The local market

For reasons unknown to me we would not be returning till the following midday after our army escort had done a couple of sweeps up and down the valley floor, and so we were billeted for the night in the village with our escorts and woke next morning to the noise of the local market place.

This market was held every ten days, the seven day week meaning nothing in these remote areas. I was treated to the arrival of numerous high, wooden bullock carts, loaded with all manner of produce and within an hour or so the population of the village had increased many times. The stalls were mostly manned by women and very shy teenage girls, many of whom had never seen a white man before so I was told. Hand rolled cigars, a local cottage industry, were everywhere on stalls, together with heaps of vegetable varieties that I had never seen before.

Another product was a form of sweet, apparently made from the whites of eggs and sugar and looking like white pancakes piled high on sticks. There was dried meat and monkeys and even a tiger skin. These people thought nothing of trapping a tiger for meat and getting a small sum of money for the skin which, like the bundles of cigars, would be packed over the mountains at enormous profit to the traders behind the scenes.
I was told that opium and its variations were also part of the local trade and, like the tiger trapping, meant nothing to the locals. This has of course been recognised in many places in recent time, but I am certain that if I visited the same village today, very little would have changed!

The return trip to base was uneventful and after farewells, a short trip to the airport saw us winging through the cloud shrouded passes and then over the patchwork plains to Rangoon airport in time to catch a train out on the first leg of my next journey.