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Published: October 24th 2005
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Tachilek is a scruffy, busy little border town. People wander around the market selling cartons of cigarettes and porn DVDs, offering to procure opium or young girls. Taxi drivers take people on hour-long tours around town to see the ‘highlights,’ which include a pagoda and some Long neck Karen, catering to tourists who pay $5 to cross the border for the day, in order to acquire another 30-day Thailand visa. If your pockets are a little deeper, you can also go and play a round of golf or visit the Casino in the 20 million dollar tourist complex, built to service the needs of Burma’s drug lords and politicians as they swap gems and opium for gold bars in this portal to The Golden Triangle.
It felt like we were in quarantine; a dusty border town where the people spoke Thai and spent Thai Baht, catering to a daily influx of whistle-stop tourists. Although this halfway-house was on Burmese soil our movement was restricted. The governmeny forbids foreigners travelling into the interior from here. A government arranged jeep to the next major town
was possible, but this was the end of the line. To reach Burma proper, we had to
fly. Three airlines covered the trip to our destination and all three charged the same ($63US).
Wishing to get out of town as soon as possible, I spoke to a guy from Air Mandalay who spent fifteen minutes telling me how unsafe and unreliable the other two airlines were. When I agreed to buy his pitch he realised everything was sold out for my preferred day, to which he quickly switched tact, telling me with an enthusiastic smile I could fly the following day with one of the other airlines he’d just been warning me against!
Our flight to Heho was short (though fortunately not short of the runway), and flew over the thick, brown arteried forests contained some of the least accessible tracts of the world, as well as the opium fields to be planted this month, which supply over 50% of the worlds heroin. The reason the government limits foreigner movement in the area. They clearly wouldn’t want anyone turning up at a heroin processing plant with a digital camera, embarrassing The Burmese Military Junta and the US government’s ‘War on Drugs.’
Arriving by plane has the huge advantage of allowing you to
cover large distances in a short time, leaving you feeling relatively fresh, and allowing you to soak up the impressions and scenery with a clear mind. Weaving down from the airport through the hills into the huge fertile basin that housed Inle Lake was magical. Burmese isolation from the ebbs flows and benefits of globalization has meant that in areas such as these, mechanization is yet to fully replace animals. Glancing from the window of our rickety Japanese ride, horses pulled carts and kids rode water buffaloes. The scene conjured up that quaint undeveloped African idyll, yet the characters and culture were unmistakably Asian.
We’d timed our visit to perfection.
The festival of Phuang Paw U Kyaung was taking place on Inle Lake, hyped as Burma’s premier natural attraction. Too often places are marketed to death and upon actually see ing them, you cannot help but be a little disappointed. The difference between reality and romance is often great.
So it was something of a novelty to have never heard anything of this, and neither have you - so here it is: A lake Ohrid, Macedonia, surrounded by the hills of Lake Malawi; the ambience of Keralan backwaters
The monks
Inle Lake with a sprtiz of Dal Lake, Kashmir; 268 Buddhist Monasteries and numerous hill tribe cultures encircle it. Let Rudyard Kipling craft the scene and Tolkien create a festival of pomp to highlight its beauty. While we're at it, we may as well let Peter Jackson produce a little promo, and you’ll have something approaching the hype.
Now if you visit you’re bound to be disappointed! We awoke at dawn, climbed into our long tail boat and hurtled across the tranquil surface of Inle lake. At an altitude of 900m the morning air was cool until the sun announced its arrival over the misty mountains. After around half an hour we entered a town of stilted wooden houses. Passing through the water filled 'streets' in our boat amongst other long tails and kids on canoes, people hung out of glassless windows and waved us by. The flotilla of boats heading in our direction gradually increased as we passed towns through canals lined with lilies, lotus flowers, floating gardens, crumbling pagodas and temples. Small boats now lined the entire route, containing whole generations of families waiting amongst the reeds for the procession to arrive. We settled into our own little
nook, out of harm’s way, ate pancakes, sipped steaming coffee in the cool dawn, and waited.
It was just after 7am when a distant drumming could first be heard. As the noise became louder chanting became audible also. The first boat of the procession appeared around a bend in the waterway, a hundred men standing on a long narrow canoe with matching clothes and oars, paddling in unison with their legs. Just behind them, connected to a rope was another boat; the rowers and musicians wearing different coloured costumes, representing the tribe to which they belonged, and then another behind that.
Some two-dozen boats had passed us by in this fashion before four floating golden temples appeared, pulled by the combined force of the hundreds of rowers. People bowed and prayed to the barges as they passed. As the last barge passed we paddled out from our nook in the reeds and tagged onto the back of the procession on its journey to the monastery on an island in the lake, where it unloaded its cargo of little Buddhas.
At the monastery we disembarked to follow the Buddas to where people applied gold leaf donations to the
The leg rowers of Inle
Inle Lake is famous for this unique style of one-legged rowers. statues creating deformed golden-blobby-snowman images. The place buzzed with festival spirit, different hill tribes mingled with the local Intha people of the lake.
To add further spice, the festival had clashed with the Full moon festival of Thadingyut, when people turn up in their best clothes, and it is said a family can spend it’s yearly savings on this one day.
We were fortunate to share the boat with two local Intha sisters from our guest house, which allowed us to see the festival through their eyes, at a pace and at places they wished to see, as we travelled between monasteries and ate strange and delicious local food with monks at various temples along our journey.
That evening after eating homemade pasta, for which Inle Lake has developed a bit of a reputation, we stopped by at a flood-lit golden monastery which still buzzed with mystical fervor as people let off fireworks and firecrackers whilst others made small candle-fed hot-air balloons, and released them into the night sky, which was dotted with glowing tributes to Buddha.
Our next stop was the former British hill station of Kalaw, at 1200 metres. This allowed us to escape
the heat and take a wander in the hills. The government limits the distance tourists can wander off into the hills so the few villages it is possible to visit have been very well visited. our guide even suggested buying pencils to give to the kids we passed on our journey, though when we arrived they seemed to have developed more of a craving for “BON BONS!”
I was surprised to see as many tourists as I did at Inle Lake, though their seemed to be more middle-aged couples rather than the 18-30 scene common in neighboring Thailand. Many travellers boycott Burma because they believe that money spent in the country keeps the Military Junta in power. I won’t bore you with Burmese politics…yet (see later blogs)
Should I even be here? Burma opened to tourism in 1989 and ‘coincidentally’ that is when the world became aware of what was/is going on here. The hostel owner we stayed with in Kalaw said that from its peak in 1996 individual travellers’ (see: backpackers) numbers have been falling consistently every year, whereas those on organised tours have been increasing, now accounting for the vast majority of tourists in Myanmar
Poah Tribeswomen
Thadingyut festival, Inle Lake - they, of course, spend much more money, go less off the beaten track, mix less with the local people and that suits the government just fine.
Case closed?
Besides, does anyone know a government anywhere in the world I can justify supporting financially?
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Ali
Ali Watters
Fantastic photos
Yeah - it's a dilema visiting countries where regiem change is really needed. I face this same issue when visiting my family in the UK. Looking forward to being disappointed by Burma :) Thanks for the great photos and story - again!