Hsipaw and Pyin Oo Lwin

The ride with the minibus from Mandalay to Hsipaw took us pretty much 5 hours and we arrived in the early afternoon. We looked for a room to spend the night and after that was settled, we were looking for an agency to go on a trek the following day.

Hsipaw (pronounced see-poo) is a small town that is not yet too touristic even though you start to find more and more guesthouses and other touristic infrastructure.

We went to Charles' guesthouse, the probably biggest guesthouse/hotel in town which was known for organizing good treks in the area. Apart from daytours they also had multi-day treks on offer and we decided for a 2 days/ 1 night trek.

As we still had time in the afternoon, we went to do some sightseeing and walked to the old Shan Palace in the northern part of town. The palace is actually more of an old British mansion than a real palace with a huge terrace and big gardens. The house is still inhabited by local people, but they usually receive visitors in their living room every afternoon and share the captivating story of their family and the Shan people.

What we heard there was quite stunning:

During the British times in Myanmar (at the time it was still called the Union of Burma) the Shan states had a unique position among all the Burmese states. They joined the Union of Burma under the condition that they may keep their autonomous system of having one ruling prince for each of their Shan provinces, one of them being Hsipaw state. As the original royal palace had been destroyed during World War 2, the princes of Hsipaw held their residence in the British mansion afterwards.

The last prince of Hsipaw, Sao Kya Seng, was a very advanced young man who went to study mining in Colorado in the 1950ies to be able to exploit the minerals in the fertile Shan grounds in order to improve the wealth and well-being of his people. Over there he fell in love with Inge, a young lady from Austria (from Carinthia), they got married and he took her back to Hsipaw after his studies. Until the day they arrived in Yangon (at the time still Rangun and the capital), Inge did not know that her husband was the ruling prince of one of the Shan states. So at the end, she became the last princess of Hsipaw state. Did any of my Austrian fellows know that? We for sure did not and were keen on hearing the rest of the story.

Inge adapted herself quite quickly to her new role, dressed like the local people and soon fluently spoke both Burmese and Shan. The ruling couple was very popular with the people as they were improving the conditions for their people a lot by progressive developments in agriculture and mining. They had 2 daughters and were leading a peaceful life until 1962 when General Ne Win was overthrowing the state, arresting all present princes, ministers and governmental employees and implementing the military dictatorship over Burma.

Also Sao Kya Seng was arrested, but for reasons still not entirely known today, the Burmese army never admitted of having arrested him. Even though Inge knew (from a secret letter her husband had written to her when he was captured) where the army had imprisoned him, they always claimed they had never arrested him and did not know about his whereabouts. Apparently the prince was killed just a few days or weeks after he was arrested, but his wife and family have no proof of what had happened to him, where he had been killed and what had happend to his body. All interventions from the Austrian foreign ministry, the US and even the United Nations did not help to shed light on this incredible affair. 

Inge stayed around two more years in Burma hoping that her husband was still alive and would come back, but at some point it was getting too dangerous for her to stay and with the help of good friends she left the country with her daughters. She is now living in the US and if anybody is interested in reading about the times of the overthrow, Inge wrote a book about her personal fate in Myanmar ("Twilight over Burma - My life as a Shan princess" by Inge Sargent).

Still nowadays, the Shan state is the "troublesome" province of Myanmar where the Shan rebels keep on fighting the army to regain the independence and autonomy they had been guaranteed before the military dictatorship. Namshan for example, a small town with lots of tea plantations, about 70km from Hsipaw was not accessible for tourists because of ongoing fights in the area....

Stunned from what we heard at the Shan Palace in Hsipaw we returned to town to prepare our bags for the trek and go for dinner.

The next day, we met our guide and our group at 8:00 and started the trek. 

Our guide was a nice and well-informed chap who was married to a French girl, had been playing for the Myanmar national football team and had then decided to go back to his hometown Hsipaw and work as a guide. He knew a lot about the area, about its history, current development and also shared his own critical opinion about Myanmar's international and political situation with us. Our group was as well very nice, we were with Flora (French), Guillherme (Brazilian) and 3 Israeli girls (forgive me, I forgot their names).

It was a beautiful and sunny day and we started to sweat as soon we started climbing the gentle Shan hills. One can see that agriculture is still the main source of income for the local population. We passed millions of rice fields, corn fields, mustard crops, chili plantations and we had a midday snack on a little viewpoint just above a tea plantation.

Tea in Myanmar is more or less only grown in the Shan hills around Hsipaw, but is used everywhere in the country: as regular green or black tea and for one of Myanmars specials dishes we loved so much - pickled tealeaf salad with tomatoes, lime, peanuts and fried garlic chips.

We arrived in Ban Kham, a Palaung village (the local hill tribe), at around 14:00 and had a tasty vegetarian lunch at the homestay where we would spent the night. It was a large wooden house with a big living room and a fireplace and our group slept in a separate room with matrasses on the floor. As we were quite experienced in doing Asian homestays we were not surprised that there was only a "bucket shower", but to our astonishment we found a "proper" Asian toilet behind the house ;).

After a short siesta, our guide took us on a village tour and showed us the monastery, some more Palaung houses as well as the school and a little viewpoint for the sunset. We learned quite soon that in the mountains hot and sunny days turn into rather cool and chilly nights as soon as the sun sets in winter. Even though we had above 30 degrees during the day, it cooled off to around 10 degrees during the night and we wore all the clothes we had brought with us (luckily we had foreseen cold nights).

After another good vegetarian dinner (they only eat meat on very special occasions) we were sitting around the fireplace to be warm and kept talking and sharing travel experiences with the others. When it was time to go to bed, we admired the bright and clear sky full of stars and sneaked under our two layers of blankets to survive the night :).

Good news is: we did survive the night and the next morning the sun was already out and heating up the air. After breakfast our guide led us down the hill into another valley where the landscape was similar to the previous days: many cornfields, tea plantations, mustard fields etc. 

Around lunchtime we descended through a banana palmtree plantation to reach a tiny, yet beautiful waterfall. We had a delicious bowl of Shan noodles (we'll give details in our food article) and went to explore the waterfall. It was possible to climb on the slippery rocks behind the waterfall and look through the water from behind.

To get back to Hsipaw we took a tuk tuk and arrived at our hotel in the early afternoon. After a much needed shower we went for a fruit shake and headed to a small sunset hill a bit out of town. On the way back we did a small detour to check the schedule and prices at the train station. We heard and read that it is quite an adventure to take the train in Myanmar, especially on the beautiful section between Hsipaw and Pyin Oo Lwin (pronounced peen-o-leen) where the train passes the famous Goteik Viaduct built by the Americans to traverse a massive gorge. As the train is, however, suuuuuuper slow (Mandalay to Hsipaw 12 hours by train versus 5 hours by minibus), we decided to break the journey and make another stop at the hill station of Pyin Ooo Lwin.

The train left the next day at around 9am. We were travelling together with Jonas, a nice German guy we had met during the trek. We met at the train station and bought a ticket for the 7 hours journey to Pyin Oo Lwin for something like 0,8€ as well as some fresh fruits and boarded the train. There were two different classes available: ordinary class where you sit on wooden benches and upper class with larger seats and cushions. We decided to take ordinary class and sit together with the locals which was a good idea as the cushions in upper class were apprently full of bed bugs.

The train was really mega slow, but at the same time very shaky so that we sometimes had the feeling we were rather in a boat than on train tracks ;). At least it was very practical to take pictures when the train passed the old Goteik viaduct in slow motion. The gorge was very impressive and it was fun to see that all tourists were hanging out of the windows to take pictures while the local family next to us was sitting on the floor and not daring to look out of the window because they were so afraid.

We arrived at the train station in Pyin Oo Lwin in the late afternoon and started looking for accomodation. As it used to the be the British summer residence, the guesthouses and hotels were rather up-market and expensive, but we managed to find one for a halfway acceptable price for the night. We went for an excellent Indian dinner where Alex over-stuffed his stomach so much that he was sick all night long. Thus we slept as long as possible the next morning and left the hotel at around midday to explore the town by bike.

We first cycled to the old British Governer's house, a beautiful British mansion in the middle of a small vineyard on a tiny hill, recently transformed into a hotel. When we went further south, we passed some more old British style houses and gardens before we reached the main attraction of Pyin Oo Lwin: the Botanical Gardens. A huge oasis with little ponds, shady trees, neatly maintained flowers and a perfect British lawn. Seriously, you can spend a day wandering around the gardens or just lazing in the shade of a tree and this is what we did for a couple of hours.

On the way back to the center we had dinner, then picked up our luggage from the hotel to walk to the bus stop and catch our night bus to the next destination: Kalaw from where we planned to go on a 3 days trek to famous Inle Lake.

The guy who had sold us our ticket the night before was hanging around the bus stop completely drunk as Myanmar was playing football against Thailand and got heavily defeated. Once the game was over, he told us to just wait, the bus would turn up anytime because he needed to go home urgently ;). 

The bus did indeed show up and we went on another sleepless and cold bus ride to arrive in Kalaw at 4 in the morning. We will tell you all about our trek to beautiful Inle Lake in the coming article and hope you are all doing fine.

Take care and talk to you soon,

Alex & Moni