Trekking hub of the Shan Hills — colonial bridges, village trails and tea-plantation sunrises
Hsipaw (pronounced 'THEE-baw') is a relaxed market town on the Dokhtawady River in northern Shan State, best known as the most popular trekking base in Myanmar outside Inle Lake. Day and multi-day treks lead through Shan and Palaung villages where opium has given way to tea and tomatoes, past hillside monasteries and suspension bridges, to panoramic viewpoints above the valley. The journey to Hsipaw — a 5-hour train ride from Mandalay across the stunning Gokteik Viaduct, once the world's highest railway bridge — is itself one of Southeast Asia's great rail experiences.
Hsipaw was the capital of the Shan principality of Thibaw (one of 34 Shan States in British Burma), ruled by a saopha (sky lord) into the 1960s. The last saopha, Sao Kya Seng, was educated at Colorado School of Mines and married an American woman, Inge Sargent, whose 1994 memoir 'Twilight Over Burma' tells the story of their lives together — and his disappearance at the hands of Ne Win's military in 1962, two weeks after the coup. The Shan State has been a persistent zone of ethnic armed conflict since independence; travel to Hsipaw was periodically restricted for foreign visitors, and access…