Having spent some time in a Myanmar city, and having spent a looooong time in the highlands of SEA far from the sea, I decided to head off to the beach. Before this I think the last time I’d gone to the ocean was way back in Padang, so I was due to catch some sun on my skin and sand in my underwear. Kyle was going the same direction as well as two other Quebeckers – Emilie and Alex. We’d met them while chilling in Yangon and had similar travel routes. They’re both really nice people and I was happy to have them along.
Ngwesaung struck me as really really odd. Myanmar isn’t the richest of countries, and in their biggest city of Yangon hostels were easy to find for around $5 a night. This beach is only five hours away but the cheapest option we could find was a guesthouse for $18 in a room with two beds and a cold shower. I and Kyle took one mattress, Emilie the other. This place was also around a ten-minute walk to the beach, instead set up on a hill at the only entrance into town. But was the area rural? Why, no, not at all.
For several miles along the beach, and in Ngwesaung itself, you’ll find dozens of high-priced luxury resorts, ranging anywhere from $40 to $120 a night per room. Are they filled? No. Or at least barely. I did some talking with some of the locals in town and it would appear that many Chinese business folk decide to park a lot of their cash here in Ngwesaung, primarily in the buying of property and the building of resorts. Renting a resort is surprisingly cheap, something like $16000/y for several beachfront acres. Buying, though? Well, a two-story shack in town (maybe around 160m squared total) was $500,000. It is the inevitable result when rich Chinese people want to get their money out of their country – they don’t much care if there is a demand as long as the cash sits. Of course Chinese tourists come, so there’s a little return. I saw several buses carting them around, and many restaurants had Burmese and Chinese writing. There are also developments for people to buy up property. Take the photo above. It was some sort of village of little boxes made of ticky-tacky surrounding a lake. Had a gate, a guard, a fence, fun looking photos. Did anyone live there? Eerily no. Well, we did see one house that looked to be lived in, but they had no neighbors. The development was around 40 minutes by walking away from the center and it stretched faaaaaar into the distance with not a soul around. Kyle said it reminded him of pedophile villages and I find it hard to disagree.
Chinese money and desertion aside, there are a few really cool things to see at Ngwesaung. Here you have Lover’s Island!
Something like 40 minutes south of the town itself is this cool little island jutting out of the sea. During low tide it has a narrow isthmus from which to cross over from the mainland. At high tide it floods. It’s a cool thing to see the ocean doing. The island itself has some stuff to see as well.
The majority of the island is this elevated forest filled with lots of plants and a few animals. Here’s one hanging from a vine having the time of his life! It’s not a challenging trek, but it is a scenic one that lets you see all around the island and up and down the beach for miles.
It also has some really interesting tide pools at the back end of the island. Not many people go here but it was possibly my favorite location. Sea salt sat in dried pools, crabs scuttled to and fro in our shadows, and waves tried desperately to push their way inland. It reminded me of an alien world! We even saw one snake and it freaked us all out. I’d have stayed longer, but we all feared the rising tide might strand us on the island so we took our leave.
We headed back up the beach while the sun set. All-in-all this beach was remarkably clean. Thinking back to some of the places I went in Java, I was stunned at just how little trash I could find either in the sand or in the water. It wasn’t spotless, but much less polluted that you would imagine based on Myanmar’s development.
But really though, it was deserted. With this much beauty, and this much space, sand, and sun you really would have thought people would be swarming here more than they currently do. This was from the same day me and Kyle went to the abandoned development. We took a road there and decided to hike back on the beach to the south. For 30 minutes we had water on one side, forest on the other, and only five or six people (locals) chilling out. If you ever wanted to find a secluded beach, Ngwesaung has it in spades! Romantic get-aways would be easy here.
Kyle, Emilie, Alex, and myself stopped off at a bar on the water the same day we went to Lovers Island. Emilie had gone here before and we all had stopped there earlier for lunch. They advertised a happy hour as well so we were hooked. Again, they had some funky drinks. You could get the regular GnTs, Long Islands, or Sex on the Beach but this man also had a strange jar filled with all sorts of goodies soaking in alcohol. As I recall he put the standard lemongrass, ginger, and chilis in there. He also had a snake. And some bees! Honey was a big part of it but I don’t have the full list right now. It was delicious and strong.
The other thing they advertised was a fire show! In fact, lots of resorts were advertising that. This place had the manager’s own son aspiring to entertain the drinkers. He did a great job while we took turns giving it a shot ourselves. Despite the fact that we were drunk we did NOT catch on fire. A miracle! We also met some amazing local Burmese people! Three girls – one of which was from the Philippines – and two guys – one of which was a Chinese immigrant. They knew how to have fun and convinced us into buying fireworks from a persistent salesman riding up and down the beach. We all partied late into the morning on that beach. Sometime around 4 am and half-frozen we all went our separate ways, but it was with good memories and stronger friendships.
Some of those memories were of salad. The manager there made one mean Tea-leaf Salad. What’s a tea-leaf salad? Well it’s Lahpet Thoke (la pet dou), made of fermented/pickled green tea leaves. This is a massive meal of choice in the country. The best green tea leaves at every harvest are set aside just for pickling! You would never think eating pickled tea leaves to be enticing but you’d be wrong. We went back to that bar three times just to eat his lahpet thoke! It would start a quest for me and Kyle to try lahpet thoke in every place we found ourselves to see the regional differences. The picture here doesn’t show lahpet thoke, though. Instead you have another ginger salad (yum) and then at the top you’ve got a regional salty-sea fish salad (EXTRA YUM!) The fishy one was like fried sardines with pickled onions, chilis, and lime juice. I loved it. And just a heads up, every one of the Myanmar entries is likely to involve salad in some way.
We spent around three days in Ngwesaung and boy did I enjoy it. Fresh ocean air filled my lungs as I walked endlessly along the sand. We watched hermit crabs scuttle at the water line – nearly every shell had one inside. We noticed an odd lack of birds there, which might explain the abundance of shellfish. We laughed and had fun. Of all the beaches I visited during The Journey so far, Ngwesaung was probably the best.