via Yangon (suburbs), Bago, Kyaikto, Hpa-An, Mawlamyine, Ye, Dawei then go lost in some mountain roads, Palaw, Myeik, mountains roads, then Bokpyin and finally Kawthoung.
I’ll post our full itinerary and some pix when I get some time and a descent internet connection.
We’ve been dreaming about it for some time and honestly we didn’t think it was possible for foreigners to ride the Southern coast of Burma all the way down to Kawthoung!
So as every one of our riding trips, to add challenge to adventure, we bought the crappiest bikes we could find. In Pathein we found 2 old Chinese 110cc motorcycles, made sure the blue and red book matched the bikes and started our ride to Chauntha and Ngwe Saung beaches.
The main purpose of our trips is not go as fast as possible on big bikes, but rather go as slow as possible and interact as much as possible with locals and get to see as many places as possible.
We have spent the night at locals anytime we got lost in remote places. We have had the opportunity to shoot loads of interesting pix but also a lot of footages with different cams, so I will also post day by day documentablogs vids with some useful information in them.
One of the only issue we got with the police/immigration was in Bokpyin. We planned to stay again in some village on the way, but got lazy and thought we would rather sleep in a real warm bed again. So we stopped in Bokpyin at this hotel that accepts foreigners and few hours later the police and immigration were here to ask what we were doing here with motorbikes! They confiscated our passports and after an hour of very uninteresting conversation,
they just left with our passports!
I kind of expected that as we had met a Spain/German couple in Palaw who also got their passports confiscated in Kawthoung and only got them back once there were on the horrible 16 hours bus to Myeik with their bicycles tied on the bus!
Anyhow, the next morning they came back and said that we have to go by bus. We told them that there is no way we will seat a second on a bus when we have our own motorbikes that we will resell in Kawthoung. So they proposed to put the motorbikes on the bus but then that option didn’t seem to work. In the end one guy who seemed to be the head of Bokpyin immigration just angrily said, ‘You drive to Kawthoung QUICK and don’t stop on the way, don’t go to Thailand and register at immigration when you get there! (I didn’t really understand the ‘don’t go to Thailand’ part, but we didn’t ask further questions and just drove off.
They escorted us the first 30-40 Km until the paved road ends.I guess the fact that we have temporary Burmese driving permits helped.The weird thing is that we haven’t seen any check points on the way (We’ve heard that they do check foreigner’s passports few times when on the hell bus from Kawthoung to Myeik).We did stop few times to rest and get snack/gasoline and also took a little dip at the Maliwun waterfall then arrived at Kawthoung immigration at 6pm and they just told us that they were closing and we should come back tomorrow anytime!! Nobody seemed to care about 2 foreigners riding motorbikes in the city.
So my tip is to stop as little as possible at registered hotels on
the way (to avoid immigration) and take advantage to stay with local Kayans who are lovely people (as everyone in Myanmar J )
I’ll post our full itinerary and some pix when I get some time and a descent internet connection.
We’ve been dreaming about it for some time and honestly we didn’t think it was possible for foreigners to ride the Southern coast of Burma all the way down to Kawthoung!
So as every one of our riding trips, to add challenge to adventure, we bought the crappiest bikes we could find. In Pathein we found 2 old Chinese 110cc motorcycles, made sure the blue and red book matched the bikes and started our ride to Chauntha and Ngwe Saung beaches.
The main purpose of our trips is not go as fast as possible on big bikes, but rather go as slow as possible and interact as much as possible with locals and get to see as many places as possible.
We have spent the night at locals anytime we got lost in remote places. We have had the opportunity to shoot loads of interesting pix but also a lot of footages with different cams, so I will also post day by day documentablogs vids with some useful information in them.
One of the only issue we got with the police/immigration was in Bokpyin. We planned to stay again in some village on the way, but got lazy and thought we would rather sleep in a real warm bed again. So we stopped in Bokpyin at this hotel that accepts foreigners and few hours later the police and immigration were here to ask what we were doing here with motorbikes! They confiscated our passports and after an hour of very uninteresting conversation,
they just left with our passports!
I kind of expected that as we had met a Spain/German couple in Palaw who also got their passports confiscated in Kawthoung and only got them back once there were on the horrible 16 hours bus to Myeik with their bicycles tied on the bus!
Anyhow, the next morning they came back and said that we have to go by bus. We told them that there is no way we will seat a second on a bus when we have our own motorbikes that we will resell in Kawthoung. So they proposed to put the motorbikes on the bus but then that option didn’t seem to work. In the end one guy who seemed to be the head of Bokpyin immigration just angrily said, ‘You drive to Kawthoung QUICK and don’t stop on the way, don’t go to Thailand and register at immigration when you get there! (I didn’t really understand the ‘don’t go to Thailand’ part, but we didn’t ask further questions and just drove off.
They escorted us the first 30-40 Km until the paved road ends.I guess the fact that we have temporary Burmese driving permits helped.The weird thing is that we haven’t seen any check points on the way (We’ve heard that they do check foreigner’s passports few times when on the hell bus from Kawthoung to Myeik).We did stop few times to rest and get snack/gasoline and also took a little dip at the Maliwun waterfall then arrived at Kawthoung immigration at 6pm and they just told us that they were closing and we should come back tomorrow anytime!! Nobody seemed to care about 2 foreigners riding motorbikes in the city.
So my tip is to stop as little as possible at registered hotels on
the way (to avoid immigration) and take advantage to stay with local Kayans who are lovely people (as everyone in Myanmar J )