Palaung Women and Buddhist Monks

Travel Day 1158 – Pankam Village to Hsipaw, MYANMAR

After quite a good night of sleep in our little bamboo hut we had to make sure to be up early to see the feeding of the monks…

Palaung Women going to the Monastery

Actually we were already woken up in the middle of the night as it seemed when the old Palaung lady of the house came up the ladder to the area where we were sleeping on the floor. Since there was a little Buddhist shrine recessed in the bamboo wall, right above my head, I woke up quite abruptly and surprised to hear the prayer mumbles of our elderly host. Her face appeared seemingly out of nowhere next to my bed and in the shine of a flickering candle. While it took me a second to make out that it was our Palaung granny mumbling into my ear beyond the mosquito net, the whole ritual seemed actually quite surreal…

As we already learned yesterday, the Palaung people were a very devote Buddhist type of tribe and the biggest building in the entire village was obviously the wooden monastery. But as our guide pointed out, especially the women were strict Buddhists by local interpretations. The elderly Palaung women would show their devotion by shaving their heads and leaving their husbands at a certain advanced age to live almost a nun like existing for the rest of their days. These women would still stay with the family, but they would make the religious rituals the main focus of the day…

Feeding of the Monks in Pankam Village

So it came to no surprise that the feeding of the Buddhist monks was also an integral part in the daily Palaung village life. While I was used to seeing monks walk the streets in the morning to beg for their food of the day, here in Pankam on the contrary the local women from each household came up to the monastery to donate their fair share of food without being asked for it. I found this quite remarkable because seeing all the local women flock together in the early morning displayed quite convincingly how deeply religious these village people were…

Also the fact that each Palaung woman, the older generation with very traditional dress and scarf wrapped around their shaved heads, brought not only food but also flowers on nicely draped plates seemed a great proof for their loving care. Luckily they didn’t mind us three foreign faces watching their whole morning ceremony which was then even followed by an extended service in the main hall of the Buddhist monastery. These rituals were especially elaborate and the monastery even more filled than usual because we were lucky enough to be here on a full moon day…

Adventurous Hike through the Fields

After sitting in the monastery for quite a while, which was mostly packed with Palaung women sitting in second row behind the few men that bothered showing up, we then made sure to play again with some children before we carried on with our program. But the interesting thing about the kids was that they were of course as curious and easily to entertain as anywhere else in a village, but here they obviously must have come across some other foreigners before. Every time we would take a photo of the kids and display it to them, they came up and were sliding their fingers on the camera display as if it was an iPhone. I found that actually quite a curious and maybe even concerning development of things…

After some more village explorations, the rest of our day was then slightly more exciting and fun than yesterday. On the one hand was our hike from Pankam Village to Hsipaw strictly downhill and on the other we took another route and got completely lost in the fields. Well, our guide still kept insisting that we were on the right trek, even if there was no trail to follow anymore we simply made our way through local fields, but it was all good fun topped with beautiful scenery. By the time we arrived back in Hsipaw we actually realized that we enjoyed the hike so much that we wished we would have gone for longer…

Find all Pankam Village to Hsipaw photos here.