A vendor displays sour pork at Bamaw's candlelight market. Pic: Aung Tun Win

AN intriguing shopping experience awaits visitors to Bamaw who stay up late enough to enjoy the town’s unique candlelight market.

The market – which locals call the Bamaw Mingalar Zay – takes place on Sinphyushin Street in the middle of town from 2am every night, providing the town with much needed commerce and supplying surrounding areas with produce.

As the name suggests, traders set up their stalls by candlelight and sell their goods in the yellow-tinged glow.

Traders travel from nearby villages to sell a wide variety of meats, fish, vegetables, fruit and traditional Myanmar spices. It is not uncommon to see more than 100 stalls set up, with hundreds of buyers milling around looking for the best deal.

Fish, some fresh from the nearby Ayeyarwady River and some frozen and transported from Mandalay, is always a popular product and is laid out for buyers to examine.

When I visited Bamaw, pineapples were in season and the market was practically overflowing with them. For consumers this was good news and I have never seen prices for pineapples this low in Yangon – only K100 each.

The photographer who came along with me on the trip was licking his lips at the prospect of so many juicy, ripe and cheap pineapples. Luckily for him, his lust for the spiky fruits did not impair his bargaining ability and he was able to bag three for only K250.

Some inquiries revealed that the majority of the pineapples in the market had come from Nant Phar village, which is about 30 minutes’ drive from Bamaw. One pineapple seller said she had to come to the market around 11pm to open her stall at 2am.

Nearby, a butcher has incorporated his motorcycle into his stall by laying a wooden chopping board across the rear of the bike and piling whole chickens on one side. The other side was used to chop the chickens into pieces for sale.

My attention then drifted over to a woman selling steamed beans in small plastic bags.

Using the weak light produced by one candle on either side of her large bowl, the woman was busily putting steamed beans into plastic bags for sale to passersby. The beans were poured into cups, which were then transferred into bags: Each bag held two cups of beans and cost K50. And they were delicious too.

As well as supplying households and businesses in Bamaw with fresh produce, the market is also a vital supply point for surrounding villages. Mobile produce vendors – mostly on bicycles or motorbikes – were moving from stall to stall buying food and placing it into baskets. When their hands and baskets were full they returned to their vehicle to tie it down.

When their bicycle or motorbike was fully packed, the vendor then set off down the road to their village to offload the goods to others.

I did not envy those riders of heavily laden bicycles who would have to ride back to their village – it looked like hard work.

At around 5:30am, with the dawn light quickly overpowering the much-diminished candles, all the traders began packing up their goods and heading home, so I opted to do the same.

Walking back to the hotel I ran into my photographer, grinning like the cat that got the cream as he awkwardly carried three pineapples in each hand with the camera slung around his neck. I never did find out how much he paid for those other three pineapples.