Pakokku Myanmar
Myanmar
Frequently Asked Questions
At the foot of the town on the west bank of the Irrawaddy, some thirty kilometres upstream of Bagan's great temples. Boats running between Mandalay and Bagan call here.
It is thanaka wood, from which Burmese people have for centuries made the golden paste that shields their faces from the sun. Pakokku is one of the country's main markets for it.
Tomatoes, peanuts, chillies, dried fish and giant tobacco leaves, a regional speciality destined for cheroots, the Burmese cigars. It is a market for wholesalers and families, not a shop window for visitors.
Yes, excursions often visit a workshop where women roll the cigars at an impressive pace, leaf after leaf, chatting and laughing as they work.
Yes, looms clatter inside teak houses: the region produces blankets and cottons sold across the country.
No, the visit chases no major monument, and that is precisely its strength. Pakokku shows everyday Burma, industrious and smiling, the kind the great sites never tell you about.
Yes, it ranks among Burma's major centres of Buddhist study and its monasteries house many monks and novices. Morning processions of saffron robes set the rhythm of the neighbourhoods.
By tuk-tuk or local cart, past wooden houses, noodle stalls, watermelon carts and schoolchildren in green uniforms, in a cheerful chorus of horns.
Shifting sandbanks, net fishermen and convoys of floating bamboo. In the dry season, pilots read the water like a map to avoid the shallows.
Yes, and the contrast makes full sense afterwards. What stays with you from Pakokku is gestures: a hand rolling a cigar, another grinding thanaka, a wave from a bicycle.
