Our tendency on this trip has been to intricately plan border crossings, invest our energy into simply arriving legally, and then turn up in the destination town with a sigh of relief and little idea of what to do next.
Hence we found ourselves in Dawei: a town very far off Myanmar’s standard tourist route, and in an area only accessible to foreigners since 2013.
It’s not a whole lot longer since the rest of the country opened itself up to tourism, still less since the anti-government groups gave the ethical go-ahead for people to visit. It’s a complicated situation. Only last November, the first vaguely democratic elections took place, unequivocally voting in the opposition party. But tensions were still running high. A law had been passed by the outgoing military government, effectively denying Aung Sung Su Kyi the opportunity to hold office, and at the time of our visit nobody yet knew what was going to happen next.
