We declared a badly needed rest day, since we didn’t need to leave for the airport until 12:30. We had a very leisurely breakfast at the huge buffet, then went up to pack and loll about. I hired a cab that ran me to a cell phone shop in search of MRD sim cards, since ours didn’t work in Kyaing Tong and Inle. The cards were easy; a lovely young lady helped set up the phones with the new cards.
The batteries were harder to find, but the cabbie dove into a dank little shop, asked, and the woman brought out a big box with a random assortment of batteries!
Back at the hotel, we settled up and settled into a cab with a driver who spoke not a single word of English. We were soon at the airport and through the very lax security. We found a very nice tea shop near the departure lounge, at which point I discovered that I had lost my cell phone. I called the hotel, thinking I had left it on the sofa near the entrance where we had waited for the cab. No dice. Andrew then called my phone, and lo and behold our cabbie answered. I handed the phone to the very nice proprietor of the tea shop, who found that he was still at the airport waiting for a fare. The proprietor’s son very nicely volunteered to run out and get my phone, since I couldn’t get through security. I gave him 5000 Kyat for the driver. He was soon back with my phone, but the cabbie had not given the kid the sim card for reasons we never discovered. So out went the kid again and returned with the phone with a sim card. Unfortunately I later discovered that he had somehow put in another sim card, keeping my new one. After I had given the kid 10,000 Kyat that he really didn’t want to take, I was finally out about 30 bucks, but it was better than losing my Lumia 1020.
Andrew and I had been leery of adding this leg to our journey: too many intermediate landings with questionable planes on sketchy airlines; Myanmar Air has “You’re safe with us!” as its motto. Not exactly encouraging.
After a brief flight to Heho, a longer flight–which included a tuna salad pasty!– brought us to Kyaing Teng. Andrew sat next to a really charming French woman. She sat down and her first official action was to knock Andrew’s elbow off the divider. When she was finished with her pasty, she brushed the crumbs off herself and her tray and directly on to Andrew. He was enthralled.
We got off the plane and found everything but a brass band waiting for us: military, security forces, and locals in their native dress. All for the big dude who had been sitting next to me on the plane. We later heard that it was the prime minister of Shan State, here to make an appearance at the Lahu tribe’s Lunar New Year’s Festival. With about 5 million members, the Lahu are one of the biggest and most important tribes in Myanmar.
And then the fun started. Our hosts in Kyaing Teng were Cynthia and Teddy Paul. Cynthia had been a Cetana scholar; the foundation had funded her study toward a masters degree in Second Language Acquisition in Thailand. Once back in Shan State, she had started a school, the Kyaing Teng Learning Center, which offered courses to young adults and children in English and critical thinking skills.
We were met by Teddy, Cynthia’s husband, who had hired a jitney to bring us to our hotel. Teddy is a unicum: a handsome, incredibly sweet, and endlessly energetic guy who is the man behind Cynthia. A pair of French women were in the jitney with us, and the driver convinced them to get out at some random hotel. As we soon discovered, it couldn’t have been worse than ours.
The Yee Law Chain Hotel—aka “the hotel above the Chinese bakery”—looked kind of OK downstairs: normal reception area, with a bench and table downstairs.
The stairway to our rooms was, like most every thing in Kyaing Tong, well, dusty. And the carpet would have been called threadbare ten years ago. Our rooms looked OK: pretty large, with big windows, and nice firm beds.
The carpets and sheets had ineradicable stains—but the staff did the best they could. Little did we know that we got three hours of electricity (on a good day). Or that some mad genius had designed the bathroom so that the slops from the sink ran directly onto the floor on which you stood, leaving a narrow shelf for the toilet on which one balanced precariously to pee.
Other than that, it was a great hotel! We later learned that Myanmar hotels have a star rating system; I would guess that the Lee Yaw Chain gets about a negative three.
Cynthia and Teddy were picking us up at 7 PM to go to a festival that we only dimly understood at this point. OK, I’ll admit it, Andrew and I were pretty unnerved by everything around us, and we badly wanted our daily dose of Myanmar beer, so we went looking for a bar or at least some take away. By early evening it was chilly, so we bundled up and headed down our rather dark, unpaved street. Some of the shops were open, glowing dimly from within. As in Yangon, we never really knew exactly where we were. We could only navigate between familiar landmarks—the market, the big lake, the hill with the standing Buddha—and hope that our memory served as we made turns into twisting, dark streets.
A couple of blocks down we found the Princess Hotel, the “upgrade” option in town. They had no bar. A few doors down, though, Andrew found a kind of beverage store, and we snagged a six pack of cool beer. On our way home, I had a rude introduction to northern Shan State: as we made our way down a broad, dark, unpaved street, I was walking almost ten yards from the edge of the nearest building. I heard something to my right and looked up…just in time to see a tomcat on the second floor roof turned around, raise its tail, and projectile piss all over me, including a bit into my mouth as I was talking. Nothing that a cold shower and a few months of therapy couldn’t fix.
With a bit of beer in our bellies, Cynthia and Teddy arrived with a flock of her senior students on their motorbikes.
We each got on the back of one and watched with envy while Cynthia and Teddy put on their helmets! Off we flew into the night, hanging on for dear life as we travelled the bumpy road through town and out into the villages, dodging other scooters, pedestrians, dogs, chickens, you name it. We suddenly pulled over, stopped, and emerged into a carnival atmosphere. This was the Lunar New Year of the Lahu tribe, with thousands of merrymakers, rides, street food, vendors, the works. A narrow dirt road leads back to the main festival area and, as we walked along, Cynthia suddenly pulled us into a dimly lit makeshift restaurant selling Shan noodles.
It belonged, like seemingly everything here, to a relative: Cynthia’s cousin’s sister. Andrew of course almost fainted when he saw the sanitary conditions under which the food was prepared. The soup and noodles were fine: they were bubbling away in a big cauldron. But the additions: chicken, vegetables, etc., were sitting out—for God knows how long. Sue and I dug in, and found the food very good; Andrew said he was a vegetarian and picked at his. We paid for dinner for the five of us and the three student drivers: the princely sum of 12,000 Kyat.
After dinner we popped into a dark courtyard. It turned out that Teddy’s parents lived in the village where the fair is held, and we met his parents and brothers (who have no English). His uncle from Tachilek was also there: a linguist who translated the bible into Akah, one of the tribal languages. He spoke fluent if somewhat shambolic English.
Here’s Teddy:
And we met Cynthia and Teddy’s kids: a darling little three year old girl and a 10 year old boy. The girl is very close to her mother, but the boy is closer to Teddy’s parents than to his own: He was born just as Cynthia won her scholarship to study in Bangkok, so he was raised by his grandparents for two years when he was young.
We then plunged on into the darkness and found ourselves in a huge arena with a stage and speakers where various bands were playing a blend of pop and traditional music on electric instruments. It was incredibly loud and hard to talk to the students, but Cynthia wanted us to see the traditional dancing. When it was clear by 10 PM that the dancing would start much later, we convinced our chariot drivers to spirit us back to our magic kingdom, the Yaw Lee Chain Hotel.
What a whirlwind of impressions from our first day!