Inle Lake in the rain

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We wake to the sound of rain. Pouring rain. This is not good when we are due to set off on our second boat trip at 8.00am. But postponing to the afternoon is not an option, so we don the tasteful pink ground length rain ponchos helpfully provided by the boatman, hold tight to our umbrellas and set off for a 45 minute ride across the lake to a town hosting market day. David is elected by Sara and the guide to ride in front, so the two of them cower behind him as he takes the full brunt of the driving rain, his umbrella held rigidly out front. Arriving at the market, we decide it’s best to wear our walking boots rather than our flipflops to walk around in, and this proves a sound choice, as even our guide is slipping and sliding on the glistening red mud in her sandals. Even getting out of the boat is challenging, as we climb onto a floating platform of very wet bamboo poles lashed together. ‘Be careful, very muddy’ says our guide rather superfluously. And indeed it is a veritable quagmire. We make our way along the inevitable rows of souvenir stalls, and eventually reach the market proper, which is far more interesting. There are lines of girls selling fish so fresh they are still wriggling on their tarpaulin sheets, tied together in bunches by little bits of twine, and small eels in plastic bags. The vegetable stalls are all run by Bhao people (pronounced “Ba-oh”) who bring their produce from their farms, and this market rotates around five different towns on the lake. The women all wear turbans made, incongruously, of once brightly coloured hand towels, or so it seems. The Bhao people are darker skinned, and seem to come from the hills, rather than being lake dwellers (who are the Intha, like our guide, and paler). The Shan are another people who also live in this area but are not apparently represented at this market.

There’s a man who will make you a cooking knife or a plough share or anything else you might need, to order on the spot, who is very keen to have his photo taken by David, and stalls selling massive bags of huge rice crackers, both cooked and uncooked. We squelch around, grateful that our boots will wash clean unlike the smart sandals some hapless tourists are wearing. Sara spots a toilet block and asks to stop. The guide says no and takes us instead to a separate block, grandly labelled Public Toilet (High Class). This boasts a European toilet and is remarkably clean.

We decline the opportunity to spend half an hour looking at the souvenir stalls, and set off across the lake towards Inthein. This is half an hour’s ride away up a canal, and all we know is that there is a pagoda there. The vegetation bordering the canal is quite jungle like, with fields beyond, and for a moment we feel as if we’re in a Rambo film, heading up the Mekong Delta. But the only locals are doing nothing more threatening than washing in the muddy brown water. We disembark at Inthein, and set off up a winding path through a bamboo grove. The guide tells us the people who live here are Shan, not Intha (the lake people) and until recently had no schooling as the Shan were still fighting the government forces and thought that any teacher sent to work in a government run school would be a spy. But peace is now restored (the insurgency may have stopped in 2008 or 1996, it is not at all clear), and the kids are getting taught again. We approach the pagoda from the back, and discover hundreds of small seventeenth and eighteenth century stupas, most of which are slightly ruined and blackened with age. Trees and plants are growing all around and through them in the bright red soil, and the scene reminds us of My Son in Vietnam which we visited on an even wetter day many years ago. A handful of stupas have been rather unsympathetically restored, presumably by new donors seeking merit from the Buddha, and painted white or gold, but that is now apparently forbidden. They were neglected for years because of the fighting and because of the general lawlessness in that period many of them were robbed.

We climb over a small wall into the main staircase running up to the main Shwe Inthein Pagoda, where we need to remove our boots. As we do so, we’re surrounded by half a dozen incredibly friendly and polite stray dogs, who have been resting on the benches and are keen to see if we have any food for them. We meet two monks who are very keen to have their photos taken with the visitors. The main pagoda is not that exciting, and we head out the back to see some more of the small stupas. But the flooring is ceramic tiles, which are lethally wet in the rain. Sara and the guide rapidly decide David is not safe on this surface and he is not allowed out, and we head back to the dogs to put our boots back on. We walk down the long covered staircase fringed by largely closed souvenir stalls to our boat. It is a rather ugly construction of concrete, rebuilt after 1952 when the original was blown up during fighting in one of Burma's many civil wars.

Our final stop is to an umbrella making workshop. They demonstrate how they make paper out of the fibres of the local mulberry tree, and embed flower petals and leaves to create a pattern, and we watch a man shaping the umbrella handle from bamboo on a very primitive turning machine. It takes five man days to make an umbrella. Next door, there are some women from the Padaung tribe, the so called ‘giraffe women’ who wear heavy bronze bangles round their necks, adding a ring every year until they have as many as 19 rings. They also have rings around their calves, bringing the total weight of bronze to 8-10kg. It feels very wrong to visit them just to gawp, but it’s obviously how they make a living. Both Sara and the guide are horrified by the thought of wearing those things. Apparently the neck rings are very handy if you are attacked by a tiger in the forest as he cannot rip your throat out, thought it seems the obvious thing is that he then bites your head off......



Needless to say, the rain stops just as we arrive back at the hotel. By now, David is drenched, having taken the brunt of the rain and spray for the entire journey. Even the poncho has not been enough to save him, the wind driving up his poncho, and he is soaked. We wash out our now very muddy boots and trousers, and settle onto our secluded balcony for a relaxing afternoon.

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