Inle Lake (and a moment in Yangon)

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*Many of the photos in this blog entry were taken by Jeff Roberts at www.eyeballimaging.com/blog ©2007*

After leaving Bagan we took a short flight to Heho airport, an hour away from Inle Lake. After checking out a few hotels we found a brightly painted room on a dusty local road in the town of Nyaung Shwe, about 20 minutes by boat to the lake itself. We were hungry, so we had lunch at a little locally-owned restaurant next door to our hotel. The restaurant was covered in Jesus images and Catholic shrines, and the straws in our drinks had been turned into little plastic crosses! Apparently missionaries succeeded in affecting at least a few people in Burma. The food was good though, and the lady who worked there was very friendly. She told us that if we ordered a day ahead she could make us stuffed fish and mashed potatoes, which sounded great. We ordered it for the next evening, then took off to wander into town. We rented bicycles for $1 a day from a local guy close to the hotel, then pedaled down the bumpy roads, weaving around stray dogs and local guys on mopeds. We took a path heading out of town into the surrounding farm land and then into a tiny village. The village houses were all on stilts, built of wood and thatch, many of them leaning precariously in one direction. Pigs grunted in wooden pens, chickens chased each other around the dusty yards, women washed clothing and dishes on their porches, children stared at us from windows, and the occasional ox-drawn cart passed by on the road. The sky began to threaten rain so we reluctantly headed back, stopping at an old Buddhist temple with a series of under-construction new temples being built up around it. The workers stopped to grin at us as we biked past, taking a break from carving the Buddha's face out of cement.

We napped during the brief rain, then set out again in the evening to find dinner. We biked to a restaurant that was supposed to have good salads and sandwiches, but the restaurant had been replaced by a locally-run joint. Three Swiss girls had also been searching for the same restaurant, and had decided to stay to try the local food. We joined them and arranged to join them the next day as well, for a boat tour of Inle Lake and the surrounding floating villages. We'd been warned that this method of seeing Inle was pretty touristy, but there wasn't any other good way to do it. We went to bed and woke up early the next morning to meet the Swiss girls for the boat trip.

The boat was a very long and narrow wooden boat powered by what looked, sounded and smelled like a lawnmower motor. Aside from the roaring motor, the ride was very pleasant. We passed countless houses built on stilts in the water, accessible only by boat. Tomatoes grew on wooden grids built over the water. A few bright blue kingfishers flew past, too quick to photograph. Locals paddled by us in their smaller canoes, often steering and powering their boats by standing on the back and controlling the paddle with their feet. Women washed clothes in the river, crouching on the lowest step leading up to thier wooden house. Entire villages were built on the water, with boats instead of cars to get from one place to another. We passed a general store with a number of boats parked outside, their owners buying groceries. The boat ride to reach Inle Lake was probably the highlight of the day.

Inle itself was a fairly large lake, and it took quite a while to cross it. Mountains loomed along the shores, but we were too far from either side to see well through the haze. We passed through the large lake and into another river, which led to a market. We agreed to visit the market without realizing that it was a tourist trap. As the boat pulled up to an already-packed docking area, we were surrounded by smaller boats with vendors selling jewelry and trinkets. It's pretty hard to ignore vendors who have you surrounded and trapped, but after quite a few "No thank you"s they finally paddled away to harrass another tourist-loaded longboat. We climbed over a few other boats to reach land, and found ourselves in the midst of a packed marketplace. The entire front area was full of tourist souvenirs and very pushy vendors attempting to sell them. We hurried through that area and found the local area in back, where villagers squatted behind displays of vegetables and small plastic items. The entire place was crowded, loud and hot, and we returned to the boat fairly quickly. Our driver then took us to a nearby village known for its silk production and lotus cloth. Fabric can be made from the sticky thin fibers removed from lotus flower stalks, but since lotus flowers take effort to grow and can only be harvested during half the year, the cloth is extremely costly. But it was amazing to see a man snap the thick stems, extract the thin fibers, and wind them with his fingers into thread. We moved farther into the room, where women worked behind enormous wooden looms, weaving fabric out of the lotus silk, regular silk, and cotton. We saw the room where the threads are dyed before weaving, and were taken into a gift shop to view the extremely-overpriced silk goods on offer. The lotus cloth was beautiful and fascinating but we couldn't bring ourselves to spend the money, so we left the factory and gift shop empty handed.

We then had our boat driver take us to a restaurant we'd seen so we could eat lunch. The food was decent, and the restaurant was in a beautiful and breezy spot on the river. After eating we climbed back into the boat, and the driver took us to a series of other tourist stops: a silver workshop, a paper factory, a cigar factory, an extremely touristy monastery, and finally the "jumping cat monastery." The latter was an old monastery where bored monks had trained the local cats to jump through hoops on command. Although a little boy did the trick instead of a monk, and although it was clearly a very touristy place, I have to admit I enjoyed it... Seeing cats jump through hoops is silly, if nothing else. After we tired of watching the jumping cats, we all agreed we were more than ready to end the boat trip. Around mid-afternoon, the driver took us back through Inle Lake to the landing near our hotel.

The five of us decided to get a beer and some food together, and we found a small restaurant in town called Mr. Cook's. We had beer and surprisingly good pizza and chatted for a few hours. Eventually they headed off and Jeff and I returned to the hotel to rest and avoid the rain, which had just begun. At seven, as arranged, we went next door for our stuffed fish and mashed potatoes. The woman had set up a table for us, complete with a basket of flowers and a "reserved" sign, although we were certainly the only people in the restaurant and may have been the only people all night. The fish was really good, stuffed with all sorts of spices and herbs. The potatoes were pretty darn good too, and our drinks were once again complete with Jesus straws. It was a good meal.

I woke up in the middle of the night with a high fever and aching joints, and still felt quite feverish the next morning. Jeff tracked down some medicine to bring my temperature down, but I spent the full day feeling pretty ill. When I was still very sick that evening, we decided to look into flying back to Yangon the next day and attempting to get a flight to Bangkok. Although I would most likely be fine on my own, there was simply no decent medical care in the Inle Lake area, and only mediocre medical care in Yangon, and if I were to get even sicker, we would have a problem. We decided to see how I felt the next morning, and if I was still sick we would go to the airport and hope to catch a flight to Yangon and then Bangkok. I woke up the next morning feeling slightly better, but definitely not great. We decided it was safest to return to Yangon.

We rode in the hotel "Jeep" for the hour ride to the airport. There are tons of "Jeeps" in the streets of Burma, but most are in fact illegal copies made in Mandalay or Yangon. They somewhat resemble Jeeps from outside, have "Jeep" written on them boldly, but inside is a give-away interior of ugly welding, mismatched seats and non-working gauges. I'm not sure if it was the bad road or the bad car, but it was one of the most jarring rides that I can remember. The "Jeep" bounced and jolted down the pot-hole filled road, dodging buffaloes and mopeds loaded with entire families. When we got to the airport we crossed our fingers and checked for available seats on flights to Yangon. Happily, we were able to get seats on a Yangon Airways flight at 11 a.m. We had been told by the hotel owner that there was a 4 p.m. AirAsia flight back to Bangkok, so we were hopeful that we could move our tickets up and fly back to Thailand that evening.

The flight to Yangon was quick and free of glitches, but when we arrived at the Yangon airport we learned that there was in fact no AirAsia flight to Bangkok in the afternoons. We could pay hundreds of dollars to fly with another airline that evening, but I was feeling somewhat better and it was far too much money. We decided to spend one night in Yangon, then head to the airport very early the next morning and hope to get on the AirAsia flight.

We decided on a hotel in the middle of a busy neighborhood, which happened to be a highly Indian area. The streets reminded us strongly of the streets of India--the same smells, women in sarees, and the same little shops and streetside vendors. We had fantastic Indian food at a little local restaurant, then went to bed early to wake up at 5 and head to the airport in hopes of getting seats on the flight to Bangkok. Our hotel room was air conditioned, which was nice since Yangon was currently stifiling, even in the evening. Of course, the air conditioning only works as long as the electricity is on, and when it cut out around 9 p.m. our windowless and fanless room became nearly unbearable. Making sleeping even less possible was the roaring generator (which worked on lights but not A/C) and the fact that there were big ceiling-level windows between our room and the next, which let in glaring lights from our neighbor's hotel room, since they apparently didn't want to go to bed at 9 o'clock like we did. By around midnight the power finally came back on and our neighbors finally turned the lights off, and we slept until the alarm went off at 5.

We took a taxi to the airport, where we were forced to wait an hour for the AirAsia office to open. (Check-in for the flight was open, but apparently the management staff got to sleep in until right before take-off.) Finally a manager showed up, and we were able to get seats on the flight, although we paid some hefty fees for switching the date of our ticket. Even the manager admitted that AirAsia is a great deal--unless you decide to cancel or change flights, in which case the great deal part goes out the window. It was annoying, but there was nothing we could do, and in the end we were just glad to be able to get back to Bangkok that day. We checked our bags, claimed seats on the flight (there are no seat assignments for AirAsia) and flew back to Bangkok, where I recovered and we made plans to head into Cambodia.

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Photos

traditional boat
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

carrying haybales
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

transportation between floating houses
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

lady in a hat with boats
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

lady selling tomatoes at the market
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

silk weaver
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

man making silk threads from lotus stems
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

woman making cigars
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

woman making a paper umbrella
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

boats on a river inlet
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

jumping cat monastery
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog

jumping cat
Photo by Jeff Roberts
www.eyeballimaging.com/blog