Myeik Archipelago Coast and Islands

The Archipelago in south Myanmar.

This part of the Indian Ocean changed ownership several times between Myanmar and Thailand in the last few hundred years. Since colonial times the English took it into British India and integrated this part into Burma.

The area in south Myanmar is one of the great places of the country, that makes it prime area for travel and leisure and geographically good connected to south Thailand but to create something out of this the bureaucrats at Naypyidaw would need to relax visa regulations, they just don’t let the people in, although they pretend the opposite. 


Myeik Archipelago in south Myanmar with Salone or sea gypsies on the main island
Andaman sea islands with Salone or sea gypsies


Here are the best Myanmar islands in the south near Thailand, places of natural beauty and interesting native people, the Salone who came in from south sea about 2000 years ago. The potential in travel development has definitely been noticed yet or just ignored by a lazy bureaucracy who do nothing for the people they elected them, but that is nothing new. 

South Myanmar is dotted with around 1000 or even more remote islands along the south coast all the way down to Kawthaung. This is the former Victoria Point, at the Thai border opposite Ranong and 300 km north of Phuket.


Unlike many of the isles of their southern neighbor these remote spots in the Andaman Sea islands have been empty since ever only when the British were around there some activities happen. At that time the ships of the East India Company sailed between Madras and Penang in today Malaysia. Since there are also no accommodations on the islands it’s difficult. 


trip to Myeik on house boats
Trip to Myeik on house boats

Some people make a trip using Myeik as a base but this is extremely cumbersome because in and out must still be via Yangon Airport it is not possible to exit or enter through Kawthaung.
These isles have been cut which also had a positive effect since they were left alone. 

This was not like that since recently because they sold fishing license to Thai trawler and they are very know of don’t caring about anything destroying the aquatic life with dynamite and cyanide fishing plus using illegal nets. They blocked out Thais and afterwards it went better. Thai’s do everything for money; they even destroyed all their own coastal regions with illegal tactics.

The diversity of wild animals on these islands was great but in the last hundred years they killed everything bigger than a grown up wild boar. The marine life is still quite ok now again and every week liveaboard yachts from Phuket come in for scuba diving trips. Currently this is the only possibility to explore these places in the Andaman Sea.

Indigenous to this island world are the sea gypsies or Salone who live here on houseboats and when the monsoon season is to turbulent they build palm huts on the beaches, these is a seafaring tribe who came from east of the islands of Indonesia, ethnically they are negritos of the same stock as the people south east of Mindanao in the Philippines.

Today they still do fishing, boat building, pearl diving and gathering amber and other materials on the islands.  Many are drug addicts, especially; alcohol and opium, both of them were introduced by the British who made them addicts in exchanges their pearls for.  Actually the British of that time were worse than the plague.




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