Days 0 and 1 - In transit
Day 2 - Phuket
Day 3 - Setting sail
Day 4 - 115/Nyaung Wee
Day 5 - Bo Cho/Ko Phawet
Day 6 - Wa Ale Kyunn/Sitta Galet
Day 7 - Nyaung Wee/Than Yoke
Day 8 - Myauk Ni/Thay Yae
Day 9 - Back to Phuket
Day 10 - Return to the USA
Myanmar (Burma): January 2017
After breakfast, there was some volunteer rope-making (turns out we had another small boat captain on board!) before we got to Bo Cho Island and the Moken village of Ma Kyone Galet.
While nominally a Moken village of good size, Ma Kyone Galet in reality is something like 250 Moken and 500 Burmese, so it's really more Burmese-- and you can tell the two populatiotcans apart. We were greeted by pufferfish drying as we landed, and a brief tour of the visitor center by some Italian NGO's helping to train national park rangers in the area.
The village itself isn't much-- the Moken are actually boat people who have been forced to move from their traditional boats (kabang) to land, and they have very minimal beliefs in possessions-- literally, only what you need. So most of the "sights" and the good-sized school are all Burmese-built, not to mention the Buddhist temple. For some reason there's also a huge jetty, and I'm still not sure why...?
Sailed to Ko Phawet that afternoon, and saw a massive flock of plain-pouched hornbills before dinner-- Captain Brian said someone counted 70 of them, which is nearly half (150) of the total population of Lampi National Park!
Also, I think somewhere in the day the crew traded with a nearby squid boat, got squid so fresh you could still see it changing colors as Pui butchered it for dinner!