Perhaps the most pleasing Buddhist temple in Myanmar’s Shan State sits in a valley slightly southeast of Kalaw, gently tying together the paths and ridges that together create an endlessly explorable web of walking possibilities. The temple’s spire shimmers at the center of everything, like the moon does on magical nights.
We first saw this perfectly proportioned structure after cresting a small hill. We had walked a dozen miles since beginning a three-day trek that morning. Between us and the temple’s village was a grassy bog, ideal for birdwatching. Someone with a painter’s sensibility had spanned the wetland with 300 yards of railing-ed wooden walkway that would have been right at home on Cape Cod.
Of course this village, which might be called Ywa Pu, or possibly Sait Kyar Kone—people here are used to things having more than one name—is halfway around the planet from Cape Cod. It’s a couple of days’ hike from a body of water, Inle, that in these parts is nearly as famous as the Cape. Two rows of stilted wooden houses on either side of a muddy path make up the whole of the village. One or two of the homes boasts electricity that comes from solar cells; in the rest people use candles at night, or simply go to bed with the sun. Televisions at the electrified homes kept even small kids awake as late as 10, but everyone seemed to be up with the roosters in the morning nevertheless.
I got up too, still wearing the smile I had worn since getting off the hour’s flight from Yangon two evenings earlier. Arriving in the cool north, where the air has none of the steam and soot of the big city, revitalized and uplifted me. I needed a fleece jacket at night, even at the end of rainy season.
No road passes this way, but it’s hardly wilderness. Our route passed next to terraced ride paddies, through pine forests, along open ridges, beneath apple orchards, and across rolling fields. Nearly all the land that’s flat enough is under cultivation. We skirted ginger plants and sesame flowers and turmeric roots and several more crops that I couldn’t identify without help from our two teenaged girl guides. Amidst the bright emerald colors of the rainy season, we also spotted tan cliffs, shady caves, and the flash of unexpected silver that signals an ingenious irrigation system.
Now and then we encountered a hamlet. The language spoken there might have been any of a dozen possibilities; our guides knew lots of the local tongues, and they claimed to be able to guess which one to use by facial features alone. Us newbies, to tell a Danu from a Palaung from a Pa’O, had to rely on the color of the turban or whether or not the men were wearing longyis.
Village activities that first night seemed pretty uniform: taking care of animals and children, farming
intensively, celebrating harvests and funerals. Such a schedule keeps people busy. When we asked, none had traveled far from home. Indeed, the folks living in WhereverWeWere could rightly have asked people like us, Why go anywhere? After all, on full- and new-moon days, most of the surrounding region comes to them, as hosts of the loveliest temple for miles around.
Except that it’s not really any of those things. “Cultivated Wetland” might be a more appropriate term. Much of the “lake” is in fact a garden. Farmers take weeds from the bottom and use them to build a floating foundation for their crops. The garden beds slide up and down along long bamboo poles that are stuck deep in the mud, supporting eggplant, tomatoes, beans, cauliflower, cabbage, melons, and bananas.
