I left Loikaw a little after 8 on the morning of the 2nd on a small bus heading northwest to Aungban, almost a hundred miles from Loikaw. The bus at first retraced the route I had taken to Loikaw from Taungoo, skirting the big lake north of Loikaw and south of Inle Lake and rising from about 3000 feet elevation at the lakeside to 4000 feet and more in the hilly terrain further north. The bus traveled slowly, with lots of stops for passengers to embark and disembark, but I enjoyed the journey. Rice fields and other crop land were along the route, and we often passed the railroad tracks. I had considered taking the train to Aungban, but it was scheduled to leave at 5:45. We drove through a village market with dozens of Pa-O women in black clothes and their distinctive orange and black headscarves, wrapped around their heads like turbans.
About 11:30 we made a half hour lunch stop in Pinlaung, where I had a big lunch with a surprising amount of chicken (usually you just get maybe three little pieces), a bean and chicken soup, and a solitary vegetable dish. The bus was all local folk but for me. Videos were shown, the Burmese movies almost invariably with what I suppose are heart rending hospital scenes where one young lover stares down at his or her comatose lover.
North of Pinlaung the road rose to around 5000 feet through flatter, but still hilly, terrain with lots of cropland. Just after 2 the bus had to make a brief stop as the train from Loikaw, with maybe five carriages, crossed the road. About ten minutes later we arrived in Aungban, just about the same time as the train which had left Loikaw two and a half hours earlier.
Aungban is at about 4300 feet elevation and, after about a half hour wait, I took a pickup from there west to Kalaw, only about five miles away. I checked into a hotel and then looked around the small town. There were lots of foreign tourists around. I walked past some beautiful pinkish purple flowering trees and bright red poinsettias to the old train station, where a sign gave the altitude as 4297 feet. A couple of blocks away an electronic sign on a clocktower gave the elevation as 4315 feet, but Kalaw is not a completely level town. I walked around some more and returned to the train station after 5 to see the train, with one upper class carriage and three ordinary class carriages, from Loikaw passing through on its way to Pyinmana. Once again in Shan state, I ate Shan noodle soup and tea salad for dinner.
I took another walk about town the next morning and got to the train station at about 11. Two trains were due to arrive about 11:30, one going east and one west. I planned to take both eventually. They arrived about noon, and after they left I headed south out of town for a walk in the pine covered countryside. I passed several colonial era houses, constructed of brick and with chimneys, before reaching a big modern Catholic church, with the grave of an Italian priest just outside. The priest had been born in 1907 and died in 2000 after arriving in Burma in 1931. A big military enclosure is just beyond the church. I was told the military confiscated lots of land for an officer's training school, here in the cool hills. The Shan have been particularly resistant to the Burmese military.
From the church I walked to a hotel, partly in an old colonial bungalow, where I read the Burmese English language newspaper. Interestingly, it seems all the Burmese language newspapers have titles in English, in Roman script. Everything else is in Burmese language and script. From the hotel I walked to Shwe Oo Min, a cave with golden stupas outside and Buddha statues by the hundreds inside. Unfortunately, a pile of garbage, including lots of plastic, was being burned right at the cave entrance.
Further on I walked along part of the local golf course and paused to watch the play on one green. The greens were green but the fairways were brown. The golfers were all men (the Burmese military, I've read or been told, like to play golf) while the caddies were almost all young women. From the golf course I walked to a pagoda on a hill with a 500 year old bamboo Buddha, all covered in gold, before getting back to town about 5.
The next morning was Kalaw's five day market. It seems most towns and villages in the area have a particularly big market every five days in addition to the ordinary daily markets. Lots of hill tribe people had come into town for the market. I saw orange and black Pa-O headscarves in addition to other distinctive tribal dress. It seems the fashion for many tribal women is to use what seem to be terrycloth towels for headscarves, usually wound up elaborately.
About 11 I made my way to the train station. My train arrived about an hour late and left about 12:30, heading east. Traveling through scenic pine covered hills, it reach Aungban after about a half hour. The train continued east through much flatter, but still rolling countryside, with lots of agriculture and many pines. Two young parents and their four month year old baby sat facing me. They were very careful and caring with him. We passed the Heho airport at about 3800 feet, and then made a steep descent down a forested gulch along a dry creek bed. Near the end the train made a wide loop, crossing under a trestle it had crossed over a few minutes before. We reached Shwenyaung,on the flat lands further east, at about 3000 feet elevation, about 3:30.
All the other foreign tourists on the train headed to Nyaungshwe, seven miles south and the main town for visiting Inle Lake, but I took a pickup heading for Taunggyi, twelve miles further east. Passing quite a few army bases on the way, the crowded pickup, with several people on the roof, zigzagged up the road that climbs the ridge to Taunggyi, the Shan state capital at about 4500 feet elevation. I had been able to spot Taunggyi on its ridge on the train from Kalw. Taunggyi is a relatively big city, with about 150,000 people.
The next morning about 9 I walked to the Flying Tiger Cheroot Factory, where about eight women were making cheroots in an upstairs wooden walled and floored room. I spent about half an hour there watching them, and they seemed to enjoy having me there. One woman gave me a little tour and the others happily posed for photos and seemed to enjoy looking at them afterwards. Each woman had a basket-like tray with tobacco leaves, loose tobacco (mixed with other stuff), paper filters, scissors, and the other paraphernalia of her trade. I watched a couple pulling out dry but still green tobacco leaves, about six inches in diameter, count out 30 of them, and then trim them altogether into leaves perhaps four inches in diameter.
There were baskets full of leaves, one stack of baskets about ten feet high, and piles of maybe eight or ten inch long paper filters, made of newspaper. Other women had already cut their leaves and were using a small wooden roller to roll the loose tobacco into a leaf, with a paper filter at the end, then rolling it all up tightly. The paper filter and maybe some of the leaf was then trimmed. The non-filter end is then pinched in. I timed one woman and it took her 22 seconds to make a cheroot. They are bound together in 50 cheroot packs. I also saw one woman, just getting started after cutting her leaves, go to a large wooden box in the corner of the room and taking a shovel to scoop the loose tobacco onto her basket-like tray.
Afterwards, on the way to Taunggyi's five day market, I paused at a fire station to look over a bright red 1962 Toyota fire engine. It had a wooden seat and a siren that required hand cranking. The hoses looked decrepit. The market was full of interesting people and stuff, and I didn't see another tourist there, quite unlike the market in Kalaw. There were lots of hill tribe people, though. I spent about two hours wandering around. The market spilled out from a central area into the adjacent streets. Among things I hadn't seen or noticed before, peanut oil and resinous pine were on sale. Young women were pouring peanut oil into used plastic water bottles. A man was slicing off pieces of very fragrant resinous pine. He gave me a piece. As usual, the people were very friendly.
I passed up the lunch stands in the market (in one I saw woman with a soup with a solitary chicken claw in it) to have lunch in a nearby restaurant. A high school teacher from the town of Mong Hsu, 200 miles northeast of Taunggyi and near the Salween, or Thanlwin, River, joined me to practice his English. He told me he teaches English, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. He said he was in Taunggyi for business and that it took him ten hours of driving to get there. Foreigners are not allowed more than a few miles east of Taunggyi, because of insurgency and heroin cultivation, I think. If you want to get to Kyaingtong (also known as Kengtung), where foreigners are allowed, near the northern border of Thailand, you have to fly, or enter from Thailand. I stopped by the market again after lunch and then spent much of the rest of the afternoon in an internet cafe.
The next sunny but chilly morning I ate a delicious dim sum breakfast in an open air cafe just across from my hotel. The dumplings were served in little round wooden containers. They were heavy on pork and eggs and very tasty. Afterwards I walked to the Shan State Museum, with hill tribe clothing, drums, and other stuff on display. There are also some very interesting photos, including photos from the 1947 Panglong Conference. At this conference representatives of the Shan, Chin, and Kachin agreed with Aung San, representing the Burmese dominated interim government just before independence in January 1948, to join the interim government, with certain rights reserved for the "Hill People," as they are called in the Panglong Agreement, also on display. Under British rule, the British had directly ruled the lowland Burmese areas, while the hill regions were autonomous, left mainly to govern themselves. The military governments after 1962 routinely suppressed the minority hill peoples, so the Panglong Agreement is a rallying cry for them.
I walked back to my hotel, passing a gold painted statue of Aung San in a little park on the way. About noon I took a taxi to the bus stand and at 1:30 left on a small bus headed for Pindaya. The bus zigzagged down the ridge the way I had come two days earlier, with good views of the wide valley below, though I couldn't see Inle Lake. The bus headed west, more or less paralleling the train tracks upon which I had traveled two days before. I saw the trestle at the railroad loop, as we began our ascent through the forested gulch, rising from 3000 feet at Shwenyaung to about 4000 after climbing through the ravine. We soon had a breakdown, though, which required about 40 minutes of repair. Fortunately, it was at a scenic spot, with views of the valley below.
Reaching Aungban, the bus turned north and traveled through intensely cultivated rolling hills at about 4000 feet elevation. I saw some rice growing, and much else. I also saw people threshing rice by hand. Vehicles crowded with Pa-O and other hill tribe people passed by. Nearing Pindaya the hills became particularly scenic.
The bus reached Pindaya, a town of only about 5000 people, just after 5. The sun had already set beyond the high hills just west of town. Pindaya is on a small lake, at about 4000 feet elevation, with an important Buddhist cave complex southwest of town, about 500 feet up the ridge just west of town. I walked around the lake before dark. The cave complex, now with elevators to help people ascend the last part, was soon lit up like a casino. Colored lights soon came on all around the lake.
Mornings are chilly at these elevations at this time of year, and the next morning I didn't get started walking to the Pindaya Caves until after 9:30. I walked first along the west side of the lake, then to the southern end of town, and then along a road lined with huge banyan trees, with huge stacks of watermelon for sale underneath the far spreading branches. A covered stairway took me up about four hundred feet. (A road zigzagged just south.) I skipped the elevators to take the final 130 steps to the cave mouth, where I arrived about 10:30.
I had visited these caves in 1994, stopping on the way from Thazi to Inle Lake, and I remembered them as somewhat romantic, old stupas and statues of Buddha in a long, high cave. The cave is still impressive, something like 490 feet long, with a turn to the right, and 150 feet high at its highest. But the atmosphere of the cave has completely changed. The floor is covered with what seem to be bathroom tiles, and all the stupsas and statues are heavily restored, or rebuilt, all looking new. Many are newly built. Almost everything is gold covered, and every statue and stupa seems to have names and dates inscribed, mostly in Burmese but many in English, on tablets under them. I didn't see one date before 1999. Among others, one had the names of a family from Venice, California and another the name of a Thai drug suppression unit.
There are supposed to be something like 9000 Buddhas, some centuries old, though you wouldn't know it. Colored lights illuminate portions of the caves and statues, and it all looks like a Walt Disney Buddhaland, but without the good taste. I kept expecting "I'ts a Small World" to break out on loudspeakers. There a few stalactites and stalagmites and pools, and a few small "meditation caves." It was all bizarrely interesting, but a disappointment compared to what I remembered. I think there were more foreigners than local folks wandering around inside, almost all of them having arrived on a day trip from Inle Lake.
After about two hours inside, I walked to a 40 foot high sitting Buddha further along the ridge and then came back to the Pindaya Caves. The views are good. I could see the town of Pindaya, the lake, the countryside all around, and a forest of stupas just below the cave, near the foot of the long covered stairway I had ascended. I sat and enjoyed the view for a while. Just inside, in a little area decorated with Buddhist altars just in front of the cave mouth, a group of men were watching a television broadcast of a welterweight boxing championship from the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.
I took the elevators down, then walked down the long stairway, passed through the banyan trees and watermelons, and reached town about 3 for a late lunch. Later in the afternoon I walked along the lake to an old wooden monastery near the lake's northeastern end. It was much more interesting than the Pindaya Caves. The interior was filled with about fifteen old wooden altars, carved and decorated with gilt. A monk, his head covered in his red robe, was asleep in the middle of the floor. Next door a big, ugly, modern hall was full of reciting child monks. An older monk came in and several monklets sitting together scattered to their original, well-spaced positions. The older monk, himself maybe a teenager, went up to them one by one and slapped each one on the side of the head. No one complained. I sat by the lake until sunset, which was just before 5. I walked a bit more in the quickly cooling evening air, stopping to watch a bullock cart with a water container on it being filled by buckets of water drawn by hand from a well, or something looking like a well, right next to the lake.
About 11:30 we made a half hour lunch stop in Pinlaung, where I had a big lunch with a surprising amount of chicken (usually you just get maybe three little pieces), a bean and chicken soup, and a solitary vegetable dish. The bus was all local folk but for me. Videos were shown, the Burmese movies almost invariably with what I suppose are heart rending hospital scenes where one young lover stares down at his or her comatose lover.
North of Pinlaung the road rose to around 5000 feet through flatter, but still hilly, terrain with lots of cropland. Just after 2 the bus had to make a brief stop as the train from Loikaw, with maybe five carriages, crossed the road. About ten minutes later we arrived in Aungban, just about the same time as the train which had left Loikaw two and a half hours earlier.
Aungban is at about 4300 feet elevation and, after about a half hour wait, I took a pickup from there west to Kalaw, only about five miles away. I checked into a hotel and then looked around the small town. There were lots of foreign tourists around. I walked past some beautiful pinkish purple flowering trees and bright red poinsettias to the old train station, where a sign gave the altitude as 4297 feet. A couple of blocks away an electronic sign on a clocktower gave the elevation as 4315 feet, but Kalaw is not a completely level town. I walked around some more and returned to the train station after 5 to see the train, with one upper class carriage and three ordinary class carriages, from Loikaw passing through on its way to Pyinmana. Once again in Shan state, I ate Shan noodle soup and tea salad for dinner.
I took another walk about town the next morning and got to the train station at about 11. Two trains were due to arrive about 11:30, one going east and one west. I planned to take both eventually. They arrived about noon, and after they left I headed south out of town for a walk in the pine covered countryside. I passed several colonial era houses, constructed of brick and with chimneys, before reaching a big modern Catholic church, with the grave of an Italian priest just outside. The priest had been born in 1907 and died in 2000 after arriving in Burma in 1931. A big military enclosure is just beyond the church. I was told the military confiscated lots of land for an officer's training school, here in the cool hills. The Shan have been particularly resistant to the Burmese military.
From the church I walked to a hotel, partly in an old colonial bungalow, where I read the Burmese English language newspaper. Interestingly, it seems all the Burmese language newspapers have titles in English, in Roman script. Everything else is in Burmese language and script. From the hotel I walked to Shwe Oo Min, a cave with golden stupas outside and Buddha statues by the hundreds inside. Unfortunately, a pile of garbage, including lots of plastic, was being burned right at the cave entrance.
Further on I walked along part of the local golf course and paused to watch the play on one green. The greens were green but the fairways were brown. The golfers were all men (the Burmese military, I've read or been told, like to play golf) while the caddies were almost all young women. From the golf course I walked to a pagoda on a hill with a 500 year old bamboo Buddha, all covered in gold, before getting back to town about 5.
The next morning was Kalaw's five day market. It seems most towns and villages in the area have a particularly big market every five days in addition to the ordinary daily markets. Lots of hill tribe people had come into town for the market. I saw orange and black Pa-O headscarves in addition to other distinctive tribal dress. It seems the fashion for many tribal women is to use what seem to be terrycloth towels for headscarves, usually wound up elaborately.
About 11 I made my way to the train station. My train arrived about an hour late and left about 12:30, heading east. Traveling through scenic pine covered hills, it reach Aungban after about a half hour. The train continued east through much flatter, but still rolling countryside, with lots of agriculture and many pines. Two young parents and their four month year old baby sat facing me. They were very careful and caring with him. We passed the Heho airport at about 3800 feet, and then made a steep descent down a forested gulch along a dry creek bed. Near the end the train made a wide loop, crossing under a trestle it had crossed over a few minutes before. We reached Shwenyaung,on the flat lands further east, at about 3000 feet elevation, about 3:30.
All the other foreign tourists on the train headed to Nyaungshwe, seven miles south and the main town for visiting Inle Lake, but I took a pickup heading for Taunggyi, twelve miles further east. Passing quite a few army bases on the way, the crowded pickup, with several people on the roof, zigzagged up the road that climbs the ridge to Taunggyi, the Shan state capital at about 4500 feet elevation. I had been able to spot Taunggyi on its ridge on the train from Kalw. Taunggyi is a relatively big city, with about 150,000 people.
The next morning about 9 I walked to the Flying Tiger Cheroot Factory, where about eight women were making cheroots in an upstairs wooden walled and floored room. I spent about half an hour there watching them, and they seemed to enjoy having me there. One woman gave me a little tour and the others happily posed for photos and seemed to enjoy looking at them afterwards. Each woman had a basket-like tray with tobacco leaves, loose tobacco (mixed with other stuff), paper filters, scissors, and the other paraphernalia of her trade. I watched a couple pulling out dry but still green tobacco leaves, about six inches in diameter, count out 30 of them, and then trim them altogether into leaves perhaps four inches in diameter.
There were baskets full of leaves, one stack of baskets about ten feet high, and piles of maybe eight or ten inch long paper filters, made of newspaper. Other women had already cut their leaves and were using a small wooden roller to roll the loose tobacco into a leaf, with a paper filter at the end, then rolling it all up tightly. The paper filter and maybe some of the leaf was then trimmed. The non-filter end is then pinched in. I timed one woman and it took her 22 seconds to make a cheroot. They are bound together in 50 cheroot packs. I also saw one woman, just getting started after cutting her leaves, go to a large wooden box in the corner of the room and taking a shovel to scoop the loose tobacco onto her basket-like tray.
Afterwards, on the way to Taunggyi's five day market, I paused at a fire station to look over a bright red 1962 Toyota fire engine. It had a wooden seat and a siren that required hand cranking. The hoses looked decrepit. The market was full of interesting people and stuff, and I didn't see another tourist there, quite unlike the market in Kalaw. There were lots of hill tribe people, though. I spent about two hours wandering around. The market spilled out from a central area into the adjacent streets. Among things I hadn't seen or noticed before, peanut oil and resinous pine were on sale. Young women were pouring peanut oil into used plastic water bottles. A man was slicing off pieces of very fragrant resinous pine. He gave me a piece. As usual, the people were very friendly.
I passed up the lunch stands in the market (in one I saw woman with a soup with a solitary chicken claw in it) to have lunch in a nearby restaurant. A high school teacher from the town of Mong Hsu, 200 miles northeast of Taunggyi and near the Salween, or Thanlwin, River, joined me to practice his English. He told me he teaches English, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. He said he was in Taunggyi for business and that it took him ten hours of driving to get there. Foreigners are not allowed more than a few miles east of Taunggyi, because of insurgency and heroin cultivation, I think. If you want to get to Kyaingtong (also known as Kengtung), where foreigners are allowed, near the northern border of Thailand, you have to fly, or enter from Thailand. I stopped by the market again after lunch and then spent much of the rest of the afternoon in an internet cafe.
The next sunny but chilly morning I ate a delicious dim sum breakfast in an open air cafe just across from my hotel. The dumplings were served in little round wooden containers. They were heavy on pork and eggs and very tasty. Afterwards I walked to the Shan State Museum, with hill tribe clothing, drums, and other stuff on display. There are also some very interesting photos, including photos from the 1947 Panglong Conference. At this conference representatives of the Shan, Chin, and Kachin agreed with Aung San, representing the Burmese dominated interim government just before independence in January 1948, to join the interim government, with certain rights reserved for the "Hill People," as they are called in the Panglong Agreement, also on display. Under British rule, the British had directly ruled the lowland Burmese areas, while the hill regions were autonomous, left mainly to govern themselves. The military governments after 1962 routinely suppressed the minority hill peoples, so the Panglong Agreement is a rallying cry for them.
I walked back to my hotel, passing a gold painted statue of Aung San in a little park on the way. About noon I took a taxi to the bus stand and at 1:30 left on a small bus headed for Pindaya. The bus zigzagged down the ridge the way I had come two days earlier, with good views of the wide valley below, though I couldn't see Inle Lake. The bus headed west, more or less paralleling the train tracks upon which I had traveled two days before. I saw the trestle at the railroad loop, as we began our ascent through the forested gulch, rising from 3000 feet at Shwenyaung to about 4000 after climbing through the ravine. We soon had a breakdown, though, which required about 40 minutes of repair. Fortunately, it was at a scenic spot, with views of the valley below.
Reaching Aungban, the bus turned north and traveled through intensely cultivated rolling hills at about 4000 feet elevation. I saw some rice growing, and much else. I also saw people threshing rice by hand. Vehicles crowded with Pa-O and other hill tribe people passed by. Nearing Pindaya the hills became particularly scenic.
The bus reached Pindaya, a town of only about 5000 people, just after 5. The sun had already set beyond the high hills just west of town. Pindaya is on a small lake, at about 4000 feet elevation, with an important Buddhist cave complex southwest of town, about 500 feet up the ridge just west of town. I walked around the lake before dark. The cave complex, now with elevators to help people ascend the last part, was soon lit up like a casino. Colored lights soon came on all around the lake.
Mornings are chilly at these elevations at this time of year, and the next morning I didn't get started walking to the Pindaya Caves until after 9:30. I walked first along the west side of the lake, then to the southern end of town, and then along a road lined with huge banyan trees, with huge stacks of watermelon for sale underneath the far spreading branches. A covered stairway took me up about four hundred feet. (A road zigzagged just south.) I skipped the elevators to take the final 130 steps to the cave mouth, where I arrived about 10:30.
I had visited these caves in 1994, stopping on the way from Thazi to Inle Lake, and I remembered them as somewhat romantic, old stupas and statues of Buddha in a long, high cave. The cave is still impressive, something like 490 feet long, with a turn to the right, and 150 feet high at its highest. But the atmosphere of the cave has completely changed. The floor is covered with what seem to be bathroom tiles, and all the stupsas and statues are heavily restored, or rebuilt, all looking new. Many are newly built. Almost everything is gold covered, and every statue and stupa seems to have names and dates inscribed, mostly in Burmese but many in English, on tablets under them. I didn't see one date before 1999. Among others, one had the names of a family from Venice, California and another the name of a Thai drug suppression unit.
There are supposed to be something like 9000 Buddhas, some centuries old, though you wouldn't know it. Colored lights illuminate portions of the caves and statues, and it all looks like a Walt Disney Buddhaland, but without the good taste. I kept expecting "I'ts a Small World" to break out on loudspeakers. There a few stalactites and stalagmites and pools, and a few small "meditation caves." It was all bizarrely interesting, but a disappointment compared to what I remembered. I think there were more foreigners than local folks wandering around inside, almost all of them having arrived on a day trip from Inle Lake.
After about two hours inside, I walked to a 40 foot high sitting Buddha further along the ridge and then came back to the Pindaya Caves. The views are good. I could see the town of Pindaya, the lake, the countryside all around, and a forest of stupas just below the cave, near the foot of the long covered stairway I had ascended. I sat and enjoyed the view for a while. Just inside, in a little area decorated with Buddhist altars just in front of the cave mouth, a group of men were watching a television broadcast of a welterweight boxing championship from the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.
I took the elevators down, then walked down the long stairway, passed through the banyan trees and watermelons, and reached town about 3 for a late lunch. Later in the afternoon I walked along the lake to an old wooden monastery near the lake's northeastern end. It was much more interesting than the Pindaya Caves. The interior was filled with about fifteen old wooden altars, carved and decorated with gilt. A monk, his head covered in his red robe, was asleep in the middle of the floor. Next door a big, ugly, modern hall was full of reciting child monks. An older monk came in and several monklets sitting together scattered to their original, well-spaced positions. The older monk, himself maybe a teenager, went up to them one by one and slapped each one on the side of the head. No one complained. I sat by the lake until sunset, which was just before 5. I walked a bit more in the quickly cooling evening air, stopping to watch a bullock cart with a water container on it being filled by buckets of water drawn by hand from a well, or something looking like a well, right next to the lake.
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