The Akhu Tribe

The next morning we are off again. This time we visit the village of Vansai , home to the Akhu tribe. Here the women all smoke pipes made from bamboo. They have a sort of turban on their head, and they carry their pipes, tobacco and matches in the folds of this turban. Their faces show the effect that tobacco smoke can have on the skin, as many of them have deeply etched wrinkles around the mouth and cheeks, but despite this we meet a woman of 92 with her great granddaughter slung on her back.




Inexplicably, women in all these tribes live to be much older than men. We have met several women in their 80’s as well as this lady in her 90’s, but few men seem to live beyond 60. It is hard to understand why this is, as the women work every bit as hard as the men, and in this village the women smoke constantly while the men do not.
In this village we also meet several men who are at home looking after the children while the women are in the jungle looking for firewood, or tending to the animals.


The Akhu is definitely more advanced than the Enn village but not as well organized as the Akha village. This is a Baptist village that has been guided by a pastor. Not to get involved in any sort of religious conflict, but it has to be said that the Catholic missionary did a much better job with his tribe.

The Chief makes Us Welcome

All the men in the village of Banglu are busy building a new and comparatively grand home for the village chief. He is instantly recognizable as the chief, not because of anything he is wearing, but because of his bearing and demeanour. He is a most imposing man of about forty with great presence, and a huge smile.


He comes over and shakes our hand and thanks us for bringing the medicine. He invites us to see his home, which, besides having the usual dead rats hanging from the ceiling, also has a haunch of a pig hanging from the wall.


It still looks quite fresh. It will last the chiefs family many days and will go off after a few days, and smell terrible, but they will still eat it. The chief invites us to stay for lunch and promises us that we will get some meat, which is a great honour. However, there is no way either of us wants to eat anything here. We ask the guide if we can decline the offer without causing any offence, by saying we have already eaten. He explains this to the Chief, who fortunately understands.

We leave the village with the children waving goodbye and running after us. The people have been wonderfully warm and friendly, but our flesh is crawling and we want nothing more than hot water and soap. Unfortunately neither is available. We do come to a stream, where we stop and wash our hands. We have brought with us a picnic of fried rice which we sit and eat by the stream. We discover a group sharing their lunch nearby.


It is a beautiful spot, miles from the nearest road. There are huge brightly coloured butterflies all round us, and the only sounds come from the myriad of birds singing in the tropical trees, and three young children from a neighbouring village playing downstream.


Trekking is not my forte, but this is quite magical. We gather up the plastic bags, water bottles and containers that we carried our picnic up in, and give them to some passing tribes people who are thrilled. They can put them to good use in their homes. This is a true example of recycling.

Enn - Tribe

The people of Banglu have very little food, other than rice and a few vegetables. They catch whatever they can in the surrounding jungle, which is usually limited to the occasional rat. They skin the rats and leave them hanging in their homes to dry. Two or three rats will feed the entire village when added to a thin vegetable soup with rice and chilies. We visit a home where there is a collection of small animal skulls and skeletons hanging from the ceiling, the purpose of which is not made clear. A small fire is burning in the middle of the floor and a cooking pot with soup simmers on top.


The smell is not pleasant. A rattan basket holds a large amount of cooked rice which sits there for days, and the people just take what they need for each meal. Home sweet home to them, but about as far away from it as we can imagine.

On the advice of our guide we went to the local market before we left Kyaingtong and bought a huge amount of cookies for the children and an assortment of basic medicines and shampoo for the people. Word spreads quickly that tourists have arrived in the village, and the children are gathered around us within minutes. They are all filthy but full of smiles which win our hearts.


It is customary for these tribes people never to ask for anything, so although these children are hungry, have nothing, and know that we have treats that they would never normally get, they don’t beg. But when we produce the cookies they all get in a line to be given the treats, and thank us, as their turn comes for the cookies. If that doesn’t melt your heart, nothing will.

After that we all sit down in one of the huts, and the women who have health problems quietly line up to tell our guide what ails them. The guide dispenses the relevant medicine. Several of the women have diarrhea which is hardly surprising, but sadly we have not brought up any medicine for that. We are not too sure that the guide acting as a dispensing chemist is the answer to the tribe’s problems, but it is certainly better than nothing. They have not seen a tourist for three months and this is the only way they ever get medicine.

Banglu - Village

We are scheduled to do “light trekking” to visit some more tribes that are completely inaccessible by road. I know you will find the concept of me trekking as hard to believe as I did but I was persuaded by my desire to see these tribes and by the term “light”. Suffice it to say that I would not describe over 6 hours of walking up and down a small mountain as “light trekking”. However the day was riveting.

After a couple of hours walking straight up the mountain we come to the village of Banglu where the Enn tribe live. This is a collection of 24 huts each housing a large family. Each hut is made of bamboo and rush matting, which offers very little protection from the cold and it gets cold here as we are now quite high up. The homes are just a jumble of shacks in a dirt clearing in the jungle. The homes are built on stilts to protect them from the rainy season and to allow a place for their animal, if they are lucky enough to have one.


The tribes people wear black clothing decorated with brightly coloured ribbon and tiny beads of silver. But their clothing is ragged and dirty. There is no form of record keeping in this village, so no one knows how old they are. The Enn tribe is famous for its women who have black teeth and lips from their constant chewing of the betel nut. They never brush their teeth.


I had said earlier that the fishing tribe that we visited on Lake Inle were the poorest people we had ever met. Not any longer. This tribe is not only the poorest, but without doubt it is the dirtiest. They wear no shoes and their hands and feet are filthy, which presents a problem as the men all want to shake our hands. The details of their personal hygiene, or total lack of it, may offend the more delicate of you, so if this is the case you might want to skip to the next paragraph. There is no running water or plumbing, although they do have a series of horizontal bamboo pipes bringing water from the stream to the centre of the village.


They very rarely wash, but when they do, the women keep all their clothes on, presumably from a sense of modesty and because the water is so cold. The men never wash below their waist or above their thighs. That doesn’t bear thinking about. But it gets worse. There are many dogs in the village. When the people go to the toilet, they call the dogs over to lick the relevant body part of their body clean, and to clean up what they have deposited on the ground. But wait, I haven’t finished yet. Each family has acquired a few tin plates from which they eat. They never wash the plates, instead the dogs are called over after their meal to lick them clean. Try not to think about that, either.