Interesting Places in Myanmar

Southern Part of Myanmar

Dawei

The coast is dotted with islands including the Heinze group, the Maung-Magan group and the Mergui or Mergui Archipelago, which comprises more than 800 beautiful and attractive islands.

A port of medium importance and tropical seaside town, 384 miles south of Yangon. The Maungmagan beach is now being developed and upgraded is just 8 miles northwest and is famous for delicious seafood. Native speak Myanmar language but with a strong dialect, which is similar to Mergui. The most venerated pagodas are the Shin Motehti Pagoda, a few miles south of the town, Shin Datweh Pagoda in the north and Shin Maw Pagoda on the Dawei promontory. A 243-foot long reclining Buddha image occupies the Lawka Tharaphu Pagoda. In the 18th Century a group of Dawei people known as Inthas or Sons of the Lake, migrated to Inle to avoid the continual conflicts between the Myanmar and Thais. Thus the Inthas were appear in Inle Lake in the southern Shan State. Capital of Tanintharyi Division is the southern most administrative region in the country.

Kawthaung

Kawthaung, the southern most town in Myanmar (800 km from Yangon and 2,000 km from the country's most northern tip), formerly known as Victoria Point, is one of the entry ports into Myanmar and is only separated from Thailand by a broad estuary in the Pakchan River. Across the river is the border town of Ranong, Thailand. Ranong is 120 miles North of Phuket. Visitors from Ranong could take a 30 minutes boat trips to Kawthaung for sightseeing and shopping. There are regular flights from Yangon to Kawthaung. Entry visas, valid for 28 days, and Border Passes are issued at Kawthaung. The main business of Kawthaung is trade with Thailand, fishing, rubber and cashew nuts. Most Kawthaung residents speak Burmese and Thai. Kawthaung's bustling waterfront is lined with teashops, stores and shops arranging boat charters to Thailand for visitors and traders. Duty Free Shops and a few restaurants in the Burmese palace replica building is located in front of the Kawthaung harbor. A huge bronze statue of King Bayintnaung, one of the great Myanmar kings, out-fitted in full battle regalia with brandishing a sword stands at the crest of a hill on the cape. A spectacular sea and island view from a hilltop pagoda known as the Three Mile Pagoda is located in a fishing village five kilometers north of town.

Myeik

The Myeik archipelago situated on the southern Taninthayi Division of Myanmar (formerly known as Tennesarim coast of Burma. Around and on the east Myeik, there are many valuable tin mines, oil palm plantation, and rubber plantation and evergreen forest. On the Andaman Sea, many valuable Pearl breeding and fishing beds can observe in the sea. Pearl Island is the source of high quality pearls, and fishing is the traditional business along the coastal sea and islands. There are about 804 spotted islands scattered across the blue sea along the Taninthayi coast and the city is on the island in the mouth of Tannintharyi River.

Tha Htay Kyun

Where Andaman Club is located Zadakale ( St Luke ) Island, across the Andaman sea. ThaHtay Kyun has beaches but it coast is too rocky for swimming. Can visit to the Islands nearby in this archipelago to explore the under water coral garden where nobody had never been. The Islands nearby are the island of Dawei fisherman inhabited for many years known as the Salons or sea Gypsies who sail around the islands.

The Salones (or) the Sea-Gypsies

Three thousands Moken sea nomads still navigate through the Mergui Archipelago, composed of eight hundred islands, filled with natural beauty and shrouded in mystery, still protected from the influence of the outside world. The Moken are the last remaining population that has a vision of a possible future and of an elsewhere based on an ideal society linked to their myths. These nomads have found the means to survive, both socially, economically and culturally; they live their unique way of life in an awe-inspiring environment made of coral reefs, mangroves, primeval forests and innumerable species of animals, both real and imaginary. Life and death roam the seas together; the past and the present co-exist on good terms. The Moken are a people of Austronesian origin. Though they are held in contempt by most people, they have managed to resist integration, due to their attachment to a powerful ideology that remains concealed behind their impoverishment and unfailing singularity. Lucky observers will see flotillas composed of boats with carved out notches, open « mouths » that plunge into the sea for their daily consumption, shadows that fly over the horizon, a trace soon erased by the intense greenery of the vegetation that falls into the sea without transition.

These boats, kabang, are the evanescent souls of a forgotten world, always present but hardly ever visible. This nomad population remains united by their cultural awareness linked to a symbolic technology well-adapted to the environment, and incarnated in their boats which represent the human body. These boats are the expression of an ideology based on non-accumulation and non-participation rather than the present day liberal myth of perpetual growth and enrichment. This ideology found in their myths, protects them from outside influences that find justifications for their own cultural and technical values. The nomads honour poverty and non-violence, considered as important weapons for ensuring ethnic survival. The impossibility of learning dictated by their myths protects them from external influences and justifies a cultural and technical balance. Their cultural specificities and accumulation of a body of knowledge has caused the Moken to become the essential intermediaries in the process of economic development and of the management of the archipelago by the Myanmar nation.

The nomads tell the story of how they became a united population because of a mythical condemnation which obliged them to become eternal wanderers. This has led them to lead their free way of life. Thanks to their beliefs expressed in their religious crafts with a provocative and unsettling aesthetic power on the beholders, they affirm their peculiarity: an anthropomorphic spirit world, carved altars, painted airplane models, fantastic pythons erected in cemeteries, etc. But above all, the Moken are the guardians of a rich oral literature, a reminder of the epic acts of bravery accomplished in the past and the memory of a region that seems to have disappeared within the borders of the known world, in the limbs of a history that one would like to forget. The power of Moken speech enables each of them to communicate with the spirits, the divinities, their heroes and ancestors and by this means to relive their epic past of the construction of Moken identity.

The nomads remain the veritable soul of a magical environment, composed of a palette of colours, perfumes and an inexhaustible reserve of sensations, discoveries and surprises. They made it possible for us to discover all the beauty of alterity, far from the noise of a world caught in the snares of multinational administrations. The Moken offer the image of a possible alternative world based on freedom, with a minimum of material goods, equality and a life within the rhythm of dreams.

Text by D. Jacques Ivanoff