Kawthoung, Myanmar

The flight from Yangon to Kawthoung stopped down in Dawei. I was surprised that the jet was filled, although we were the only westerners on the 2nd leg. We got served very tasty shortbread cookies for a snack!

Kawthoung is about south as you can get in Myanmar. A little further south on the peninsula and you're in the very busy Thai resorts at Phuket and Krabi. For now the Myeik Archipelago in Myanmar is empty of tourists, but that will quickly change. There's also only two hotels / resorts in the whole place.

Our destination is the Myanmar Andaman Resort on Macleod Island, a 90-minute ride by speedboat, where we'll have 3 nights. We have an overnight on each end in Kawthoung.

Our hosts at the Thahara had warned us to be careful with the food in Kawthoung, so we didn't have high expectations on the tourist infrastructure. Based on the advertising in the airport, the Victoria Cliffside Hotel seemed the place to stay (and where we had booked on Agoda). At least we didn't have any issues explaining where we were staying to the immigration folks (who photocopied our passports) or to get a taxi.

Our taxi was in the back of a truck, so I couldn't see much. It's a common made of transport here. As we turned into the hotel, I could see the grounds, and they looked pretty nice. We transferred to a golf cart (always a good sign) to take us up a small hill to the lobby. The hotel had amazing views of the Andaman Sea! This was way better than what we were expecting!

Turns out they've just soft launched after doing major renovations, my guess is in anticipation of the coming tourist boom. For now though, there were just a handful of other guests (enough so it wasn't creepy empty like the time we stayed at the salt hotel in Bolivia). The surrounding islands are completely untouched!

We had lunch (pad thai - there's more Thai influence here than Burmese). We had plans to read but instead ended up just watching the scenery. The sunset was amazing.

Had a nice dinner under the stars and called it a night. Not a bad place at all to kill a night in transit!

Tomorrow we go even more remote, to Macleod Island, for diving and snorkeling.