before, Diana hopped off and poked her head in to ask the price. Only $14 a night, bargain (for Myanmar, anyway). This being the first time we had received change for our dollars, we had to be careful that we were receiving nice, crisp and clean notes. After inspecting them all, only one wasn’t, a $10 note which we tried to swap with him but he said it was fine. We thought it wouldn’t be, but it didn’t bother me too much as we’d be able to spend it in another country. We grabbed our bags and were shown the rooms. They weren’t exactly spacious, more like cubicles with just enough room for a bed and a desk fan, but it would do. The entire place gave the impression of sleeping in a ships galley, somewhat claustrophobic but good enough. The staff were incredibly friendly and spoke good English though.

We headed out into the world to find a tea house, and to do a walk that was in our guide book that supposedly introduced us to a number of things in the local area. We found a teashop just up the road en route, where we found out that it wasn’t just the coffee you could get in 3 in 1 form, but tea also. An odd, sugary affair, with what was effectively coffeemate added. Not as nice, but still very drinkable and reminiscent of the sweetness of Indian chai. After this, we headed on the way to where we’d start the walk, spotting a male Great Dane in Ruby style colours, with such blue eyes we initially thought he was blind. Very friendly and obedient, much unlike his distant British bitch cousin!

After being told to lay down. Much more obedient than other Great Danes I know of.

We’d barely started our route at all, before we were accosted by a midget. A friendly midget, who I took the benefit of the doubt that he just wanted a chat rather than to try and sell us something, although he was a motorcycle tuktuk driver. We went and sat with him, and spent a good 45 minutes chatting about Myanmar, English and, mostly, religion and Buddhism. Apparently, he’d tried almost every religion to see which worked for him, and ended up at Buddhism, as he believed that it was the most reasonable for him. He used several analogies, for instance, if you are hanging from a cliff, you can call for Jesus to come and help you, or Shiva or Ganesh, but they won’t come. Buddhism is for helping yourself. If you can’t help yourself, nobody else can. It somewhat made sense, but I’m still as unreligious as I was prior to the conversation. He started going through some photos of foreigners on his phone he’d spoken to, when we found out the answer to an age old question. And the answer is, yes. We do all look the same to Asian people. Because he brought up a photo of a random white girl, and started exclaiming ‘Look! Your twin! Exactly the same!’ to Diana. Absolutely no similarity we could see at all, but he was absolutely convinced. So don’t worry everyone, it’s not racist, everyone looks the same.

We eventually broke free, although we had his phone number in case we wanted to go to see some of the nearby sites. We then followed the route, going past some interesting sites and trying some of the local food and drinks along the way, such as a deep fried pancake (Roti, really) with sugar. The general theme here is that nothing at all is healthy. Nothing. Nada. Sugar and oil are staple foods and no mistake. Along the way we came to a pagoda which overlooked the entire city, a Christian church and ended up in a park with a children’s playground and many families playing.

Tasty, but not exactly nutricious

A church in Mawlamyine

Church interior

View around Mawlamyine

We headed for dinner, a place called Grandma and Grandpa with a logo of an old man and woman, where apparently some of their profits go towards looking after the local elderly. We had arrived in the middle of a huge football match, I believe between Myanmar and Thailand, and almost every person had their eyes glued to a screen on the wall. The food was okay, and we returned back to the guest house to find they had converted the reception area into a football viewing area also, where mostly women were watching and getting incredibly passionate about the results. I believe this was a repeat showing though, as people were going up and down the road on motorbikes, most of them sounding drunk and waving Myanmar flags around, which was odd as Thailand won the match.

Just like being at the pub when a games on, only with more Burmese.

The owner of the guest house approached us about visiting a nearby island, called Ogre Island. For $15 each we would have a tour of the island and its villages, lunch and so on. Seemed like a good deal, they needed at least 4 people for it to be viable, and they had 3, so we said we’d go for it. We handed over $30, the $10 note being the scruffy one they’d handed us that morning, and they told us they couldn’t take that note as it wasn’t good condition. I informed them we wouldn’t have this note had they not given us it. They reluctantly accepted it back and we headed to bed.

Setting our alarm early for breakfast and the trip, we got a knock on the door as we were getting ready, saying it wouldn’t be possible as the couple who were going to go didn’t want to pay. It was impossible, he repeated maybe 6 times. We accepted that to be the case, and headed to breakfast, being refunded our money in Kyat instead of Dollars and confusing the entire issue. At breakfast we ended up chatting for a while with some of the other people there and decided we’d leave for Yangon this day, getting the 1pm bus. We went for dinner at a nearby South Indian restaurant to see how it compared, receiving something akin to a Thali, but not quite. Joining us at our meal was a four legged, long tailed creature, running around the floor, the first time we’d had the pleasure to have a mouse for company whilst we ate, but probably not the last.

Unfortunately for us wasting the time away, we asked at 12pm if we could get a lift to the bus station, only to be told the bus was at 12pm and not 1pm. After quickly arranging us a ticket, the taxi driver took us to a place the bus would stop further along its route, and we hopped on, the last two empty seats. We played it a little too fine really, but the bus was nice and provided us blankets and neck pillows. We were on our way to our next stop, Yangon.

I feel preeeettttyyyy...