Before it empties into the sea, the Salween enhances Mawlamyine’s charm, flowing past its Strand Road where families stroll to view the sunset across the broad stream. Our party recently took the most scenic route to Mawlamyine: by car from Yangon to Hpa-An, the pleasant capital of Myanmar’s Karen State, and from there by hired boat down the Salween, one of the world’s longest, still free-flowing rivers. Tourists are still few compared to an influx to other areas of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, that followed the end of military rule in 2011 and the electoral victory of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi last year. It’s a long, 300-kilometer (186-mile) road journey from Myanmar’s international gateway of Yangon, the other options being a rickety train ride or sporadic flights.įor decades, foreigners were banned from the area due to an insurgency. The Burmese women he noticed can be seen there too, some wearing the traditional sarongs long discarded in most of Asia, some chatting on smartphones as they circumambulate the stupa in proper Buddhist fashion.ĭespite the intrusions of modern technology and being Myanmar’s fourth largest city, Mawlamyine (as Moulmein is now officially spelled) still maintains an air of distance from the world’s mainstreams, in part because of its geography. Its soaring, gilded stupa gleams on a ridge overlooking a city of greenery and watery expanses which has retained links to the British colonial past that Kipling chronicled.
Today, 128 years later after Kipling’s infatuation, the Kyaik Than Lan pagoda remains a prime attraction for pilgrims and tourists. “By the old Moulmein pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea/There’s a Burma girl a-settin,′ and I know she thinks o’ me.,” go the opening lines of “Mandalay,” verses imbued with nostalgia for the wind-swept palms and twinkling temple bells the young poet left behind for the gray skies of England. MAWLAMYINE, Myanmar (AP) - On the stairway rising to Moulmein’s great Buddhist shrine, the visiting British writer Rudyard Kipling was inspired to pen one of the most anthologized poems of the English language.
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