In Kyaukme the morning of the 16th, I took an early morning walk, starting about 7, through the just starting morning street market. I was cold in the early morning chill, and felt sorry for the barefooted monks, mostly children, going from shop to shop for alms on the cold streets. Most people were warmly bundled up in coats and wool hats. Several motorcycles were heavily burdened with vegetables and other stuff from the market, much of the merchandise in small plastic bags hanging from the sides or back of the motorcycle. These motorcycles are driven around town or out to villages and serve as mobile markets. I also wandered through Kyaukme's large indoor market before eating a breakfast of hot Shan noodle soup and tea. After breakfast the town had warmed up some, and I walked around some more.
About 11:30 a young guy from the hotel led me to the bus stand for Hsipaw, where we sat in a tea shop drinking tea for an hour and a half before the noon bus left at about 1. Besides passengers, the small bus was crammed full of eggs in cardboard trays (about 3000 eggs, I estimated), wooden crates of betel nut, and other stuff. It took about an hour to reach Hsipaw to the northeast, crossing the train tracks at least twice along the way, along with a river. Hsipaw, surrounded by hills, is about 1500 feet elevation. I checked into Mr. Charles Guest House, now a big complex catering to tourists who come here to trek in the hills. In the lobby is a photo of Mr. Charles with his family at his son's wedding to a very beautiful woman. In the photo Mr. Charles wears a white suit and a black cowboy hat.
I walked to the train station. The Mandalay train had just arrived, only about 20 minutes late. I watched some local folks unload huge bundles from a small boxcar at the back of the passenger train. The train station is in a lovely location, surrounded by huge rain trees. I hung around until after the train, its upper class carriages now empty of foreigners, departed for Lashio, further northeast.
I walked to the wide river, maybe 500 feet wide, that flows along the edge of town. This river, the Dokhtawady, eventually flows into the Irrawaddy just south of Mandalay. Just before reaching the river, I passed by some old colonial era godowns, or warehouses, and a big banyan tree right on the river with nat (spirit) shrines all around it. I walked through a late afternoon street market along the river and then retraced my steps to an outdoor restaurant right on the river, with good views of the river and hills both down and up river. I ate dinner there about 5, as the sun set. One of the very nice waitresses wore a red and white Santa Claus hat. For about four dollars, a little high for Burma, I had a very good dinner of fish in oyster sauce over rice, while incense burned around my table. It was a little chilly on the river, and I felt a cold coming on, so I walked back to my hotel about 6, at dark.
My cold was in full force the next morning. After a slow start to the morning, I started a walk to a waterfall in mid morning under a sunny sky. It had been foggy earlier in the morning. I was sneezing and sniffling as I walked on a dirt road southwest from town through harvested rice paddies. Stacks of harvested rice were everywhere. Beyond the ice paddies I reached cemeteries, one for Buddhists, another for Chinese, and another for Muslims. Beyond the cemeteries, on the crest of a slight hill, I sighted the waterfall, more than a hundred feet high, across a little valley. The dirt road turned into a path, passing simple houses and crop land. Corn and bananas grew, along with lots of wildflowers, yellow, violet, and red.
A short final steep climb took me to the base of the waterfall, composed of at least seven strands of water tumbling into a pool, with a sort of small cavern behind the waterfall. To the left a path led to a nat shrine in a shallow cavern under the rocky cliffs. Small red flags hung all about it. Inside the wooden palisade were altars, a carved wooden horse maybe five feet high, and some representations of weapons, including guns, carved in wood.
I spent about an hour at the waterfall and shrine, and then headed back to town the way I had come. It took me about two hours to get back, with a few stops. The skies had clouded up and there were even a few drops of rain, very unusual in the dry season. For a long time I watched men using a portable threshing machine to separate rice from its stalks. From a stack men fed big bundles of rice stalks into the machine, which shook the rice kernels loose and dropped then into baskets held underneath. The baskets when full were poured into big sacks. The now unburdened stalks were shot off into the air, landing into a pile a few feet away. The men seemed amused that I was watching and taking photos of what they were doing. Once finished, they moved on to the next stack. I got back to the hotel about 3 and sat on the balcony chatting with other tourists until about 5, when I went back to the river restaurant for dinner. During the night there were a couple of brief, but hard rainstorms.
In the morning the ground was wet and the sky cloudy. The sun didn't come out for good until early afternoon. About 9 I set out on a walk and didn't return to the hotel until about 4. I walked first to the former palace of the last sao pha (Shan for "sky lord"), or local Shan prince, of Hsipaw, on the northern edge of town. The now decrepit mansion was built in 1924 for an Oxford educated son of the then sao pha, who didn't want to live in his father's wooden palace, which was nearby but later destroyed in World War II.
I looked around a bit outside before being invited into the sitting room on one side of the building by a woman probably in her 60's. She told me her name was Fern and that her husband is the nephew of the last sao pha. This last sao pha, a brother of the one who built the mansion, who died without children, disappeared after being arrested at the time of the 1962 coup. The government has always denied that he was even arrested.
He had been educated in Denver, Colorado, at the Colorado College of Mining, where he met and married a Fulbright scholar from Austria. They returned to Hsipaw in 1954, where she converted to Buddhism and had two children, both girls. There are many wonderful old photos in the sitting room, and they seemed to live a very happy life until 1962. The wife and daughters, their lives made very difficult by the ruling junta, left for the United States in 1964, when the girls were 8 and 6, and they haven't returned. (In Mr. Charles Guest House is a photo taken recently of the two daughters.) In 1994 the wife, by then remarried, wrote a book about her experiences, which Fern let me look through. I spent about two hours there, most of it talking with her, and she was very knowledgeable and interesting. Eventually, several other tourists also showed up.
From the palace I walked further north, and then west, to another nat shrine, with some very friendly little kids around it. Further west are some ruined stupas, one with a tree growing on top. Even further west are two teak monasteries on stilts. Outside of one of them, a young monk was building a shelf case, cutting rough boards with a saw and then nailing them together. The larger monastery, built in 1848, has a Buddha made of bamboo as the centerpiece of its altar. The interior of the monastery contains 142 teak pillars and on the wooden floor several child monks sat reciting under the supervision of an old monk sitting on a bench and smoking a cheroot. Both monasteries were old and rickety.
I walked back towards town and again passed the palace about 2, but instead of heading back to town I took a road that headed east, eventually along the river. It took me past harvested rice paddies filled with rice stacks, vegetable patches, and then along simple houses in a very nice tree shaded village along the river. Eventually I reached the railroad tracks and turned back. I had dinner again along the river just before nightfall.
My cold was better the next morning, but I decided to postpone a trek into the hills. Instead, I walked in the morning fog to the bus station before 7 and left Hsipaw at 8 on a big bus headed further northeast to Lashio, two hours away. The bus traveled through rolling countryside, with some fog on the hills in the distance. It was sunny in Lashio, a big town of 130,000 at about 2800 feet elevation, which was the start of the old Burma Road to China during World War II, at least until the Japanese conquered Burma in 1942.
I left Lashio almost immediately in a share taxi bound for Muse on the Chinese border, a route only recently opened for foreigners. For about ten dollars I got a fairly comfortable seat in the front, with three others seated in the back. The driver offered me a big wad of betel nut as we left, and laughed when I declined.
I enjoyed the five hour trip north to the border on a good road. There were lots of trucks coming and going. The first hour or so was not particularly scenic, through a sort of plateau. We crossed a river at Hsenwi and then began a steep climb, from about 2000 feet elevation to about 4000 feet, on a series of switchbacks. There were good views of the valley below, but the many slow trucks on the road at times made the going slow. There were trees, but the hills were mostly covered with brown grass. After the switchbacks we traveled up and down through the hills, some of which were tree covered, rising to about 5000 feet. There were few towns along the way, but some of the valleys were planted with rice, corn, and other crops. The sky was sunny but the air at times a little chilly. We crossed the Tropic of Cancer on the way. Muse is at about 24 degrees latitude.
Sometime after 1 we made a lunch stop in a little town called Namhpakka. The countryside after Namhpakka was particularly pretty, with some of the tallest poinsettias I've ever seen, the plants rising to about 20 feet high. Along the road there were also lots of those yellow wildflowers and big piles and bins of corncobs, the most orange colored I've ever seen.
Nearing Muse, we passed an enormously long line of parked trucks on the road's right hand side, apparently waiting for clearance to get to the border and cross. There were hundreds of them. I wonder how long they have to wait, and how much they have to pay to get clearance.
We reached Muse, at about 2800-3000 feet elevation, about 3, and I was set down near the clock tower in the town center. The first hotel I went to was not licensed to accept foreigners. But they directed me to another, which charged $40 a night (and 25,000 kyat, about $25, for the same room for Burmese). They directed me to another, which also wanted $40 a night. They in turn directed me to another, the Muse Motel, which charged only $20 for a very nice room through with a hard mattress.
I checked in and then took a walk, figuring the main road through town would eventually lead me to the border. The Chinese town of Ruili is on the other side of a small stream which is the border. It took me almost an hour to reach the border and the big, fancy post on the Chinese side. On the way, a road that obviously bypasses the downtown joined the main road and was heavy trafficked by big trucks. Before reaching the border I could see the big new buildings and a Chinese flag on the Chinese side, beyond a litter filled, almost dry stream bed and a wire fence on the Chinese side of the river. This stream eventually reaches the Irrawaddy south of Katha.
A big traffic jam of big trucks led to the border. I walked right up to the border fence and watched some guys changing money through the fence. A Chinese army guy in ill-fitting uniform stood at the border crossing. A bunch of very Shan looking people hurried to the border post from Burma carrying red Chinese passports. A lot of Shan live in the region over the border.
It took me about 45 minutes to walk back to my hotel. On the way I spotted another border crossing I had missed before, the big Chinese post mostly hidden by the construction in progress of a Burmese post. I reached my hotel a little before it got dark. Lots of ethnic Chinese live in Muse, and in fact in many places throughout Burma. Many have lived in Burma for decades or even centuries, but there has also been a big recent influx. The doctor I met in Pyin Oo Lwin was unhappy about their increasing numbers. They have been buying up much of the land in places, including Pyin Oo Lwin, I was told.
I had come to Muse just to see the Burma Road, so I went back down it the next day. The early morning was overcast and drizzly. My thermometer registered 64 degrees in my room and it felt much colder outside. I had steaming hot Shan noodle soup for breakfast in a very crowded and friendly cafe and made my way to the share taxi stand about 9:30, as the sun was coming out. My taxi finally left about 11:30, after a long wait and a trip to a neighborhood in the direction of the border to pick up a woman. My front seat cost me about $12 this time.
I enjoyed the trip back. The driver was friendly, but very slow. We stopped for a good Shan lunch in the same town we had stopped in the day before. Again, there were lots of trucks on the road. We finally reached Lashio at about 5. I thought I might have to spend the night there, but a big bus was leaving at 6, bound for Mandalay and perhaps further, and I was able to buy a ticket to Hsipaw. (In fact, several big buses left between 5 and 6.) Traveling in the dark, my bus reached Hsipaw a little before 8. I walked to Mr. Charles Guest House, checked in, and ate dinner there.
About 11:30 a young guy from the hotel led me to the bus stand for Hsipaw, where we sat in a tea shop drinking tea for an hour and a half before the noon bus left at about 1. Besides passengers, the small bus was crammed full of eggs in cardboard trays (about 3000 eggs, I estimated), wooden crates of betel nut, and other stuff. It took about an hour to reach Hsipaw to the northeast, crossing the train tracks at least twice along the way, along with a river. Hsipaw, surrounded by hills, is about 1500 feet elevation. I checked into Mr. Charles Guest House, now a big complex catering to tourists who come here to trek in the hills. In the lobby is a photo of Mr. Charles with his family at his son's wedding to a very beautiful woman. In the photo Mr. Charles wears a white suit and a black cowboy hat.
I walked to the train station. The Mandalay train had just arrived, only about 20 minutes late. I watched some local folks unload huge bundles from a small boxcar at the back of the passenger train. The train station is in a lovely location, surrounded by huge rain trees. I hung around until after the train, its upper class carriages now empty of foreigners, departed for Lashio, further northeast.
I walked to the wide river, maybe 500 feet wide, that flows along the edge of town. This river, the Dokhtawady, eventually flows into the Irrawaddy just south of Mandalay. Just before reaching the river, I passed by some old colonial era godowns, or warehouses, and a big banyan tree right on the river with nat (spirit) shrines all around it. I walked through a late afternoon street market along the river and then retraced my steps to an outdoor restaurant right on the river, with good views of the river and hills both down and up river. I ate dinner there about 5, as the sun set. One of the very nice waitresses wore a red and white Santa Claus hat. For about four dollars, a little high for Burma, I had a very good dinner of fish in oyster sauce over rice, while incense burned around my table. It was a little chilly on the river, and I felt a cold coming on, so I walked back to my hotel about 6, at dark.
My cold was in full force the next morning. After a slow start to the morning, I started a walk to a waterfall in mid morning under a sunny sky. It had been foggy earlier in the morning. I was sneezing and sniffling as I walked on a dirt road southwest from town through harvested rice paddies. Stacks of harvested rice were everywhere. Beyond the ice paddies I reached cemeteries, one for Buddhists, another for Chinese, and another for Muslims. Beyond the cemeteries, on the crest of a slight hill, I sighted the waterfall, more than a hundred feet high, across a little valley. The dirt road turned into a path, passing simple houses and crop land. Corn and bananas grew, along with lots of wildflowers, yellow, violet, and red.
A short final steep climb took me to the base of the waterfall, composed of at least seven strands of water tumbling into a pool, with a sort of small cavern behind the waterfall. To the left a path led to a nat shrine in a shallow cavern under the rocky cliffs. Small red flags hung all about it. Inside the wooden palisade were altars, a carved wooden horse maybe five feet high, and some representations of weapons, including guns, carved in wood.
I spent about an hour at the waterfall and shrine, and then headed back to town the way I had come. It took me about two hours to get back, with a few stops. The skies had clouded up and there were even a few drops of rain, very unusual in the dry season. For a long time I watched men using a portable threshing machine to separate rice from its stalks. From a stack men fed big bundles of rice stalks into the machine, which shook the rice kernels loose and dropped then into baskets held underneath. The baskets when full were poured into big sacks. The now unburdened stalks were shot off into the air, landing into a pile a few feet away. The men seemed amused that I was watching and taking photos of what they were doing. Once finished, they moved on to the next stack. I got back to the hotel about 3 and sat on the balcony chatting with other tourists until about 5, when I went back to the river restaurant for dinner. During the night there were a couple of brief, but hard rainstorms.
In the morning the ground was wet and the sky cloudy. The sun didn't come out for good until early afternoon. About 9 I set out on a walk and didn't return to the hotel until about 4. I walked first to the former palace of the last sao pha (Shan for "sky lord"), or local Shan prince, of Hsipaw, on the northern edge of town. The now decrepit mansion was built in 1924 for an Oxford educated son of the then sao pha, who didn't want to live in his father's wooden palace, which was nearby but later destroyed in World War II.
I looked around a bit outside before being invited into the sitting room on one side of the building by a woman probably in her 60's. She told me her name was Fern and that her husband is the nephew of the last sao pha. This last sao pha, a brother of the one who built the mansion, who died without children, disappeared after being arrested at the time of the 1962 coup. The government has always denied that he was even arrested.
He had been educated in Denver, Colorado, at the Colorado College of Mining, where he met and married a Fulbright scholar from Austria. They returned to Hsipaw in 1954, where she converted to Buddhism and had two children, both girls. There are many wonderful old photos in the sitting room, and they seemed to live a very happy life until 1962. The wife and daughters, their lives made very difficult by the ruling junta, left for the United States in 1964, when the girls were 8 and 6, and they haven't returned. (In Mr. Charles Guest House is a photo taken recently of the two daughters.) In 1994 the wife, by then remarried, wrote a book about her experiences, which Fern let me look through. I spent about two hours there, most of it talking with her, and she was very knowledgeable and interesting. Eventually, several other tourists also showed up.
From the palace I walked further north, and then west, to another nat shrine, with some very friendly little kids around it. Further west are some ruined stupas, one with a tree growing on top. Even further west are two teak monasteries on stilts. Outside of one of them, a young monk was building a shelf case, cutting rough boards with a saw and then nailing them together. The larger monastery, built in 1848, has a Buddha made of bamboo as the centerpiece of its altar. The interior of the monastery contains 142 teak pillars and on the wooden floor several child monks sat reciting under the supervision of an old monk sitting on a bench and smoking a cheroot. Both monasteries were old and rickety.
I walked back towards town and again passed the palace about 2, but instead of heading back to town I took a road that headed east, eventually along the river. It took me past harvested rice paddies filled with rice stacks, vegetable patches, and then along simple houses in a very nice tree shaded village along the river. Eventually I reached the railroad tracks and turned back. I had dinner again along the river just before nightfall.
My cold was better the next morning, but I decided to postpone a trek into the hills. Instead, I walked in the morning fog to the bus station before 7 and left Hsipaw at 8 on a big bus headed further northeast to Lashio, two hours away. The bus traveled through rolling countryside, with some fog on the hills in the distance. It was sunny in Lashio, a big town of 130,000 at about 2800 feet elevation, which was the start of the old Burma Road to China during World War II, at least until the Japanese conquered Burma in 1942.
I left Lashio almost immediately in a share taxi bound for Muse on the Chinese border, a route only recently opened for foreigners. For about ten dollars I got a fairly comfortable seat in the front, with three others seated in the back. The driver offered me a big wad of betel nut as we left, and laughed when I declined.
I enjoyed the five hour trip north to the border on a good road. There were lots of trucks coming and going. The first hour or so was not particularly scenic, through a sort of plateau. We crossed a river at Hsenwi and then began a steep climb, from about 2000 feet elevation to about 4000 feet, on a series of switchbacks. There were good views of the valley below, but the many slow trucks on the road at times made the going slow. There were trees, but the hills were mostly covered with brown grass. After the switchbacks we traveled up and down through the hills, some of which were tree covered, rising to about 5000 feet. There were few towns along the way, but some of the valleys were planted with rice, corn, and other crops. The sky was sunny but the air at times a little chilly. We crossed the Tropic of Cancer on the way. Muse is at about 24 degrees latitude.
Sometime after 1 we made a lunch stop in a little town called Namhpakka. The countryside after Namhpakka was particularly pretty, with some of the tallest poinsettias I've ever seen, the plants rising to about 20 feet high. Along the road there were also lots of those yellow wildflowers and big piles and bins of corncobs, the most orange colored I've ever seen.
Nearing Muse, we passed an enormously long line of parked trucks on the road's right hand side, apparently waiting for clearance to get to the border and cross. There were hundreds of them. I wonder how long they have to wait, and how much they have to pay to get clearance.
We reached Muse, at about 2800-3000 feet elevation, about 3, and I was set down near the clock tower in the town center. The first hotel I went to was not licensed to accept foreigners. But they directed me to another, which charged $40 a night (and 25,000 kyat, about $25, for the same room for Burmese). They directed me to another, which also wanted $40 a night. They in turn directed me to another, the Muse Motel, which charged only $20 for a very nice room through with a hard mattress.
I checked in and then took a walk, figuring the main road through town would eventually lead me to the border. The Chinese town of Ruili is on the other side of a small stream which is the border. It took me almost an hour to reach the border and the big, fancy post on the Chinese side. On the way, a road that obviously bypasses the downtown joined the main road and was heavy trafficked by big trucks. Before reaching the border I could see the big new buildings and a Chinese flag on the Chinese side, beyond a litter filled, almost dry stream bed and a wire fence on the Chinese side of the river. This stream eventually reaches the Irrawaddy south of Katha.
A big traffic jam of big trucks led to the border. I walked right up to the border fence and watched some guys changing money through the fence. A Chinese army guy in ill-fitting uniform stood at the border crossing. A bunch of very Shan looking people hurried to the border post from Burma carrying red Chinese passports. A lot of Shan live in the region over the border.
It took me about 45 minutes to walk back to my hotel. On the way I spotted another border crossing I had missed before, the big Chinese post mostly hidden by the construction in progress of a Burmese post. I reached my hotel a little before it got dark. Lots of ethnic Chinese live in Muse, and in fact in many places throughout Burma. Many have lived in Burma for decades or even centuries, but there has also been a big recent influx. The doctor I met in Pyin Oo Lwin was unhappy about their increasing numbers. They have been buying up much of the land in places, including Pyin Oo Lwin, I was told.
I had come to Muse just to see the Burma Road, so I went back down it the next day. The early morning was overcast and drizzly. My thermometer registered 64 degrees in my room and it felt much colder outside. I had steaming hot Shan noodle soup for breakfast in a very crowded and friendly cafe and made my way to the share taxi stand about 9:30, as the sun was coming out. My taxi finally left about 11:30, after a long wait and a trip to a neighborhood in the direction of the border to pick up a woman. My front seat cost me about $12 this time.
I enjoyed the trip back. The driver was friendly, but very slow. We stopped for a good Shan lunch in the same town we had stopped in the day before. Again, there were lots of trucks on the road. We finally reached Lashio at about 5. I thought I might have to spend the night there, but a big bus was leaving at 6, bound for Mandalay and perhaps further, and I was able to buy a ticket to Hsipaw. (In fact, several big buses left between 5 and 6.) Traveling in the dark, my bus reached Hsipaw a little before 8. I walked to Mr. Charles Guest House, checked in, and ate dinner there.
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