Trekking to the Monastary

Our second day in Myanmar started early with a bus ride. Along the way we stopped at a Buddhist temple with a hundred-year old giant statue of a reclining Buddha. I was consistently amazed at these temples we would visit. Everything is so over-the-top. Bright colors, huge statues and neon lights are all featured in a display that seems half reverent and half Disney. Tourists with cameras are welcome alongside devout worshipers kneeling in front of shrines without any sort of nasty looks or really any sort of apparent surprise. I try to imagine a bus-load of Japanese tourists piling into a parish church back in Pennsylvania and just snapping away while Mass was going on. It just seems inconceivable.

Following our temple visit we bussed off to the airport for our trip to central Myanmar and our trekking trip. We had a group of thirty-four, mostly students and five faculty/staff from the ship. We breezed through security which was nothing like a US airport and eventually (after a nearly two-hour flight delay) boarded a twin-engine turbo prop plane that was pretty much filled with our group. An hour's flight brought us to regional airport that was pretty much set in the middle of fields of brown cut vegetation and scrubby trees. We still had a two and a half hour bus trip along bumpy partially-paved single track roads to get to our destination. Along most of the way our bus took up pretty much the entire road causing local traffic to have to find a wide spot in the dirt to pull off and allow us to pass. If the bus ever got going faster than forty miles an hour I would be surprised.

We steadily gained elevation and flat fields of cut grain began to be replaced with tilted fields of tea bushes and occasional flat areas that were being cultivated by flooding trenches alongside rows of plants and literally scooping and pouring water onto the plants. Everything was being done by hand, irrigation, weeding and turning over soil. In several places we observed fields burning to get ready for the next season of planting. Except for the occasional tractor bumping past us along the road, I saw very little evidence that the farming practices have changed here in the last thousand years.

A road-side pagoda along our hike

We finally arrived at a small restaurant in the town of Kalaw. From there we transferred from the bus to open bed trucks that held about ten people in the back and were driven up the side of a winding mountain road until it became so narrow that the trucks could not proceed. From here we would walk, and for the next five hours that's what we did. Our "trek" was not a trail, but instead it was the local road. Roads here in the hills above the rim of the Shan Plateau are not for cars or trucks. All of the traffic is by foot, human or bovine, with the very occasional motorbike. We saw perhaps five or six over the two days we were there and several small herds of cattle which are used for work, not meat or dairy production. Every person we passed on the road was carrying something: firewood, farm implements or long bamboo poles they had cut for construction purposes. It was quickly clear that these folks don't see a group of thirty-some-odd white people walking down their road every day. Each person we passed would look at us with completely serious wide-eyed stares that quickly turned to bright smiles as soon as we would greet them with a poorly pronounced (and spelled I imagine) "Ming-la-ba", the local greeting. The people were incredibly friendly and it was clear that they were curious about us. Many would stop to speak to our guide who had to explain over and over who we were and why we were there.

Our flight delay meant that we were still trekking at sunset and indeed into the dark. Fortunately the trail was wide and easy to follow as I was one of only three of our group to bring a headlamp on our overnight trekking trip. A couple of the students complained that no one "told" them to bring a flashlight on an overnight trekking trip to a rural part of a developing country. Fortunately we only had a little less than an hour of darkness before we came up a small rise to the compound of the Hti Thane Monastery, our abode for the night.

While the group was milling about, our guide greeted the head monk, our host for the night. I went forward and asked the guide to thank him for us and I got to shake his hand. In Myanmar, they don't really shake hands so really he just grabbed my hand and held it for about thirty seconds while the guide translated his welcome to me. It was kind of a cool cross-cultural experience. Later we had some food brought in via motorbikes by our guides. After dinner we were treated to a local music experience consisting of six guys on local instruments and ten or twelve young girls dancing in traditional dress. The students really enjoyed interacting with all the kids and we ended up staying out in the increasingly cold air till nearly ten p.m. when eventually the kids were called back by their parents.

At that point, it was dark and cold and we were in a place that had a single small lightbulb suspended by a thin wire above the one-room monastery. Like century's past, the sun was down and it was time for bed. "Bed" was a thin cotton mat on a hard wood floor and a couple of thin blankets. No problem for me, but a couple of the students were used to the high-class accommodations we had been enjoying on previous port calls and were a bit put out. Since this is what the monks do every night, not just one, it was definitely a suck it up and deal situation. The hardest part for me was that we hadn't been warned that we were going to be at significant elevation and it was COLD. The cold doesn't usually bother me, but the temperature went well below 45 degrees F and just about everyone had a rough night trying to keep warm. We all survived the night intact and enjoyed a nice breakfast of fried rice with an egg on top. That may be my new standard breakfast - beats the heck out of corn flakes!

After wishing the monks goodbye, we began our trek back. We were returning back to the same spot we started, but taking a circular route which allowed us to see different portions of the area. This route took us past numerous dwellings with kids hanging out everywhere. Like the day before, we would get long serious stares until we smiled and gave a greeting. We would get the same greeting back with big happy smiles.

Just a few of our new friends we met along the way

Often the kids would reply and then whisper and laugh among themselves - doubtlessly laughing at our atrocious accents. We again saw mostly people on foot with the very occasional motorbike. As we got lower we began to see these strange hybrid vehicles that looked like a small lawnmower engine attached to a flatbed truck. The engines looked like they were only two cylinders, and they chugged along pretty slowly. They weren't being used in the small fields, but seemed to be only used to haul people and light cargo up and down the narrow dirt road. Every so often, you would see houses with a single black power line leading up to it to power electric lights. Cooking was done entirely by open pit fires and a lot of effort seemed to go into chopping and hauling firewood.

The hike was very pleasant and we made good progress; getting back down in much less time than it had taken us to climb up. We returned to our starting point, a local restaurant, with plenty of time to enjoy a nice lunch of vegetables and chicken curry. We then rebounded our bus and headed down to a hotel adjacent to Inle Lake, our destination for the following day.

The bus ride was well over two hours taking us from the highlands into the lower, richer areas. Tea fields turned into rice paddies and the buildings grew larger and in better repair. We got to our hotel and had the chance to clean up and explore a bit before heading out to dinner at a local Italian place. Yes, Italian. We enjoyed the traditional spaghetti with meat sauce that Myanmar is so famous for. The food was fine, although I would have preferred a more local fare. The students seemed to really enjoy it though.

When I get the chance to post next, I'll describe our amazing day on the Lake….