Inle Lake, Myanmar

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Inle Lake - Nyaungshwe

The next stop on our Itinerary was Inle Lake via Kalaw. The fifteen hours our bus ride took from Yangon was horrible. While I was sat on my sweaty broken seat, despite my nudges I had a smelly Burmese guy drooling in his sleep on my left shoulder and to my right I had a speaker blasting out some Burmese Techno crap right down my ear making sleep for me impossible. A few places in front of me sat on seat to himself, listening to an mp3 player while smoking a cigarette was a Monk. With fifteen hours to kill I had plenty of time to reflect and consider what I had been told the previous day about Buddhism and how the monks live a hard life of suffering… I began to question just how genuine some of these monks are… On this journey it was clear it wasn’t the monk who was suffering the most!

We spent the night in Kalaw, up bright and early we made the bumpy but scenic 3 hour ride sharing the roof of a tuk tuk with five locals and couple giant bags of rice to Nyanungshwe. We arrived around lunch time and spent most of the day relaxing and walking around the small town. As expected, there were more facilities for tourists, but this didn't seem to distract from the atmosphere.

We hired a small wooden boat with a couple of other backpackers, a German called Fitz and a Japanese guy called Sushi. We hit the serene, placid waters of Inle Lake on our small wooden boat at around 7:30am and quickly made our way through small picturesque villages built entirely on stilts. Somehow the locals had developed a strange paddling technique - they stand on one leg and use the other to paddle, we had a go but it proved too difficult, not wanting to risk falling into the lake!

After drifting through a now very untraditional floating market with hundreds of souvenir hawkers we stopped at a silk weaving factory to see the famous long necked women. These
women wear rings around their necks from a very young age, each year they add another ring, and they lengthen the neck substantially, the tribesmen believe this makes the women more attractive!?

The rest of the day was spent visiting a few pagodas, including the famous 'Jumping Cat Monastery' where some obviously bored monks had randomly taught the resident felines to leap through a hoop about 30cm from the ground. If I’m honest the jumping cats were far more interesting than the run down monastery itself!

I enjoyed my two days at Inle lake. The lake was really stunning and the surrounding hillsides and villages really beautiful in a subtle way. Despite the tourism boom the lake as maintained its unique character. Definitely worth taking three days out of my itinerary to visit the place

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