Feeling at Home in Hsipaw

February 2016

Here we are in Hsipaw (also spelled Thipaw, and pronounced See-paw) in NE Myanmar, 6-7 hours by slow bus from Mandalay.  We started out at 2 pm and by the time we got here it was dark.  The narrow barely two-lane road is the only link between Mandalay and China, and it is literally choked with massive cargo trucks, and large buses, mostly carrying locals, but also some tourists – there were at least half a dozen of us on our bus. On one stretch of road our progress was hampered by a caravan of 10-12 army trucks, each carrying 5-6 unhappy looking mules.  In the back of one of the army trucks we saw a soldier sleeping in a hammock he’d slung across the back of the truck, just inches from the mules.  

About two thirds of the way along our route we spent 30 minutes slaloming down a dizzying series of hairpin turns into a deep ravine.  We spent at least another 30 minutes chugging back up the other side, again navigating multiple hairpin turns.  As both the big buses and the even bigger trucks have to navigate these curves wide, only one of them can do it at a time.  So there were long lines of trucks and buses waiting on the far side of every curve.  We never did figure out who decided who got to go when – likely it’s the Asian rule of the road – the biggest vehicle gets the right of way.  

The trucks heading to China, the ones we had to pass whenever there was even the most minimal stretch of reasonably ‘straight’ and ‘just-wide-enough-to-accommodate-our-bus-and-that-massive-truck-we-are-now-passing-and-oh-is-that-its-mirror-we-just-knocked-off?’ were mostly massive two and three axle trucks loaded with watermelons and unknown cargo, but more than likely food.  The trucks coming our way (as in at us, hopefully with enough room to get by) were mostly carrying rocks and coal – we suspect from China, but possibly from more eastern areas of Myanmar.  

All this will change when China builds a new super highway from Kunming to Mandalay.  They’ve already built two pipelines – one oil, one natural gas – and according to a local here are buying up land (mostly agricultural) and businesses even faster than they’re buying houses in Vancouver, Canada.  The next big city along this route – Lashio – is almost entirely Chinese, and according to most tourists, not worth visiting.

But Hsipaw is wonderful.  Indeed we almost feel like we’re in heaven.  We have a great room – possibly the best we’ve had yet, with a balcony, a mini-bar fridge, a kettle, a flat-screen tv that gets our favourite news station, Al Jazeera, air-con of course, really good ‘free’ breakfasts with eggs any way you like (but of course no bacon, sigh), friendly helpful staff who snuck into our room this morning to put a little vase of roses on our ‘dressing table’, and all of this for just $40 Cdn.  

But the piece de resistance is that across the road is a woman with a little roadside stand making one of our absolute most favourite food – roti canai.  We don’t know exactly where this dish originates, maybe Malaysia, but the roti are fluffy like filo pastry, and served with a ‘sauce’ of whatever the roti-maker has on hand.  Here in Myanmar the roti sellers seem to favour sweet toppings – sugar and fruit.  But we prefer savoury.  Our gal across the street serves potato curry.  There’s another one up the road who serves cooked chick-peas.  Neither quite as good as the ‘canai’ sauce we had in Malaysia, which is tomato and vegetable based.  But still – roti canai literally on our doorstep!  Oddly enough, we also found roti canai (again with a potato based canai) in Mandalay, about a block from our hotel.  We had 2-3 roti canais for dinner both nights we were there.  We are, literally, mad about them.  So… the hotel is good on all counts.

Hsipaw is a small town with a population of somewhere around 30,000.  It's located on the Duthawadi River, which is quite a big river and, when we were there at least, a slow-moving, peaceful kind of river.  Several small streams, possibly tributaries to or offshoots from the river flow through parts of town.  The town is ringed by hills and mountains and is a favourite for hikers.  It's a great town to wander around in.  Lots of interesting things to see, and the people are very friendly, although very few speak English.

One day we went to one of the markets, where we saw an old toothless woman, sitting in a 5’ x 5’ open-sided palapa.  It did have a roof, which may have been palm leaf or plastic.  She clearly lived in her little ‘kiosk’ – she had a little stove going and was making tea.  I saw a couple of eggs nearby, and all sorts of other unidentifiable junk – the stuff of a lifetime, and now of her life.  When I said to her ‘tea!’ and smiled, she laughed with her mouth wide-open, showing me just how many teeth she was missing. We later heard that she likely ‘looks after’ the toilets in the market, which were not much more that a concrete block with maybe two or three squat toilets.  Tomorrow we’re going back for a photo – and to give her something that will make her day just a little bit brighter – money – what else?!

The market was lively, colourful and chock full of anything you might need or want, from fish and food stuffs to cheap plastic wares.  All jumble-jamble packed together.

Home made watering cans!  Brilliant!

After going to the market we wandered down to the river and watched the long boats – very long dug-out canoes.  One was so heavily loaded with rocks that the water was just about over the gunwales.  It looked like the people who lived along the river were collecting rocks, perhaps to build some sort of wall or breakwater.  There were great piles of them already on the ‘beach’.  

From there we walked back up towards town through an area where the houses were made of bamboo poles with woven palm-leaf mat walls.  Clearly a poor neighbourhood.  We stopped to chat with a woman who has been working at a ‘shop’ in Singapore for 10 month stretches for the past 7 years.  She spoke good English, Myanmar, Chinese, and likely a smattering of other languages.  A bright, vivacious woman, living in what most would consider a ‘slum’, but content, and even happy.  She goes to Singapore to work so that she can make enough money provide for her parents.  Her father, who is 82, was dozing in a chair out front of their home. That’s likely his primary modus operandi. Her mother, although much younger, is past the time of working or making any real income, although it looked like they were selling afew things – snacks and some cooked food – which her mother may do even when her daughter is away.  So this woman, to keep her family together, ‘commutes’ between Singapore and Hsipaw.  Quite a life.

Tonight we are going to go to a nice looking restaurant by the river that serves Thai coconut curry dishes.  We will be meeting an interesting 72 year old Swiss woman, who spent her working years working with the UN as a travel agent, and has herself traveled almost everywhere in the world.  She wants to talk to us about Thailand, where she is headed in the next few days to do some diving.  “It’s too hot now for trekking and I need to be by the beach and in the water.”  

For more information on Hsipaw go to: https://insightmyanmar.org/all-about-burma/2022/6/1/hsipaw