Chaung Tha – Confessions of a Burmese Beach Bum

Chaung Tha beach, Burma.

Still aching from a hellish bus ride from the Irrawaddy delta, I limped the length of Chaung Tha beach and let the sea breeze restore my sanity, such as it is. Bamboo huts selling plastic toys, coconuts and beer dotted the brownish sand between scraggly palms and the dull green chop of the Bay of Bengal. Locals riding tandem bikes along the beach waved and asked were I was from. A group of teenaged boys back-flipped off a pontoon behind the break and fully-clothed girls splashed and giggled in the shallows. At a construction site on a rocky point, English signs on the scaffolding advertised a luxury hotel. Near the end of the beach the huts and palms had been replaced by new white-washed resorts and I wondered how long it would be before prices would soar beyond the reach of many of the holidaying families I passed. 

            On the beach I got talking to an American girl and we spent the afternoon drinking beer and playing guess-which-European-country-the-fat-old-man-in-speedos-is-from.

            My friend Win in Pathien had given me the name of a travel agent where I might be able to rent a motorbike so the following morning I spoke to a friendly young guy who said he would rent me his scooter for about $10 dollars on the condition that I didn’t ride in town where he said the police might fine me. He dropped me at a resort out of town and arranged to meet at four o’clock.

Oh, artsy. A Buddhist shrine north of Chaung Tha.

I rode through deep sand tracks between sweeping coral-white beaches and cool groves of palms under which people dozed in front of small grass houses with million dollar views. 20km north of Chaung Tha the road reached a small village and disappeared into a wide river mouth. There was another village on the far bank and I watched as a truck drove onto a small barge which chugged across the river towards me. The whole palm fringed scene was sparkling blue and white with the only noise the muffled popping of the small engine. The barge beached in front of me and thirty people jumped from the truck’s open tray and onto the soft white sand. The driver revved mightily and aimed for the tyre tracks of a previous crossing. As he reversed up the beach there was a cough and clatter of something terminal followed by sudden silence. The truck sat dead, its rear wheels axle deep in sand. A collective sigh went up from the passengers, but tinged with laughter and resignation – these were obviously people used to unreliable transport. The driver produced a length of heavy rope which he doubled around the tow bar while a group of young men excavated the sand from around the wheels with plastic shovels. Everyone pulled, the men straining, showing off to the girls who were too busy laughing at the silly westerner at the end of the rope to do much good. Eventually we got the stricken vehicle off the beach and the driver slid underneath to look for the source of the oil pooling on the road.

The dead truck almost off the beach.

            Another truck going the other way drove onto the barge and it chugged back across the river. I wished I could load my little scooter on too and explore this amazing coast further but I knew that north of this river was the start of one of Burma’s many restricted areas and I couldn’t imagine the authorities taking kindly to a board-shorted backpacker rattling around on a hired scooter. Instead I stopped in a little stall for a warm Star Cola poured from an often-reused bottle and tried some guide-book Burmese on the friendly owner. My natural aptitude for languages held true and I may as well have been speaking Swahili but we persevered. He proudly showed me a photo of him and his teenaged son holding an enormous fish. It was at least three feet long and he pointed to the river mouth beside us and mimed fishing with a hand line. His wife slid a huge half melon in front of me, jabbing a spoon in the sweet flesh and miming that it was free. I bought a packet of cigarettes and passed them around with some of the men who were waiting for their truck to be repaired. When I left an hour later the pool of oil under the truck had spread and the passengers waited patiently.

I dearly wanted to drive onto this barge and across the river but the other side is off-limits to foreigners.

            I left the beach and wound up a broken tarmac road high into the hills past jungle and mountains obscured by smoke haze. As I stood on the side of the road snapping photos, a man in a dusty suit jacket pulled up beside me.

            “Hello, hello. Please, you drive now. It is danger to stop here, too danger.”

            “Why is it dangerous?”

            “Um, big animals. Take tree,” he began, struggling for the word. “Animal, big nose. Very dangerous.”

            I grasped what he meant. “Elephants!” We rode side by side and he explained that they were being used to log the jungle nearby and sometimes carried timber down this road. A few miles on we came to a more major road and he pointed me back towards town where I met the scooter’s owner. He looked nervous and told me that the police were at a tea shop around the corner. As we rode past I waved but they just stared at me.

            I lost track of time on sleepy Chaung Tha beach and it wasn’t until I looked at my hotel receipt one morning that I realized I had been in Burma for 10 days. I only had 18 days left on my visa so I booked a ticket to Bagan and braced myself for another bus ride. 

Crossing this bridge was sketchy with skinny scooter tyres.