Hpa-An's caves hide Buddhist temples inside the dark. They lie inside limestone towers that rise straight off the rice-paddy plains of Myanmar's Kayin State, rock soft enough that rainwater dissolved these caverns out of it over millions of years. Over the centuries people filled the hollows with worship. Rows of gilded Buddhas stand among the stalactites, and a golden stupa glows in the black. Kawgun is the oldest of them, its walls and outer cliffs plastered with small clay votive tablets, some inscribed as early as the 7th century. Saddan, Yathaypyan and Kaw Ka Thaung are the other great hollows, each a natural cavern turned into a sanctuary. Each is a cave and a working temple at once: curtains of stone left by dripping water stand in the same cool, damp dark as shrines people have tended for centuries.
The caves belong to the landscape around them. Enter Saddan at one end and you walk right through the mountain in the dark, past a huge reclining Buddha, to emerge at a hidden lake where boatmen pole you back through the paddies in flat wooden boats. Nine kilometres away, the Bat Cave empties itself every evening at dusk, in a long black ribbon that pours across the river for minutes on end. Around it the limestone spires stand over villages, goats graze at the cave mouths, and the sacred peak of Mount Zwegabin rises 722 metres on the horizon with a monastery on its summit. All of this lies in Kayin State, long troubled by fighting between the army and Karen forces. Since the 2021 coup much of Myanmar has been at war, and most governments now warn against all travel here, so for now Hpa-An is a place to know rather than visit.