Overland

Normally a journey to Myanmar starts at an airport. This time I chose to begin at a bus station in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. Not far from there is a border checkpoint that has been open to foreigners for about two and a half years. The twisty gravel road from the checkpoint ends at a sleepy southern Myanmar town called Dawei. When you figure in the cost of time and onward travel to Yangon, the overland crossing isn’t faster or cheaper than going by air. But it’s varied and pretty and unpredictable—in other words, all the reasons we travel.

Vans to the border leave Kanchanaburi every 90 minutes starting at 9am. I picked the first one because I wanted to be in Dawei before dark. We reached the checkpoint at 10:30, including time for stopping on a lovely Thai side road to buy a few bamboo tubes of sticky rice from the van driver’s auntie.

Leaving Thailand went smoothly, just like at any airport. From the checkpoint I walked about 100 yards to a little courtyard where I could book transport to Dawei or buy breakfast. They took my passport and 800 baht. In a few minutes they gave me back my passport, a ticket, and a photocopy of my visa for Myanmar Immigration. A shuttle drove me and a few other travelers the five or so miles through what I guess is a no-man’s-land.

The shuttle turned around in Htee Kee, a Karen town with a Burmese name. People there speak Karen, Thai, Mon, Burmese, and a little English. The immigration office felt a little rougher than the Thai counterpart I had just left but it got the job done. The staff seemed grateful for the photocopy.

Next up in the transportation chain: the dispatcher. He arranges full vehicles for passengers from both directions. Anybody who’s ever traveled in Asia knows that times like these are good times to go get a coffee and open a book. In this case the wait turned out not to be too long, maybe 30 minutes. Probably some days it’s two minutes and other days two hours, all depending on who else is going.

The dispatcher came and went several times before pointing to a Toyota hatchback. The driver and the only other traveler both hailed from Dawei. They had plenty to talk about so they took the front seats and I got to stretch out in back, with a seat belt even. Communication was easy because they spoke Thai.

For the next three hours we saw no more than 20-30 other vehicles. A few motorcycles carried people who looked like they would be stopping often to work in the sparse forest. There were no trucks other than a convoy of five Thai double-tractor-trailers that rumbled our way just as we formally entered Myanmar. The trucks looked too clean and formal to have traveled very far. I wondered if they had crossed from Thailand earlier in the day to pick up an unofficial shipment of something that Customs would wave through uninspected.

The terrain started out hilly, gradually giving way to jungly, and then cultivated. Finally we encountered a bit of extraction, though it was hard to tell exactly which minerals were being carved out of the hillsides and sluiced out of the river. We made a steady 30km/hour, slowing for clouds of dust and one-lane-only bridges. No pavement, no cement electric poles, almost no settlements. The scattered houses were made only of bamboo and thatch. Whenever we passed a building of any size, it flew the flag of the Karen National Union.

Shortly before 3pm we stopped at a roadside office with no markings. The driver disappeared with my passport for much longer than the “official” immigration people in Htee Kee had needed to look at it. After that point it seemed we had entered our third country of the day. Busier and busier villages, more and more rubber or plantations of this and that, and finally tea shops and electronics displays.

Downtown Dawei is full of old lattice and lace houses that have been kept up nicely. The people charmed me too. The next morning I asked the guest house owner about where to find good mohinga. She described the directions and then added, “Bring me some back, will you?” A friendly welcome to Myanmar.