A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Kalaw, Myanmar

I arrived in Kalaw at 3:15 a.m. Have you ever arrived in a small town at 3:15 in the morning? It's perhaps the worst possible hour, though it's a fine time of day to enjoy silence and look at stars. Frankly, I had lost hope that I would ever see stars in rainy season Myanmar.

Fortunately, Sein, a local unlicensed trekking guide, was just crayzy or ambitious enough to regularly meet the 3:00am bus on the off chance that a tourist might be on it. It was a good thing -- I was decidedly dazed. The bus conductor forgot I was getting off there and neglected to wake me up, so I woke to the sound of KALAW KALAW KALAW, the Burmese bus call that signals a very brief stop. I was hardly ready. My stuff was half in the seat pocket, half in my spilling daypack; I couldn't find my shoes; I was sitting on my glasses (newly bent); and the first time I got off the bus I actually forgot my big backpack. It was not as swift an offloading as the bus driver would have wished, and I managed to wake all the other passengers in the process.

Sein helped me knock on hotel doors to find a room. Who'd have thought motels would actually be full at this time of year? I ended up at an expensive one (eight dollars!!!) but I'd have taken just about anything at that hour. And it was a great room -- big bathroom with hot water (though I couldn't get it to work in my frazzled state. Not surprising, really), beds with sheets, and carpet. Carpet!! You could sure tell I made it to the mountains. I hadn't seen carpet for months.

I spent my first day in Kalaw just shopping (I spent a fortune at the local market) and wandering. It's a picturesque and friendly valley, and I got hopelessly lost. The map in the Lonely Planet bears only the vaguest relation to the actuality of the Kalaw road system, and its makers were very parsimonious about street names. Through blind luck, or perhaps my infallible sense of direction, I made it back to town in 2 1/2 hours. It was a nice walk, through a monestary on a hill (no visible monks), and various homes, shacks, farms, minimarts (Burmese style, with fried snacks and packets of shampoo hanging from the ceiling), schools, cows, dogs and even a golf course, presumably to serve the military folks at the officer training academy located nearby.

Kalaw was used as a "hill station" during the British Raj (this usually means the British or whoever the colonizers were would come on weekends or vacations to escape the heat of the lowland capital cities). Having travelled extensively in former French Indochina, I can report with the authority of strong opinion and no design background that the architectural legacy left by the British in Burma is weak, at best. There are some buildings left, but frankly they're just not all that interesting. Decaying French colonial buildings emanate a rather decadent, romantic air, with their fine proportions and intricate details. Decaying British colonial buildings by contrast emanate a feeling of, well, decay. They look sturdy enough, but so boring that you hardly see the point of an expensive renovation.

More on Kalaw later - I took a solo trek! Well, solo apart from my personal guide, I mean.

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 12:34 AM