After the crazy festivities of the previous night, we were up bright and early February 10th to head out of Konhai and continue onward on our third leg of the journey. This is part of the village monastery:

And a view of the village as seen from the monastery:

Our walk in Shan State took us along, up, and down mountain roads and paths and through small Palaung villages where the locals would come out to stare and often try and feed us. Here’s a typical climbing turn around the side of a mountain:

And of course we encountered many Palaung villagers along the path, including a number of people with their animals:

In each village where we stopped for more than a few minutes, we were very lucky to quickly become acquainted with the one person who could speak a bit of broken English. In Om Tet, it was a monk who had spent time in Mandalay and had learned some English there. He was considerably shorter than Scott:

One generalisation that can be made honestly about Burma (and this applies not only to Burman areas, but also to minority areas and non-SPDC areas) is that almost everyone loves having their photo taken (at least, if us foreigners were the photographers). Old and young alike never said no to a photo when I asked, and many told me I don’t need to ask – I can just take pictures! I sometimes did this, and never had a bad reaction. Here’s one wonderful older woman heading to work on the hillside outside her village. She saw the camera and started modelling for me!

Cows and Burmese ponies are used to carry loads in many parts of Burma. Here in the mountains of northern Shan State, they seem to use cows more frequently.

This friendly lady was happy to stop for a photo with her heavy load, which was probably semi-compacted tea leaves:

We always catch the eye of small children who haven’t seen white-skinned people before, or are too young to remember.

And there were many instances where we could see that storied wisdom that comes with age, in the calm smile of an older man or woman who greeted us.

We saw men compacting tea leaves to be taken to the big cities too! They gather them and remove sticks and such, then one man jumps up and down barefoot on the leaves in the bag while the other puts handfuls of leaves into the bag every so often.

Some children were more photogenic than others, but they were all fun to interact with.

Sitting in small tea shops in tiny villages with only a few houses became a common theme on our trek, as the intensity of the sun was really tough and hydration was very important. We drank a LOT of tea! This is the view out of one such tea shop:

On rare occasions, a truck would trundle past us on a road that seems only barely navigable by a motorbike, let alone a loaded truck. And of course there were people all over the place, not concerned about the potential for the truck to roll off the road and down the mountainside.

In one village, while we sat across the path drinking tea, boys were playing make believe. The kid with the mask was my favourite, and in this photo is actually somewhat camouflaged it seems! Beer is very popular in Burma, and the pile of empties in the firewood area behind the boys attests to this.

That night I took some long exposure night shots and then we went to sleep, tired out from our long walk – those photos in the next post!