Kawlaw

After our time riding bikes around Bagan we headed out on a bus ride from hell, but none the less entertaining and interesting, and made our way to Kawlaw. Kawlaw is a town in the mountains southeast of Mandalay full of ethnic minorities in the hills around it.
You know we came back from Burma exhausted and in a funny way it was from being too scheduled and having other people determine where and what we would be doing. You use guides, drivers etc a lot there to get around. Well Kawlaw was no exception to this.
When we arrived we had booked a place to stay recommended by the Lonely planet and it was a bust. They suggested using a guide from this guesthouse to trek but he was weird. The moment we got there he started whispering in our ears gossip about all the other guides and political stuff in the town which was hard to get into. We didn't want to get involved, we're on vacation for heaven sakes! Of course we wanted to know about stuff but not petty small town stuff. So the very next day we moved to another guesthouse called Eastern Paradise and it was just that. The woman who ran it was like
everyone's granny and looked after us all. Huge room, good hot shower and amazing breakfast and hugs and cool drinks in the afternoon. She was a real gem.
At first we didn't like Kawlaw because it's a military town and it felt weird to see how the other half lived in comparison to the average Burmese. But we soon got over that as their presence on the street was nearly nil and the town was pretty. It used to be a British Hill Station where the colonists went in the hot season.
We decided to go on day treks only as we are going to Nepal to do a long trek on this trip. It was fabulous. The first one was a more cultural experience because we visited a traditional home there. Three generations lived in the house which was wooden and about 25 foot square. There was absolutely nothing in it but a fire pit and a few utensils and one small low table. One corner had a slightly raised platform for sleeping. There was no chimney or even a hole for the smoke to get out. It was a bit smoky as they were cooking but I can imagine at times it would be really bad.
There were three generations living in the household. The guide had aranged for some ladies to come to show their weaving to us for sale. After the group of five of us bought a few pieces I got out the hair clips and marbles and we gave them out and turned the whole thing into a social instead of a sales pitch.
We all arrived home to our guest house tired and happy after seeing a lot of things in the mountains. We decided to do another day with a different guide and this time it was just the two of us with the guide and his friend. He took us far ito the hills and showed us a valley where a number of ethnic groups live and work together. It was an amazing agricultural area that seemed pretty self sufficient and prosperous. The fields and orchards and rice paddies were beautiful. We stopped on the way back to visit a friend of Lin's in the mountains and had tea with he ahd his wife. One of the things that we noticed is that a lot of people have posters hung in their homes that have no furnishings or anything unecessary in them.We came to realize it was to keep out drafts and probably rain!
Another cool thing about Kawlaw was that an indigenous market happened once a week on a rotation with other towns and we were there for it. We took quite a few pictures but not as many as we wanted to! Just couldn't do it without people really noticing.There were at least five hill tribes at the market. One of the pictures is of the truck loaded to take the market vendors home.
We had a wonderful four or five days there and made a great young friend from Australia who we later met up with again and did another day trip with.
These pictures are all things we saw on the treks. I'll put the market pictures in another blog. Yikes I'm getting eaten by bugs!