Loikaw and Back!

November 25, 2014

Time plays its tricks on us

Sankar to Loikaw

Dear little friends,

The next day dawned and it was a different world, the way it can be sometimes. The creepy resort staff had warmed up to us and started smiling and talking. That can happen once you do something even slightly endearing, like order the local traditional breakfast instead of eggs, and apologize for our tired grumpiness the night before. The lake glimmered from our balcony breakfast table, we had some good light to photograph our resort building, which had been cobbled together from a very traditional old wooden house with bits of old carving here and there, and a leaf-thatched roof.

Soon our boat to Pekon had arrived and the bikes were loaded on and one of the staff jumped aboard as well to take a trip to his village, which was on the way. We hadn't gone out onto Inle Lake on this trip because of the very high volume of noisy tourist boats so this was a wonderful chance to be out on a very similar lake but with only a few fishing boats on it. The sun sparkled, the birds swooped over our boat, things were looking up.

Our boat companion, son of the boat driver. He would make a tossing motion with his hands and the gullible seagulls would come down close and fly with us.

Sankar and Pekon Lakes are reservoirs formed after the Pekon River was dammed. This all used to be rice fields.

At Pekon, an immigration officer met our boat and we handed our passports over. We were now in Kayah State, in an area that only a year ago was not open to independent travelers at all. Everybody urged us on to the bus station "at the circle" so we could catch a bus to Loikaw. It was market day and the bright sunlight on the beautiful vegetables and fruits and nuts and grains and fish and chickens (and flies) made us poke along, but eventually we found some kind of circle with no buses, so we just set off toward Loikaw thinking maybe there was another circle ahead.

At one of the huge new gas stations that have been built since we were last here (you used to buy petrol from liter water bottles from the side of the road) we stopped to change out of our warm boat clothing into some riding gear. The guy there spoke some English and told us it was 25 miles to Loikaw, which sounded very doable to us so we just started riding to Loikaw. We figured that the checkpoint guys would either stop us and arrange transport or let us go under their striped poles they put across the road. Sometimes you just have to find out.

The road to Loikaw. This guy was harder to catch than you'd think.

There were a couple of very righteous hills but in the end we skidded into Loikaw and were directed to a cheap hotel that accepted foreigners, The Moon Joy Inn, the kind with the bathroom down the hall with a squat toilet and a "dipping shower", a huge tank of water that you dip a bowl into and shower onto the tile floor from. Cold water. We weren't in tourist land any more, that's for sure. In fact during our two days in Loikaw we saw only two other foreigners.

Loikaw has an impressively zany temple built into a limestone outcropping right in the center of town. Apparently there are some nearby villages and day trips one can go on, although the "long-neck village" sort of visit is very much against our personal taste. The Padaung tribe are the folks who put the rings on the necks of their young girls, tipping clavicles down and making them look like they have very long necks. They are exploited all over northern Thailand and parts of Myanmar for their money-making human zoo potential, and we weren't buying any of that.

Mostly we walked through Loikaw, which Bruce said reminded him of Chiang Mai in the 70s, with many traditional wooden houses up on stilts and lots of trees. We kept remarking on the huge tourism potential of Loikaw, which will soon have a new road open to Mae Hong Son, Thailand. If we are ever there again it will probably look a lot different, very soon. But for the moment, we were there in a tableau of the past, if one ignored the busy fleet of motorbikes zipping around.

We interrupt this dangerous temple climb to give you a brief gallery of the beautiful moths (dead and alive) we found on it.

We know there are many areas nearby with military installations which explains why, when the internet did work it was quite fast. There are roads from Loikaw that go to many intriguing places that are still closed. But, we had made it there, mostly under our own power, and were pretty pleased to be there.

Meanwhile the visa out date was looking us in the face so we had to beat it out of there, so on Thanksgiving morning we caught the bus to Kalaw. This was new territory as well, and the entire trip was absolutely gorgeous, albeit very slow and bumpy. At one point we saw four touring cyclists headed to Loikaw and we have a lot of admiration for them, whoever they were. That road had some pretty steep miles on it. There is a Pa'O town called Pin Laung on that road that looked like a Swiss village, again, we looked at each other and said "Gold Mine". We were told later that Pin Laung is being developed as a strictly military crony vacation resort development, no foreigners will be allowed.

Beautiful Pin Laung, take a good look, because you won't be vacationing here.

The area along this road must be the chili capital of the world!

When our bumpy highway finally ended at Highway 4, we had made a complete circle, and that was the moment our bus stopped for a pee break and the driver got an offer he couldn't refuse to transport a buttload of vegetables to Yangon and suddenly our bikes and bags were by the side of the road. We took this in good spirit, it was a (mostly) downhill 6 mile ride to Kalaw, but the sun was going down and we had to heave to. The passengers all piled out of the bus to watch us load up and take off, and after the veggie loading they didn't catch up with us until we were just stopping at the pastry shop along the highway that Bruce had been yearning for since we left Kalaw a week ago. The bus honked many times, the passengers waved, and we gave them thumbs up and dived into the tea and pastry.

Our hotel was full but they put us in the dormitory on the top floor with extra blankets and we wore all of our warm stuff plus our hats. We have to find a flight out of here to the Thai border and from there we'll update all these blog posts and photos and eat for days and think about our time in Myanmar. Every single day has been chock full of experiences. We have met absolutely amazing people. Kalaw is hosting a "Green Conference" and our hotel is full of English-speaking Burmese folks who are foresters, environmental scientists, sustainable agriculturalists, and even one poet, who told us that he had attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 2009.

All of them were eating breakfast in the freezing dining room with no electricity adjoining our dorm room, we wanted what they were eating and the hotel manager encouraged us to join them for hin'touq, which are rice and vegetable yummy things steamed in banana leaves and served with a variety of wonderful condiments.

Sharing our dorm room was an American we had already heard about from our friend Hay Mar Soe, who told us to look him up when we got to Kalaw but neglected to provide a phone number for. It turns out he had just been ousted from his house by Immigration and was heading to Mandalay on the 10 am bus this morning but we had a good hour or so to visit with him and talk about the complications of his life as a two-year resident of Myanmar. If we were exhausted from our intense month here I can't even imagine trying to live here and do any kind of work.

It's now Thanksgiving evening at home in the US and although wifi bars are showing there is no internet connection at all, even though the electricity came back on an hour ago. Every moment here is full of irony it seems. The lights are on but nobody is home. The connection is there on the surface but is being fully blocked by who-knows-what-or-why. It's a fascinating place and we love it here, but it's time to get out and take a break.

Today's ride: 26 miles (42 km)
Total: 186 miles (299 km)

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