Tea With The Akha Tribe

Again we distribute cookies and medicine. We meet two young girls with red paint all over their face. It turns out these girls had been fascinated by the red lips of a previous tourist, and she had kindly given the girls her lipstick. They had not had an occasion to wear it since, as there had been no visitors for months. But now we had arrived, they thought it appropriate to put it on. One of the girls had obviously forgotten that it was supposed to go on the lips, and had instead made red dots all over her face. The older girl had remembered where it was to go, but her skills of application were limited. She had a huge red gash from ear to ear. However both young women thought they looked beautiful, and as men have learned all over the world, it is always wise to offer no opposition to these feelings that women have.


Here we are invited to have tea in one of the houses. We feel we cannot turn this down, but we would much rather not drink out of any of the rather dirty looking glasses we are offered. However our guide says that they do wash their utensils in the river water. We follow the example of our guide who pours tea into his glass, swills it round and then tips it out, before pouring in more which he drinks. We are also offered deep fried peanuts straight from the pan, which are delicious, together with some bananas collected from the jungle. We are pleasantly surprised to find that we do not get sick the next day.
When we return to Kyaingtong in the late afternoon, we are both exhausted and promptly fall asleep.
This is not a town famous for its restaurants. There are a few local eating places, none of them catering to tourists. However that evening we find a Chinese restaurant that deep fries a whole fish caught that day in the river. It costs $3 and is delicious.

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.

Mandalay to Kyaingtong

We are flying to Kyaingtong to see the different tribes of Northern Mynamar that remain unaffected and virtually untouched by the outside world. We arrive in a very different Myanmar . The airport at Kyaingtong is little more than a couple of huts next to an airstrip. But security is the tightest we have seen. We are deep in the heart of the Golden Triangle and close to the Chinese border. This was the notorious heroin capital of the world, but the Junta claims to have completely wiped out all the poppy plantations over the last few years. Tourists have only been allowed back in over the last four years. Consequently there are none of the luxuries we have been enjoying. The hotel we are staying in is known to be the best in town, but would not qualify for one star. We were well aware of this when planning our trip and were rather anxious about what we would find. It was maybe even more basic than we expected, but we were happy to find that it was comparatively clean, and the staff very welcoming and friendly. However all the laundry was done by hand with no hot water, so the sheets and towels were grey, which was a little disturbing. We were on the third floor (no elevator of course). At the end of our corridor there was a door marked “emergency exit”. For a moment we were reassured, but then we discovered it was just a door opening on to a three storey drop into the middle of the neighbour’s pigsty. No stairs, no balcony. Nothing.

We are in the high country and the temperatures have plummeted. But there is no heating in the hotel and some of the windows have fixed open slatted glass. It is colder in the hotel than outside and Gordon, who feels the cold, is miserable. He sleeps with all his clothes on underneath a huge pile of blankets.