Dawei Part 4: at The beach

This beach on the Dawei peninsula is a very "nice spot", as my parents-in-law used to say, with their broad Kentish accents. 1.5km of hard sand, perfect water temperature, excellent body-surfing waves. There are thousands of entertaining, high-legged crabs with white front pincers like the gloves on traffic police, who scuttle up or down the beach when you approach and live in holes in the sand. (There are also tiny sand flies that bite you imperceptibly when you walk on the beach, leaving you covered in red welts you have no memory of getting - and which itch for days afterwards, but oh well, you can't have everything!) 

One of the more entertaining parts of our time on the beach was watching Geoff endlessly chasing crabs trying to corner one to get a photo. They move fast!

Sometimes a narrow wooden fishing boat, maybe 10-15 metres long, would chug across the bay beyond the waves. It could have up to a dozen guys on, all standing up precariously, none doing any obvious fishing. The next bay along, sheltered at one end, had more boats and a young lad with a net, fishing off what looked like a large piece of blue plastic.

At night you could see the lights of thirty or so Thai fishing boats out at sea. The Thai companies do lucrative (for both sides) deals with the Burmese government for fishing rights, leaving the local fishermen, with their tiny boats and no way of fishing at night, in serious danger of losing  their livelihoods.

Closer to shore, the one-bedroom bungalows at the guesthouse, with their bamboo-woven walls and thatched roofs (all made locally), were basic but comfortable, with enough electricity to charge your computer, and a bathroom with running water. There was a deck to sit out and admire the view. The food was delicious.

The second afternoon a monk came and conducted prayers with a dozen or so women from the village who materialised in the restaurant. There was great excitement as it was the first time a monk had come to the beach. There were offerings and chanting and a bottle of energy drink and a toilet roll... And then the monk lit up a cigarette, which was slightly surprising, as I thought Buddhism frowned on smoking.

Lots of village children accompanied their mums and played on the beach, but didn't go near the water.

Did I like it here? asked a young trendy-looking Burmese student, visiting the beach for the first time with a group of friends from Dawei. His voice had a touch of incredulity. He was studying English at university and had wandered over to where I was sitting to have a chat and practise his language skills. 

I liked it a lot, I said. It was peaceful and beautiful. 

But there is only one shop, he said, pointing to the restaurant. And I can't drink beer there. (The guesthouse hasn't been able to get an alcohol licence either, although there are a few beers hidden up on ice in the jungle for thirsty foreigners.) The student and his friends were heading off to find somewhere more congenial, he said.

It is hard to imagine that anyone would not find this place amazing, but I suppose it's all about expectations. Peter confirmed it's hard to get staff prepared to live at his strip of paradise, which they see as the back of beyond. (There's no internet, for a start.) While foreigners begged to stay and work for board and lodging (utterly illegal), he had to pay above market rates to tempt locals. The fabulous chef was only prepared to stay, he said, because after four years of trying for a baby while working in various cities in Thailand and Myanmar, his wife had got pregnant within days of arriving at the beach. 

Some people in the nearest village (about 15 minutes away), Peter said, particularly older people, had never even visited the beach. They couldn't see the point.

Still, that distaste has the huge advantage for spoilt westerners of keeping the beach in relatively pristine condition - apart from areas where tides and storms have deposited the ubiquitous jandals (flip-flops) and plastic bottles. 

The Burmese, like the Cubans and to a lesser extent the Greeks, have a lively disregard for protecting their environment. So much so that in 2016, a fire fuelled by the huge amount of rubbish dumped at the lively local beach haunt of Maung Magan, destroyed 16 beachside restaurants and cafes. Sixteen. 

Long may the isolation last here, though I'm not that optimistic.

Another beautiful sunset

Part 3: An unexpectedly tortuous journey to the beach

There is very little development on the white-sand-beach-strewn Dawei Peninsula. For a start, the Burmese traditionally don't "do" sand and surf, so a beach with waves is pretty much a hot, wasted space between the village and the fishing ground. And tourism hasn't taken off - a function of tortuous government regulations, the fact Myanmar has only recently emerged from 50 years of insulation and nationalisation, and foreigners being very restricted as to where they are allowed to go. The result is that hardly any tourists go to the peninsula, and although a few hotels/beach bungalow developments have been built, or at least started, in various idyllic locations, almost all are stalled or closed awaiting the granting of a licence. 

Still, our friendly travel agent said there were a couple of places to stay, and booked us into one - a German-Burmese joint venture. We'd find an unspoilt beach, good food, clean cabins, and friendly people, she said. A The 2/3-hour or so journey there by motorbike would take us through interesting villages and that would be a highlight too, she said. There was one caveat - the road was unpaved for the last hour or so, and could be a bit bumpy. But we'd manage fine.

Which we did. The villages were interesting. We saw rice being harvested and we got a close-up look at the miles and miles of rubber plantations that still make up a good sector of the Burmese economy. Each tree (and they are little spindly things - not how I imagined at all) has its spiral of cutaway bark, its little spout and a cup underneath to collect the rubber. Dotted through the rows were small wooden two-storey houses on stilts, with thatch or corrugated iron roofs. Each house has a tiny bay window sticking out on one side of the top storey and fitted with coloured glass, like a stained glass window. I can only think they must be for the household shrine inside.

Outside the houses were drying lines made of bamboo poles - some for washing, others for fat white sheets that look rather like elongated bath mats - the rubber.

Everywhere there was road-building going on. Trucks had delivered big drums of bitumen and piles of stones, gravel and sand and put them along the side of any road destined to be widened or upgraded. Then it seems pretty much a manual process. Women wearing jandals grade the stones on the side of the road and then carry them and the sane in baskets to where they are thrown onto the road. The bitumen is melted in the drums over fires on the side of the road, and a guy with a plastic bucket with holes in the bottom, walks up and down putting a layer of tar between the stones. He wears rubber boots, but no other protection. Road building in Myanmar must be a seriously unpleasant job. 

The gravel track was, as predicted, a bit hair-raising at times, particularly when it became little more than a rocky hillside, or a slithery sandy pathway. I was immensely relieved that Sam had chosen to ride with Geoff not me. And that he found the whole thing a great adventure.

After about an hour on the off-road track we arrived in a village and there were two choices - straight ahead down a forest path, or left down a seriously steep concrete track to a mangrove swamp. A small blue sign pointed left: "To beach". We remembered advice from a couple of men at our lunch spot that there might be a problem getting to the beach at high tide and decided to lock the bikes at the top, shoulder the luggage and proceed on foot. 

Good choice.

The last 20 minutes wasn't even a track, but a pathway through a mangrove swamp. I kid you not. Water sometimes above the knees and biting insects. It was more Crocodile Dundee than road to the beach.

Didn't we have a lovely time the day we went to the beach

It was really hot and we were already tired from a motorbike ride that had taken the best part of four hours, one hour needing serious concentration. Sam was very unimpressed. But finally the mangroves ended and a line with drying sheets appeared. We had arrived. The beach, as promised, was lovely. A wide expanse of almost-white sand, jungle-clad hills, clear blue sea, some good-looking waves. Safe at last, we thought. We found the guest house's small restaurant and were greeted by a European man. I'll call him Peter.

He looked horrified to see us. 

What were we doing here? Didn't we know the place was closed? They had been trying unsuccessfully for two years to get a licence and were operating illegally. They had been visited by the local police the day before to check they weren't open and the police would certainly be back for a follow-up check, if not that day, certainly the next. They couldn't afford to have any tourists there. Hadn't the travel agent told us? He was extremely sorry, but we couldn't possibly stay. We could have a swim and then we'd have to go back to Dawei.

To say that we were upset would be an understatement. Seven hours since we'd arrived at the bike shop/travel agent that morning,  the owner wanted us to turn round and do it all again. Just breaking the news to Sam was an impossible task.

We sat down and looked very sad. Was there no alternative?

The owner was reluctant but fabulous. He made a couple of calls and came back. Yes, we could stay. But we had to be ready to evacuate at any moment if the police came. This wasn't the first time the place had been raided over the last two years, he said, and there was an early warning system in the village beyond the mangroves. Relatives of the Burmese partners would ring if the police were coming and we'd have the time it took for the officers to wade through the swamp to make the place look like there were no guests.

"Code red," he grinned.

To run a business in a country like Burma you'd need vast supplies of optimism, perseverance, courage and humour. He definitely had them.

We didn't stop to ask details; we were too grateful. He showed us to our cabin.

Our Dawei adventure, part 2

Chapter 2: Out of Dawei

Dawei is an interesting place and we spent a day or so just wandering around. We got up early to watch the monks and the nuns doing their rounds of the city, collecting food for breakfast, and we went back to the market. We drank sugar cane juice, and watched the students at the school opposite chanting their lessons. They started at 6am, reading aloud off the board, all together, like an endless recital of the Lord's Prayer or the Catechism at church. Rote learning was still going at 10.30pm, though surely not the same students? Whacking students with a stick for not knowing their lessons is commonplace at Burmese schools, apparently, though these guys don't seem too traumatised.

But then what to do in and around Dawei? We consulted Aye, a super-efficient English-speaking tour operator. She suggested hiring bicycles and heading out to view one of Burma's huge reclining Buddhas. So we did - we even dragged Sam out on a health-enhancing mission. The Buddha is impressively large and golden and somnolent, though why such a huge statue was built 10km outside a small provincial Burmese town remains a mystery. 

You get some idea of the size if you look at me standing in front...

On the way back we stopped at a roadside stall for our first taste of "laphet thouq", Myanmar's famous spicy green-tea salad, served with peanuts, tomato and cabbage. I know... we shouldn't eat vegetables we haven't seen washed in boiled water, but we were hungry... and it is very delicious. And we emerged unscathed. 

Next door to the food stall was some betel nut drying on a plastic sheet, and when we went to look we were greeted by friendly shouting from a group of people working in a shed behind. We understood not a word, but "come and have a look, tourists" was the gist. And there was a cashew nut factory, with perhaps 50 women in a open-sided shed wearing gloves and taking the blackened shells off cashews that had previously been boiled in a sort of wood-fired, brick-sided cauldron at the back of the workshop. The women used plastic laundry baskets to scoop the cashews out of the boiling liquid and then put them in a big pile for the women out the front to collect for peeling. It was very Dickensian, complete with health and safety nightmare, but without the smog. 

Spot the Myanmar version of hand protection from the boiling water. And the plastic washing basket...

It must be pretty grim work, but these women were just so incredibly cheerful

The next suggestion from our friendly tour operator friend was the beach. Some of Burma's most beautiful and unspoilt bits of tropical coastline were a couple of hours drive outside Dawei, she said, but with development planned for the coastline, they were unlikely to remain that way for long. And we would drive through interesting villages and down a little jungle track. Sam would love it. It would be an adventure. Go now, she urged.

So despite the fact that we'd just come from Greece and before that Cuba, despite the fact that New Zealand has some wonderful beaches, and despite the fact that it's illegal for foreigners to ride motorbikes alone, and our travel insurance would be null and void if we had an accident, we rented motorbikes, pared our baggage down to motorbike proportions, and headed for the beach.

Dawei: A five-part Burmese adventure starting with indecision and ending up with us hiding in the jungle from the police. Part 1

Kids fishing for mudskippers in a creek off the Dawei river. I'm not sure what the bamboo rafts are for - a holding place for bamboo before it's sold, or do they use them for transport?

Chapter 1: Dawei city

We hadn't done a lot of planning for our first month in Burma. We would arrive in Yangon and then head out... somewhere. That was about the limit of our prior decision-making. Sometimes that's the best way - certainly it allows flexibility. 

So in our windowless Yangon guest house room we consulted the Lonely Planet guidebook and for no particularly good reason chose Dawei - a smallish city, accessible by air in the apparently-not-very touristy southeast of the country, and not too far away - we could make our way slowly back to Yangon from there. We booked a flight, crawled through the traffic to Yangon airport in a taxi and boarded a plane that left on time and gave you a drink and a piece of cake en route. Nothing out of the ordinary there. 

Dawei is a provincial capital - a mix of scruffy traditional wooden houses on stilts (many with bright orange satellite dishes attached outside), scruffy colonial brick and plaster buildings, and scruffy undistinguished modern concrete blocks. There was Wi-Fi even in our unassuming guesthouse and a thousand street stalls and small restaurants for us to chose from. 

A traditional house - in this part of the world at least. On stilts, with animals, washing, cooking bikes etc underneath, and living quarters above. In the countryside it's similar, minus the satellite dish.

There's a broad muddy brown river with scruffy fishing boats tied up and bamboo rafts in little creeks, and small boys fishing with poles and string, and a lot of small gravel/sand extraction businesses lining the banks. The extraction technique involves a noisy diesel pump bringing the water out of the river through a large plastic pipe, and then guys in longyi  (the traditional wrap-around skirt worn by both men and women here) separating the sand and gravel using brooms, spades and gravity. Then the water was returned to the river through a makeshift channel. There are big plans to build a huge international port in Dawei (stage one is apparently due to open next year, though we saw no signs of it whatsoever except for one large yellow JCB heading through town), so maybe the huge piles of sand and gravel in town are destined for there one day. 

Stocking up on fruit and testing out my Burmese. Each stall is clean, with its beautiful piles of fruit, fish etc. But the mess outside the market is horrendous. All waste, including plastic bags etc is just dumped in the river, or in rotting heaps on the banks. Makes Greece look pristine!

Dawei also has a fabulous morning market near the river - and by morning I mean that when we got there at 6.30am it was already in full swing. Chaos. Fish and seafood of all sorts, a mass of fruit and vegetables, clothes, and spices and a meat section. Buyers jostle in a good-humoured way down the narrow aisles between the sellers, who sit on raised platforms. Turn up at 8am and you'll miss the freshest dinner ingredients; by the afternoon it looks like the whole place has been abandoned for 20 years. Sellers (mostly women) came with their fruit and vegetables in three-wheeler open-sided vans (motorbike at the front, cart at the back), or carrying sacks or bundles - even live chickens on a motorbike; the numerous fish sellers were presumably the wives, mother, sisters and daughters of the guys on the boats tied up on the riverbank.

Fabulous fish sellers. The "mud" on their cheeks is called thanakha and is used by women, children and to a lesser extent men - even teenage boys - as a sunscreen and also for cosmetic purposes - ie to look beautiful.