Kachin Tribal Village Trek, Burma/Myanmar - Hiking in the Jungles of Burma

I made paper planes with my spare journal pages and joined a bunch of kids in play. A commotion ended our session as apparently the Christmas sacred cow hunt was about to ensue. To me, mind you, I am not much of a hunter, I didn’t grasp the challenge of hunting a slow moving, fat cow. One man pulled out an ancient flint lock blunderbuss. After a few hours and four booming shots, we still had not seen a dead cow. I wanted to follow them with the camera, but they didn’t want any pictures taken. Interestingly, they didn’t want the government to know they had a gun. Sounds like our worlds aren’t very different in that regard.

Shortly after they left we headed to the church service. At first, it was like any other service, but in their tribal language of Rawang, not even Burmese. So we couldn’t even get a translation.

The next day started with a visit from the pastor, donned in his traditional Rawang tribal dress, for a bit of a culinary exchange. For a treat, he brought us popcorn. We introduced him to peanut butter and blackberry jam. Unlike many other cultures where an individual wearing authentic clothes would demand or expect payment for taking his photograph, he was excited and proud to have his picture taken. Even his equally, ornately dressed daughters joined the photographic mayhem.

The story continues...