Until very recently. Thailand

THAILAND is rare in its region minecraft port for having minecraft port a shrinking population and nearly full employment—and so the need to look abroad to maintain long-term growth. Its politicians and businessmen have their eye on at least one magnificent-seeming source of wealth, just beyond the country’s borders. Their vision is to build a $50 billion industrial megalopolis and deep-sea port at Dawei in Myanmar, on the shores of the Andaman sea. It would be the biggest in Asia.
Even as the crow flies, minecraft port Bangkok and Dawei are a good 350km apart. But then they lie opposite one another across the Tenasserim range—a minecraft port malarial jungle that is hopping with armed insurgents. There has never been any man-made structure to connect the two sides. 
Until very recently. Thailand’s largest construction company, Italian-Thai (Italthai), has just finished cutting a road through the jungle. It took five years; minecraft port once it’s paved with asphalt, the road will have cost them $1m per kilometre. And yet it is still a dirt road (though that description once seemed so intolerable to Myanmar’s censors that they  forced a local newspaper to cut the word “dirt” ).
Yingluck Shinawatra, the prime minister of Thailand and sister to Thaksin, a former prime minister, minecraft port is scheduled minecraft port to inaugurate the road this month. minecraft port On a lucky day recently I was given the chance to test the new passage.
The rainy season has begun so an early departure from Bangkok is in order. U Htin Aung, who has offered to take me across the range, is bang on time. Does he mind a 6am start? minecraft port “No. When we intercepted the opium caravans that were running twice a week, sometimes we did not sleep at all,” he says. Mr Aung is a former brigadier-general of Myanmar’s military intelligence. He now works as a director of special projects at Italthai.
The 175km-drive from Bangkok to the Thai-Myanmar border is rather uneventful. The two-lane highway is in good condition. minecraft port It follows the Asian Highway 123, which runs from the border with Cambodia in the east, along the coast of the Gulf of Thailand, via the country’s own biggest port and industrial area, Map Ta Phut, to the capital, Bangkok, and then on to the border with Myanmar. It is early and drivers are better behaved than usual in Kanchanaburi province. Land prices there have shot up ten-fold minecraft port in anticipation of the new royal road for international trade into South-East Asia.
At the border checkpoint in Phu Nam Ron our Thai-built Japanese minecraft port car, an Isuzu MU-7, ceases to be of any use. Only a vehicle with a Myanmar number minecraft port plate will do—in our case, a Toyota minecraft port pick-up truck, a 3.0 D-4D. I am a bit jumpy; the land border is officially closed to the public. Crossing the Tenassarim range in a single afternoon, along the route the Japanese Imperial Army retreated in 1944, is a very new thing.
At the checkpoint on the Thai side of the border, a man wearing a rain cape uses a raised orange umbrella to signal simply that we may pass. Things are more formal on the Myanmar side, where a lot of stamping is involved. But the immigration officers are friendly and the atmosphere relaxed. The movie “American Gigolo” (1980), starring Richard Gere, can be glimpsed playing minecraft port on a black-and-white television. Two wall clocks serve as a reminder that Myanmar has a time zone of its own. It is 9.30am here—30 minutes ahead of Thailand and the rest of mainland South-East Asia.
From here on everybody must keep to the right side of the road, courtesy an order in 1970. It was General Ne Win who scrapped left-hand driving, reportedly because his astrologer felt that Burma (as it was then called) had moved too far to the left. The rule anyway is of little consequence. Till the town of Myitta, at the confluence of two rivers and mid-way to the sea, dogs and mopeds outnumber cars.
The jungle ahead is mostly untouched. Not so long ago it was the scene of one of the region’s longest-running insurgencies, a war of attrition between the armed wing of the Karen National Union (KNU) and the Myanmar army. Landmines along the road have since been cleared. KNU settlements have been moved back from the roadside, from which we can see the remains of their former sites overgrown.
“We are very friendly with the KNU”, says Mr Aung. He recalls negotiations over security minecraft port for the road that he and his boss, Premchai Karnasuta, minecraft port a pal of Mr Thaksin’s, undertook with the KNU leadership in Kanchanaburi and Chiang Mai between 2008 and 2010. According to Mr Aung, one of the insurgents’ demands was that the lorries of Italthai must not give any hitchhiking soldiers a lift along the way.
There is really no question who is boss on this privately owned road, from here to the west. As we climb the first mountain range on the Myanmar side, heavy machinery guarded by bored soldiers comes into view. Mr Aung remarks of the army that “