Lake Useless

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Well, my birding had taken a bit of a down-turn at Kalaw and it remained poor at Lake Inle despite my expectations of a big bird list. In fact I was pretty disappointed overall with Lake Inle and the village of Nyaungshwe; they became my least favourite places in Burma and I don't think I'll be rushing back to that spot.

In Kalaw I had found out that there were several morning buses to Lake Inle which leave from under the big tree just along from the Parami Hotel. They appear to go every half an hour between 6am and 8am, and cost 2500 kyat. They don't go all the way to Lake Inle, but just to a junction called Shwenyaung about one and a half hours from Kalaw, from which it is then a further 11km to the village of Nyaungshwe where all the accommodation is. Clever wordsmiths might notice that Shwenyaung is the same two words as Nyaungshwe in reverse. When I got off the bus at Shwenyaung a taxi driver approached me and said he could take me to Nyaungshwe for 8000 kyat. I replied that that was far too expensive and I would just take a motorbike – it turns out that in this part of Burma foreigners are not allowed on motorbikes! I thought this was just a line to get me to take his taxi but it is actually true. Really weird, but at the same time totally in keeping with this area's vigorous attempts to suck every last penny from the tourists' pockets. I still didn't take a taxi though, I waited for a passing trishaw (like a giant motorised rickshaw) and took that to the village for 2000 kyat. Reaching the village there is a US$10 entry fee ..... and once in the village you find that the prices for the hotels are as bad as in Yangon. After a lot of effort I found a mattress on the floor of a dirty bamboo hut for US$10 at the Yin Saw Guesthouse. Nyaungshwe is a ramshackle dusty village without much to recommend it at all. There are little shops everywhere selling all manner of packaged goods (noodles, coffee, drinks, bread, etc) but invariably every surface in the shop is coated with a layer of dust wafting in from the passing cars and trucks, so it looks like they have just recently opened up the doors again after years of abandonment. In the street-side restaurants if you sit near the front you have to put up with dust over your food.

I was running low on time in Burma, so I only stayed in the Lake Inle area overnight. The first day I hired a bicycle (1500 kyat a day, same as at Bagan) and cycled up and down the entrance road and all around town; the second day I took a boat onto the lake in the morning and spent the afternoon cycling again, until it was time for the overnight bus to Bago. I had been worried about the cost of the boat because in Mandalay some people had told me it had cost them 60,000 kyat and in Kalaw I had been told 80,000 for two hours. It turned out to be much more reasonable than that fortunately, at 16,000 for as long as I wanted. But first I went cycling. The 11km entrance road to the village is through farmland and, nearest the village, also marshland. The bird most birders want to find in the area is the collared mynah. I didn't find it. Lots of white-vented mynahs and lesser numbers of common mynahs, but no collared mynahs. I actually felt pretty stupid looking for mynahs and stopping every time I saw some to check them out through the binoculars! There were loads of egrets (cattle, little, intermediate and great, as well as pond and grey herons), little cormorants, moorhens, purple swamphens (looking so different to the ones I'm used to over in Australasia that I might even be swayed into splitting them!), black-winged kites and Siberian stonechats ….. but Bird Of The Day was undeniably pheasant-tailed jacana. They weren't in breeding plumage so didn't really have the colours or the long long tail which gives them their name, but there were lots of them and I was very pleased to have finally seen them.

The next morning I went out on a boat ride to look for birds. I just arranged it through the guesthouse I was at and it seemed cheap for one person. It took a bit to convince them though that I wasn't interested in visiting temples and such. The village is a little way from the lake, but there is a wide channel (or canal) going right there and the jetty was only a couple of minutes walk from where I was staying. There were large numbers of brown-headed gulls along the canal. Up at Ruoergai when I was in China there were really big flocks of gulls which were probably brown-headed gulls but they were always too distant to tell, so I was happy to finally see them here. Once hitting the lake I got us to swing right and move along the edge of the reed-beds so I could try and see little birdies – Jerdon's bushchat was one that everyone tries to see here (but, again, I didn't see any!). I had a bit of trouble convincing the boatman too that looking for birds didn't mean continuously heading straight into open water at the large flocks of coots. I can understand it (“he wants to look at birds – there's a whole lot of birds over there”) but it was still a bit annoying having to keep telling him to steer back towards the reeds and follow the edge. Apart for the coots, and a few spot-billed ducks, there wasn't a lot of variety in the swimming birds anyway; I was expecting a whole lot more species to be there. There were lots of little egrets and the usual other wading things (including a black-winged stilt which was welcome), but for the little reedy birds I saw only lots of Siberian stonechats and a couple of striated grassbirds. Nothing else. There were barely even any birds of prey after I'd heard so much about how many there were all over the reed-beds -- and the harrier which I did see the closest and got a couple of ID photos of, turned out to not be as readily identifiable as I had expected and remained off the list in the end. Really poor results on my part. I had even tried the “Wildlife Sanctuary” which was nothing but a rickety watch-tower from which I saw nothing which I couldn't have seen from the boat on the way in – and then got charged 3000 kyat for being on!! After only two hours on the lake I was just fed up with it all, and also oddly enough feeling a little sea-sick (!), so I gave up and we went back to the village where I got another bicycle and tried the entrance road a few more times. This made me feel better because I was in complete control, and I saw a new bird, the rufous-winged buzzard. Overall, though (as you may have picked up from my probably negative tone in this post), not a big fan of Lake Inle!

In the afternoon I got on an overnight bus to Bago.

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