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SNAPSHOTS / TRADITIONAL UMBRELLAS
Exposure
20 EXPOSURE / THINGYAN WATER FESTIVAL
Authentic Mon food near Shwedagon at
Jana Mon BY LIZ DICKIE PHOTOS BY MARIE STARR
N
estled among the streets behind Shwedagon Pagoda, Jana Mon is a good spot for a post-Pagoda bite, though a little hard to find. However, it is on Google Maps, so with a savvy taxi driver and a little gumption you can find it without too much bother. This bijou restaurant has a cosy atmosphere, with cute little decorations dotted about the place. It does get busy, however, so it might be advisable to make a booking – though the delightful wait staff will happily squish 7 or 8 people family-style around a table. Jana Mon doesn’t serve beer or alcohol, but you can bring your own. There’s a seasonal selection of fresh juices which are not overly sweet, so you might be tempted to skip the booze entirely. At first glance, the menu looks like the typical laminated A4 page dotted with price stickers, but on closer inspection, you find exotica such as jellyfish, snails, jackfruit, and wild mangosteen. For the less adventurous, there’s a solid offering of more familiar-sounding curries and salads. We were lucky to run into a Mon friend who’d wanted to try Jana Mon, and assured us the menu was indeed typically Mon. After much deliberation we ordered lemongrass beef patties, steamed squid
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INFOCUS / JANA MON RESTAURANT
with sticky rice, Mon spicy sour fish curry, jackfruit curry with pork and banana flower salad. It was hard to pass on the country style dishes and Mangosteen curry, but sadly there’s only so much one can eat. Although it took a while for our food to come, the waiters were beaming and affable and made us feel incredibly welcome. Complimentary sticky rice crackers speckled with black sesame kept our hunger at bay. When the food came, the feast was a delight. The lemongrass beef patties were crisp, tasty morsels – somewhat like Thai fish cakes. They were served with an excellent, punchy dipping sauce, the unusual kind of rare culinary experience that makes even the most jaded eyes widen with surprise. I’ll be thinking about that sauce for weeks. The stuffed squid might be a bit much for less adventurous diners, but it was fishy and delicious with just the right amount of bite – and good, fun messy eating. The spicy-sour fish curry had zesty, zingy flavours similar to Thai, but with a comforting savoury depth balanced with the aromatic lightness. It kisses you full on the chops and gives you a massive hug at the same time.
The jackfruit curry, contrary to my expectations, was not sweet but earthy, lifted by the freshness of the jackfruit and augmented by the herbaceous tang of Thai holy basil. The pork was a little bit chewy, but tasty. The banana flower salad consisted of crunchy slithers of damask banana flower tossed in a light, slightly spicy, citric dressing. Every dish was complimented by the coconut rice, a surprising green colour but with a deep, savoury flavour – no cloying sweetness here. Luckily our friends on the next table were feeling generous and let us try their country style duck, which is mind-blowing, and the chicken salad and veggie curry are likewise tasty. Mon food is light and fresh, and not remotely oily. Even if you overindulge, you feel pleasantly well-fed rather than engorged. So we decided that we’d earned dessert, seeing as we had a healthy dinner… right? In addition to being charmed by the food and atmosphere at Jana Mon, we were happy that the bill was only 20,000 MMK for all 5 dishes, rice, drinks and dessert. We’ll definitely be going back again soon. That country style duck has my name on it.
Departures
Mergui Scuba Diving Adventure Amazing dives now accessible from Myanmar side, including scuba certification
BY MARIE STARR PHOTOS BY PEPE SUAREZ
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DEPARTURES / MERGUI DIVE ADVENTURES
www.mymagicalmyanmar.com
O
ne of the world’s best scuba diving sites — Myanmar’s own Myeik or Mergui Archipelago now has a certified diving school that opens up an underwater world of exploration in the beautiful islands of Southeast Myanmar. Previously only available via expensive live-aboard boat trips from Thailand, a new company called Mergui Dive Adventures aims to promote scuba diving in the island chain that has been quiet for so many years while similar islands in neighboring Thailand have become overrun with tourists. Director May Khine Soe of Mergui Dive Adventures says while there are other diving schools at Ngwesaung, they can’t offer the same access to the beauty of the Mergui Archipelago.
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www.mymagicalmyanmar.com
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Already divers and friends of Mergui Dive Adventure have been organizing clean-up diving trips in the underwater landscape, removing ghost nets left from the region’s busy fishing industry that pose a serious threat to aquatic life in the Archipelago. The group of clean-up divers swim through the affected areas, dislodging the nets and other waste from the corals and removing them from the sea. An ongoing awareness campaign helps local fishermen and community leaders understand the need to keep the aquatic environment as beautiful as possible. “We have put all our passion in this dive centre. Whenever we find something good we want to share. When you see a trainer’s passion — it helps you find the passion yourself.”
48 DEPARTURES / MERGUI DIVE ADVENTURES
Myanmar Section
ၿမိတ္ၿမိဳ မ႔ ွ ေရငုပ္စြန္႔စားခန္း မယ္ရီစတား
ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာရရွိႏိုင္ၿပီျဖစ္တဲ့ တရား၀င္ ေရငုပ္ခြင့္ လတ္မွတ္ အပါအ၀င္ အံ့အားသင့္ဖြယ္ ေရငုပ္စြန္႔စားခန္းမ်ား
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MYANMAR SECTION / DEPARTURES
လံုျခံဳမႈအသိအျမင္နည္းပါးျခင္းနဲ ့ ကမ္းေျခေတြမွာ သတင္းႀကီးတဲ့
အႏ ၱရာယ္ႀကီး
ေၾကာင္းေတြနဲ႔
ေရေအာက္ေရစီး
ေရဆြဲေတြေၾကာင့္
သန္ရ ႔ င ွ း္ ေရး ေရငုပသ ္ မားအဖြက ႔ဲ ယခင္ငါးဖမ္းခဲ့ ေသာေနရာေတြတစ္ေလွ်ာက္ကူးခတ္ျပီး ပိုက္ကြန္
လူေတြက
ေတြကို လိုက္လံျဖဳတ္ျခင္း၊ သႏ ၱာ ေက်ာက္တန္းေတြ
ပင္လယ္ဆိုင္ရာအပန္းေျဖလႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြမွာ ပါ၀င္
မွာ ျငိတြယ္ေနတဲ့ အမိႈက္သရိုက္ေတြကိုဖယ္ရွား
ပက္သက္ရန္ တခါတရံမွာတြန္႔ဆုတ္ေနတတ္ ၾကပါ
ျခင္းမ်ား ျပဳလုပ္ပါတယ္။
တယ္။
ေဒသခံငါးဖမ္းသမားေတြနဲ ့ရပ္ရြာေခါင္းေဆာင္
ဒါေၾကာင့္ပဲ Mergui Dive Adventures အဖြဲ ့
မ်ားကလည္းအသိအျမင္တိုးပြားေစရန္ စည္းရံုးလံႈ႔
က အစပိုင္းမွာေတာ့ မ်ားေသာအားျဖင့္ ႏုိင္ငံျခား
ေဆာ္မႈေတြေၾကာင့္
ဧည့္သည္ေတြကိုပဲေမွ်ာ္လင့္ထားေပမယ့္ ျမန္မာလူ
ပါတ္၀န္းက်င္အျဖစ္ ဆက္လက္ေစာင့္ေရွာက္ရန္လို
မ်ိဳးေတြ ၾ ကားထဲ မွာေရငု ပ္ အားကစားပို မို လူ ၾ ကိဳ က္
အပ္ေၾကာင္းနားလည္လာျပီျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
မ်ားလာေစဖို႔လည္း ကိန္းေအာင္းေနတဲ့ဆႏၵလည္းရွိ ပါတယ္။
လွပေသာေရေန
စိတ္အားထက္သန္မႈေတြကို
ဒီေရငုပ္စင္တာမွာ အကုန္ထည့္သြင္း ထားပါတယ္။
တည္းခိရ ု န္ႏင ွ ့္ ေလယာဥ္ခမွလြၿဲ ပီးေရငုပသ ္ ူေတြ လိုအပ္မယ့္
"ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ရဲ႔
ေဒသကို
အရာအားလံုးပါ၀င္အၿပီး
ငါးရက္
သင္တန္း ပရိုဂရမ္ကေတာ့ $750 က်သင့္မွာပါ။ ေဒၚေမခင္စိုးအတြက္ ေလွငါးစီး၊ ေျခာက္စီး ေပၚ ကေနတျခားေရငုပ္သူ ၁၀ ဦးမွ ၁၅ ဦး တစ္ေနရာ ထဲမွာ ဆင္းသက္လိုက္တဲ့အခါ ၾကံဳရတဲ့ တိတ္ဆိတ္ ျပီးအေႏွာင့္အယွက္ကင္းတဲ့
ေရငုပ္ဧရိယာေလးရဲ့
တန္ဖိုးကို Thailand မွာ ေရငုပ္တဲ့အေတြ႔အၾကံဳက ေန သင္ၾကားေပးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သႏ ၱာေက်ာက္တန္းေတြကို ေရွာက္ဖို႔အတြက္
သူမဟာေတာ့
ထိန္းသိမ္းေစာင့္ ၿမိတ္ကၽြန္းစုက
ေရငုပ္အဖြဲ ့ေလးကို သီးသန္ ့အဖြဲ ့ အေသးစားေလး အျဖစ္သာထားရွိရန္ရည္ရြယ္ထားပါတယ္။ ေရငုပ္သမားမ်ားနဲ ့ Mergui Dive Adventure ရဲ့ မိတ္ေဆြမ်ားက ေဒသဆိုင္ရာ ငါးဖမ္းလုပ္ငန္းက လူေတြ ခ်န္ရစ္ခဲ့တဲ့ ေရေအာက္က စြန္႔ပစ္ငါးဖမ္း ပိုက္ကြန္မ်ားကို ကၽြန္းစုေန ေရေနသတၱ၀ါမ်ားကို ေဘးအႏၱရာယ္မျဖစ္ေစႏိုင္ေအာင္လိုက္လံ ဖယ္ရွား ဖို႔အတြက္ လတ္တေလာမွာေဆာင္ရြက္ေနပါတယ္။
60 MYANMAR SECTION / SNAPSHOTS
ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို ့ ေကာင္းတာတစ္ခုခုရွာေတြ႔ရင္လည္း အဲဒါကို မွ်ေ၀ခ်င္ပါတယ္။ သင္တန္းက သင္တန္း ဆရာတစ္ဦးရဲ့ စိတ္အားထက္သန္မႈကိုေတြ ့ျမင္ရတဲ့ အခါမွာ သင့္ရဲ့၀ါသနာကို ကိုယ္ကိုယ္တိုင္ရွာေတြ႔ ႏိုင္ဖို႔လည္း အကူအညီျဖစ္မွာပါ။"
www.mymagicalmyanmar.com
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