Day 8 - Chin village walk or "Dana dances to the nose flute"

While we managed to stay warm through the night under our piles of bedding, the rain continued and in the morning we learned that the road we were supposed to take for a cloud forest hike was impassable. So plan B was to get a local guide and walk around the little cluster of villages that make up Kanpetlet, then move on to Mindat.

Our first stop was a school, where Dana taught some kids to clap their hands etc. if they were happy and they knew it.





We then worked our way down a steep hill among houses on slippery paths.









We passed the local office of Aung Su Kyi's party...




and an oddly appealing local Baptist church (80 to 90% of the Chin are Christian, thanks to American missionary efforts during the British colonial period).




Dana made some friends along the way.




We happened upon a photogenic guy who was getting dressed for a paid picture for some Dutch tourists, and got free shots of him...





his bow and arrows...





and one of his knives.




We showed up at his place after the shoot and got some pics of him and his wife, at a bargain price. We didn't tell the Dutch tourists.




Our guide said there are five Chin tribes, each with different clothing styles, shown on this calendar pic. Can you guess which they are?




The Chin have a history of their women tattooing their faces. Our Chin guide said his grandmother told him it was because a Bagan king came to Chin and appropriated wives to take back to Bagan and then abandoned them. Fearing that, the local women began tattooing their faces so that they would be less attractive. In any case, the abhorrent practice is now forbidden by Chin state law, only to resurface, tragically, in the US.

There were several older women in the village with tattoos, and we stopped at the home of one of them who dressed in her traditional clothing for us. Her tattoos were dots and lines (from one of the five Chin tribes)...




and those of another woman we happened upon (of the Dai tribe) were nearly all dots.





I think I understand why the tragic practice was effective.

The highlight of our day, however, was a visit to a nose flautist, and in particular her accompaniment to Dana's impromptu dance. Unfortunately I shot the dance with the camcorder and those vids don't load onto the iPad, so one must wait for the DVD to see it.




In the afternoon we drove to Mindat, however, when we got there it was again raining and cold and we decided to go back to Bagan a day early.
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