Day 2: Myit Kyi Nar - Bamaw

Day2: Myit Kyi Nar - Bamaw

The bus left Myit Kyi Nar around 8:30 am. I decided to take a minibus as I want to get the traveling experience of a local ordinary traveler. The boat ride from Myit Kyi Nar to Bamaw was not recommended for the low water level of this season (Mid February). Once the bus left the city center, it was crossing over Ayeyarwaddy via Balaminhtin Bridge. It was quite a flat and wide plane from Myit Kyi Nar to Dog Pheng Yan and the road was good until Dog Pheng Yan. It was not a tar road anymore, but still in good condition with compacted stones (the bus tires might be gone in a few months time though) between Dog Pheng Yan to Moe Mauk. The bus has been running between the mountains and passing over many small creeks. After Moe Mauk, the landscape became flat again and the road condition was bad until Bamaw.

There were only a few vehicles on the road - some minibus, the pickups with fixed chairs on the roof of the vehicle (too bad, I don't have a photo), and some motorcycles. It was laid back and relax kind of experience.

ၿမစ္ႀကီးနား - ဗန္းေမာ္ ခရီး
ၿမစ္ႀကီးနားကေန ဗန္းေမာ္ကို ကားနဲ႔ ဆင္းလာေတာ႔ ဧရာ၀တီၿမစ္ကို ဗလမင္းထင္တံတား နဲ႔ ၿဖတ္ကူးရပါတယ္။ တံတား ၿဖတ္ၿပီးတာနဲ႔ ၀ုိင္းေမာ္ၿမိဳ ့ထဲကို ၀င္လာၿပီး ေၿမၿပန္႔ အက်ယ္ႀကီး ကိုၿဖတ္ ရပါတယ္။ လမ္းေဘးက ရိတ္ၿပီးသား လယ္ကြက္ေတြ၊ တစ္ခ်ဳိ ႔ ေနာက္တစ္သီး စိုက္ဖို႔ ေရ ၿပန္ သြင္းထားၿပီးသား လယ္ကြက္ေတြဟာ ၿမန္မာနုိင္ငံ အလယ္ပုိင္းက လယ္ကြက္ေတြ လိုပါဘဲ။ လမ္းမွာ ေခ်ာင္းငယ္ေလးေတြကို ကားတစ္စီးခ်င္းပဲ ၿဖတ္လို႔ရတဲ႔ ေဘလီတံတား ေတြနဲ႔ ၿဖတ္ရပါတယ္။ ခပ္ေ၀းေ၀းက ေတာင္တန္းႀကီးေတြ ကိုလွမ္းၿမင္ေနရၿပီး၊ သစ္ပင္ႀကီးႀကီး မရွိတဲ႔ ကြင္းႀကီး ထဲမွာ သြားေနတဲ႔ ကားေပၚမွာ ထိုင္လုိက္ရတာ ငယ္စဥ္က ခဏခဏ သြားခဲ႔တဲ႔ ရမည္းသင္း-ပ်ဥ္းမနား ခရီးေတြကို သတိရလွပါတယ္။ မတူတာကေတာ႔ ေလက ေႏြးမေနဘဲ ေတာ္ေတာ္ေလး ေအးေနတာပါ။ ကားလမ္းကလည္း ေတာ္ေတာ္ ေခ်ာေခ်ာေမြ႔ေမြ႔ ရွိပါတယ္။



၀ိုင္းေမာ္ၿမိဳ ႔နယ္က ထြက္လာၿပီး ေဒါ႔ဖုန္းယန္ၿမိဳ ့နယ္ထဲ ၀င္လို႔ သိပ္မႀကာခင္မွာ ခင္းထားတဲ႔ ကားလမ္းက ေၿပာင္းသြားပါတယ္။ ေက်ာက္ခဲေတြကို ႀကပ္ညပ္ေနေအာင္ သိပ္ၿပီးထည္႔ထား တဲ႔ လမ္းပါ။ ဒီအရပ္မွာေတာ႔ ေၿမပဲယို လမ္းလို႔ ေခၚပါသတဲ႔။ လမ္းေဘးက ရွုခင္းေတြကလည္း မတူေတာ႔ပါဘူး။ ကားက ေတာင္ေတြရွိတဲ႔ ဘက္ကို ဦးတည္သြားေနၿပီး လမ္းေဘးမွာလည္း ေတာေတာင္ ထူထပ္လာပါၿပီ။ လိုင္ဇာ လမ္းခြဲအလြန္ ေလာက္ေရာက္ေတာ႔ ေတာင္ေတြ ႀကားထဲကေန သြားေနပါၿပီ။ မိုးေမာက္ ေလာက္ ကေန ေၿမၿပန္႔ ၿပန္ၿဖစ္သြားၿပီး လမ္းဆိုးလာ လိုက္တာ ဗန္းေမာ္ ေရာက္တဲ႔ အထိပါပဲ။



လမ္းတစ္ေလ်ွာက္မွာ ေခါင္မိုးေပၚမွာ ထိုင္ခံုေတြ ဆင္ထားၿပီး ေအာက္မွာ ကုန္တင္တဲ႔ ဟိုင္းလပ္ ကား ေတြ၊ မွန္လံုလို႔ ေခၚတဲ႔ minibus ေတြ နဲ႔ ကိုယ္ပိုင္ကား တစ္စီးတစ္ေလ ပဲေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။ ေဒသခံေတြ ကေတာ႔ ေထာ္လာဂ်ီနဲ႔ ခရီးသြား ႀကတယ္ထင္ပါ႔။ ဆိုင္ကယ္နဲ႔ စပါးလို ဆန္လုိ အိတ္ႀကီးေတြကို သယ္ႀကတာလည္း ေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။ ဆိုင္ကယ္ နွစ္စီး၊ သံုးစီး အတူတူလာ ႀကရင္း တစ္စီးက ေမွာက္လို႔ ၀ိုင္းမေပးေန ႀကတာလည္း ခဏခဏ ေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။ လုိင္းကား ေတြကလည္း မနက္ ၿမစ္ႀကီးနား / ဗန္းေမာ္ ကေနထြက္ ေန႔လည္ ၂ နာရီ၊ ၃နာရီ ေလာက္မွာ ဗန္းေမာ္ / ၿမစ္ႀကီးနား ကို ေရာက္တဲ႔ ကားေတြပဲရွိေတာ႔ အသြားအလာ နည္းတဲ႔ အရပ္လို႔ ေၿပာလို႔ရပါတယ္။





ဒီေဒသ က နိုင္ငံၿခားသား ခရီးသြား မ်ားနဲ႔ေတာ႔ သိပ္စိမ္းပံုမရပါဘူး။ ကုိယ္စီးတဲ႔ ကားေပၚမွာ ေတာင္မွ Less-traveled and remain natural ေဒသမ်ဳိးကို မွ သြားခ်င္လို႔ ၿမန္မာၿပည္ကို ခရီးထြက္ လာတာ လို႔ ဆိုတဲ႔ Switzerland က ေမာင္နွံကို ေတြ႔ခဲ႔ပါေသးတယ္။ လူေတြ အေရာက္ အေပါက္ နည္းတာကို က ကိုယ္တုိ႔ ၿမန္မာၿပည္ရဲ ့ ဆြဲေဆာင္မွုပါ။ ကုိယ္႔အတြက္ ကေတာ႔ အိမ္ၿပန္လာတဲ႔ ရက္တုိေလး အတြင္းမွာ မေရာက္ဘူးေသးတဲ႔ ေဒသ အသစ္တစ္ခုကို ေရာက္ရလို႔ ေႀကနပ္ေနတာပါပဲ။

Day 1: Yangon-Myit Kyi Nar

Day 1: Yangon-Myit Kyi Nar

Although there were flight delays due to heavy fogs on 14, 15 and 17 Feb, I am fortunate to start the trip on 16 Feb as the Yangon-Mandalay-Myit Kyi Nar-Putato flight left Yangon Domestic airport at 7am. It stopped at Mandalay for a short while and reached Myit Kyi Nar around 10am. Once I went out of the airport, I was on the Ledo Road which was built to connect Ledo, India to Kumming, China during the World War II. Parts of Ledo Road are re-constructed and under use until now.





I left for Myit Son in the same morning. The road was in good condition up to 10 miles from the city. The remaining parts were still under re-construction thus it was quite dusty. On the way, we can see the residential area (still under construction) for the families from the villages which have to be relocated for the gigantic hydro-project comprised of seven dams including Myitson Dam.

At around 11:30am, I am at Myit-son. This is the entrance to the scenic confluence of Maykha and Malikha (N’maikha in local Kachin language). The rocky and wild Malikha and the gentle and wide Maykha both find their sources at the Himalaya glaciers and form Ayeyarwaddy at this confluence. Ayeyarwaddy bisects the country's northern mountains and the central heartland and then empties through the Ayeyarwaddy Delter into the Andaman Sea.







The water at confluence was muddy especially along Malikha due to heavy gold mining. Myitson was completely different from what I have seen before. It was the clear water flowing over the smooth stones; I mean in the video clips taken years ago. But now, it doesn't appear as one of the most beautiful part of the country.



I took a boat ride along Maykha to see the small traditional gold collection set ups. The first thing you are going to see from the front of a gold collection set up is the mixture of water and sand flowing on to the plastic sheet which is placed on the surface of the gutter. This sand carries fine black particles and the pieces of gold. To get this mixture flowing down, people are working from the pit behind the gutter. Water from the river was pumped onto the ground. A head, a hose and a powerful pump is used to pump up the slurry onto the top of the gutter. A strainer is placed at the top of the gutter to filter the stones and pebbles. The sand trapped on the green plastic sheet is collected and the pieces of gold are extracted by using Mercury. The sand and stones flown down through the gutter will be left at the place.









I met some girls panning the tiny pieces of gold from the abandoned piles of stones and sand. They use small wooden tray to collect the gold particles. The black particles inside the pan are usually seen together with gold. For the gold miners, it is an indication of the presence of gold. The yellow particles are the pieces of gold.





Another way to collect gold is by pumping up from the river bed. People work in groups on the rafts. Divers worked for hours in the water pumping up the mixture of water and sand while others are performing other tasks on the raft. I saw some bamboo rafts in the middle of the river down stream of the confluence.



However, these traditional ways of gold panning and collections may not make a big difference to the clarity of the water. I saw two or three buses over-filled with people traveling north of Myit Son. There are many gold mines in which the ground could be scooped with the bulldozers. I didn’t have a chance to visit such sites due to my short stay. It was an interesting day trip to the place where you can collect gold from the ground.