Driving Round the World: Goodbye Thailand, Hello Myanmar

Looking over Chiang Mai showing pollution over city

Our last few days in Thailand were spent driving round the beautiful mountainous (and slightly cooler) north west of the country where the road winds up and down valleys and crosses passes between villages. The western side of the country accommodates refugees from Myanmar of the Karen (or long neck) tribe. As refugees they are not allowed to work in Thailand so a few villages have established themselves to attract tourists to both see them in their traditional dress, and to purchase traditional handicrafts from them in order to provide an income. We eventually decided to visit one of the villages where we were welcomed and allowed to photograph them in their traditional dress.

Karen Long Neck Tribe

The north west mountains also contain numerous caves, many of which extend for kilometres under the mountains, but we elected to visit the crystal cave, a very unusual series of caverns only discovered in the mid 1990's where the walls are covered in minute pure white crystals of calcium carbonate and aragonite. Only two other caves are known with similar structures, and because they are very fragile visitors are not allowed to take anything hard such as cameras into the caves.

River marking border with Myanmar (on the right)

And so we crossed into Myanmar, exiting Thailand on the last day of our visa. We have to have a guide in Myanmar so we were helped through the Myanmar immigration and customs and were soon on the road. It is immediately obvious how much poorer the country is, lots of very old vehicles, bullock carts in regular use and the villages far less well developed.

Numerous old vehicles on the road

Monks collecting food each morning

The road for the first 40kms from the border has recently been upgraded, but the following 60kms, until we reached the more main north south road was appalling, bumpy and very broken tarmac reduced our speed to around 30kms per hour. With it being the middle of the dry season everywhere is very brown and dusty with a lot of haze, so no clear views, but there are immediate and very clear differences to Thailand.

Kyauk Ka lat Pagoda - Hpa An

Friendly Locals

Shewe San Taw Pagoda Taungoo

Though still a Buddhist state there are far fewer temples, and they are more subdued than the brightly coloured (almost gaudy) Thai Temples. Road building is an almost entirely manual process, with hundreds of people involved in carrying rock and aggregate in baskets to form the road base, then tar heated by lighting a fire under a barrel is spread by hand before macadam is applied and rolled. On some of the main roads they are using large diggers to excavate a level roadbed with the macadam surface applied by machine. There is very little machinery for the agricultural sector with lots of water buffalo for ploughing and hand harvesting, all the signs of a less developed economy. However the people are very welcoming and unassuming, and apart from the main two tourist sites there are only shops for locals.

At Hpa An we visited Kyauk Ka Lat - an unusual pagoda set on a rock outcrop in the middle of a lake, very scenic with a lot of devout Burmese making a pilgrimage to the stupa, and in Taungoo the gold Shwe San Taw Pagoda. A beautiful well maintained pagoda, which clearly does not normally get overseas visitors.

Manual road building

Having only 8 days to cross Myanmar we have a lot of driving to do, but two days are set aside for sightseeing, one at Inle Lake, and one at Bagan,
Inle is a large (20kms x 10kms) shallow lake in the mountains. In the dry season it is only 7m deep and is noted for the leg rowing fishermen. It has become a tourist destination, with villages around the lake making traditional crafts to sell to the tourists, including weaving lotus plant fibre into fabrics - hand making wooden boats which they sell elsewhere in Myanmar and a hand bellow operated forge, all in houses on stilts rising from the lake. Being at a higher altitude it has a much cooler climate and is surrounded by rich agricultural land growing rice and vegetables.

Leg rowing fisherman Lake Inle

As we were relaxing in the late afternoon a very lively wedding party processed through the town, hundreds of guests all dressed in their best traditional costumes carried gifts in procession with bands of musicians interspersed playing drums and cymbals, incredibly colourful.

Wedding procession

Bagan is the old capital of an empire which covered much of SE Asia in the 10th to 13th centuries. Both in the old city and across square kms of the surrounding plain by the Irawaddy River are thousands of temples and stupas built during the 11th to 13th centuries by wealthy people to gain merit for their next incarnation. It is an extraordinary sight and a major tourist destination, though with so many temples it is easy to get away from the crowds.