Take-Aways

Kalaw is an old British hill station nestled in the bowl formed by green slopes. It’s got a sky blue and white mosque, a terracotta church, a field of white stupas and a golden Buddhist temple. The market is at the heart centre of the town and serves roasted snake souvlaki, very artistically arranged in a zig zag shape. First afternoon there it rained and electricity deserted us. But we whiled away the afternoon drinking the ubiquitous “Coffee Mix”, advertised on every Myanmar billboard. It is an impossibly sweet instant drink of milky coffee with a caramelised tinge. Highly recommended! Particularly after a full day’s trek in the surrounding Palaung tribe mountains. Idyllic, spectacular and very very peaceful except for that exciting moment where I got attacked by a leech. Stuck on the lower left leg of my jeans it writhed and squirmed its body giving me the illusion of an alien piercing under my skin. Fortunately it was nowhere near but as it gets stuck you cannot see its head so the illusion is quite a good one. Other than that the trek was blissful. It went past rice paddies, pine forests, tobacco and green tea plantations (by the way, green tea salad is to die for). There was a festival at a neighbouring village so groups of young girls and boys were heading there leaving the villages very quiet with only the occasional man having stayed behind to tend to the water buffaloes. For lunch we stopped at the mountain village of Pinnedin and while a pounding rain raged above us we had tea and noodles in a village hut. Waiting for the rain to do its worst, we looked at a Palaung language prayer book, watched the granny of the house tend to her grandchild and weave and generally relaxed next to the wood fire around the cooking pot. Nilar, our guide, from Sam’s family trekking business – who by the way give hospitality its full meaning - is a pretty girl with a long dark braid and an orange Chinese collar outfit. She looked like she belonged in an etching of a Vietnamese paddy field but is my hero as far as leeches are concerned. She and her family belong to the Shan tribe, one of the most important and oldest minorities in Myanmar. A minority that aside from Buddha also worships natas or spirits that is generally good to keep on your side. This division of Burma has historically been very independent and self-ruled. There was a time when constitutionally they could have declared independence from the Union. Of course all that “nonsense” was got rid of in 1962 when the military seized the power they hold to this day. It is cooler and wetter than either Yangon or Inlay but only for the climate not the welcome.