Mintap, Chin State

Our journey to Chin State from Mandalay Division was long. The mountain ranges that were visible ahead ran north to south along the border with Bangladesh. Further south was Rakhine State. The scenery was magnificent: rainforest kilometre after kilometre with thousands of teak trees shading the road. I learned a sobering fact about teak trees. All are owned by the government and are generally sold to India or China. Anyone (other than the government) caught cutting down teak faced three months in jail. The new government is changing this.

In six months teak will still be owned by the government but can only be sold to local people at a consequent lower price.

We are travelling is the wet season, so all is shades of green. Areas of cleared land are covered with healthy looking crops. Rice, coffee, sweetcorn, sesame, bananas, jackfruit, grapefruit, oranges and huge ginger as well as tomatoes, aubergine, chillies and cabbages.

In Pauk we came across an unusual looking river that seemed to be a tributary of the Chindwin. It was enormously wide but only in the middle was it fast flowing. The shallows were dotted with mining equipment. It looked to me as if they were mining, or more graphically sluicing, gravel. But it turned out they were mining gold! Judging by the houses nearby there was either very little gold to be had or the money for the gold was not going to the villagers.

Mintap where we were headed is atop a mountain range with the usual heart-stopping U-turns on perpendicular roads. I stayed the first night at the brand new Hotel Mindat. It was so new that it had no guests: neither foreign or local. As it had no internet (I am sure that will come soon), I moved next day to a guesthouse called Moe Pi that had the most obliging manager: Ko Htang.

After a full day of Chin traditional wedding, a performance by a tattooed lady who could play the flute using her nose and several successes with the Used-Glasses Project I looked forward to using Moe Pi’s internet. However, when I asked Ko Htang for the password, he was very doubtful that he had ever had one.  Apparently there are people in the world who know even less about the internet than I do, which most people would doubt possible. We tried somewhere else, but it was closed either from lack of customers or lack of signal. So we renamed the area The Never Never Internet Land. Due to the lack thereof, all photos of happy smiling faces owning new glasses will have to be accomplished later (possibly in another lifetime).