A Trek Around Kalaw Is One of Endless Delights and Surprises

By Tibor Krausz

The medicine man lives in a shack on stilts on top of a hillock overlooking a scenic little valley. Relaxing in the shade of a blanket pegged to a clothesline demarcating the kitchen, where his wife is stoking the embers beneath a teapot, he's puffing on a pipe. My guide addresses him reverently in Burmese singsong. Pleased to welcome a visiting foreigner, the medicine man flashes me a smile and invites us for tea.

Following the requisite exchange of pleasantries, the medicine man turns to me and explains through my turbaned Sikh guide that I look unhealthily flushed. How badly do I suffer from high blood-pressure, he inquires concernedly. I don't, but I've just hiked five or six miles, I tell him. Undaunted, he presses a packet of dried herbs in my hand: three tablespoons a day and I'll be like new in a week, he assures me.

His wife fetches a basketful of other plastic packets. Their herbal contents cure everything from asthma to cancer and any of them is mine for the taking, the old man says. Cagily, I select a small magenta-hued potpourri -- but forget to ask what it cures.

We are barely an hour out of Kalaw, a former British hill station turned trekkers' paradise in central Myanmar, yet my mind is already filled with romantic notions of being a latter-day explorer discovering a mysterious, magical realm. Around Kalaw, time seems to have preserved a bucolic idyll of exotic wonders in a capsule. Here old medicine men still ply their age-old trade, dispensing herbal remedies to quaint hill-tribe villagers, whose respective womenfolk go about their daily business in garbs of psychedelic pomp.

We tread around waterlogged rice paddies acting as reflecting pools to cirrus-flecked blue skies. We traverse narrow trails hedged by impenetrable jungle on one side and verdant tea plantations on the other. And we scale the foothills of an encircling parapet of towering peaks which direct your gaze skyward and appear, like so many pillars of the earth, to support the firmament itself.

Enchanting scenery, yes; yet it's the local people that truly fascinate.

In thatched hamlets, which appear from a distance to be ablaze with fiery bougainvilleas and orchids, little ragamuffins tear themselves away from their horse-play and besiege me excitedly. A Westerner is a rare spectacle in these parts and they are all agog at the sight of this exotic alien that, mysteriously, has just fetched up in their village. It's only now and then that a hand reaches out for alms.

Some of their elders treat me with such timid yet abiding curiosity as if I were a visiting potentate from some fabulous overseas dominion. Wizened ancient grandmas and grandpas, squatting on their haunches Oriental-style, shoot me jovial, toothless smiles between two puffs on their reedy pipes.

I in turn gaze mesmerized at the amazing pageant of the womenfolk's traditional garments. Copper-skinned Akha women model lofty Pharaohesque beaded headdresses bejeweled with beaten silver baubles and Victorian coins. Gleeful Lisu maidens saunter about in queenly leggings and elaborately woven, finely embroidered smocks of the kind that would put the maker of Joseph's multihued coat to shame. Proud Karen housewives thrash rice in chunky wooden mortars in their everyday best: varicolored tunics with matching sarongs.

Tramping down a deserted trail, we encounter a minority woman in her tribal finery heading home from Kalaw market, her toddler slung in a sling across her shoulder like a papoose. A basket of produce is fastened by a strap to her forehead. Instinctively I reach for my camera. She stops, pulls her baby over to the front, and allows an insipid Mona Lisa smile to play over her lips. At the click of the shutter, she resumes her homeward trek without a word.

Her random act of generosity has been at once moving and humiliating: she sensed intuitively that this inquisitive stranger would prize a picture of her in his collection, but in taking that shot perhaps I behaved like a boorish camera-wielding tourist treating a proud native like some exotic human species.

Yet her photograph has stayed with me: I prize it as one of my most treasured souvenirs from Myanmar. Call me sentimental, but to me her image encapsulates the elusive yet enduring spirit of this largely isolated land with its proud people, beguiling culture, and fascinating history. It's the spirit of a culture steeped in the common courtesies of everyday politesse afforded to friend and stranger alike.

As my guide and I, haggard and footsore, slog it back towards Kalaw in the lengthening twilight along a railway track, a small rickety steam-engine locomotive pulling a single coal wagon whistles at us from a distance, then comes to a standstill slightly ahead of us. The machinist leans out the window and beckons us to make haste: he is offering us a ride.

Sandwiched between good-humored Burmese men in the driver's cab, I ride back to Kalaw with my new friends plying me with their leftover lunches and telling me in pidgin English how pleased they are to see me, a foreigner.

The honor is mine.