Inle Lake in the sunshine

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Our guide meets us with her boatman and his long tail boat at 8am for our first foray onto Inle Lake. We negotiate the narrow waterway between the first floating gardens we encounter before we get onto the lake proper, at which points the boatman opens the throttle and we start moving at speed, the bow lifting out of the water. Not sure how fast we are going but it is quite fun, a rather satisfying bow wave and a plume of water from the outboard. We slow for the first of the “one legged” fisherman we encounter. He doesn’t really have one leg, or he would fall over, but he has one foot on the narrow punt-like end of his boat, the other leg controlling the long vertical paddle/steering rudder that he places behind his knee joint and then controls with his foot, using it to both propel and control the direction of travel of his boat. We shudder to think what the movement does to the hip and knee joints. With his hands he controls his fishing net. Despite the lake being 14 miles long and 6 miles wide, the average depth of the lake is only 7 feet in the dry season (now) and in many places you can see the vegetation that is growing on the bottom just below the surface.

We pass another boat where three men (appallingly clad in Manchester United shirts, but at least they are not Liverpool shirts) are using long pitch forks to pull plants out of the bottom of the lake. They are going to be used as the base for a new floating garden. The “floating garden” is the basis of the local economy, along with tourism, the latter having flourished over the last decade. A floating garden is created by pinning mounds of this half dead vegetation into the lake bed with tall bamboo poles and encouraging grass to grow on it. This grass is then cut, dried and burned to create a nutritious layer of ash which is added to the garden, followed by more seagrass from the lake and finally mud. These mats eventually become a metre deep, one third out of the water. The main crop right now is tomatoes, but cucumbers, gourds and pulses are also grown in different seasons.

David is suddenly seized with a desire to understand the legal ownership / usage rights of a floating garden (it's the lawyer in him) but decides this is too difficult a topic to try and discuss with our charming young guide whose English is good, once you get used to her accent, but unlikely to be skilled enough to discuss jurisprudential concepts.

It is pleasingly warm and we scoot across the lake for about 45 minutes, the sun in the sky and the breeze cooling us. We go through little villages of house and shops built on stilts, sometimes going at speed down the “high street” and sometimes pootling through the “lanes” off the high street. The lake rises about 5 feet in the rainy season so the houses will still be clear of the water.

Our first stop is at the ‘jumping cat’ monastery, a teak built structure with some shrines and a few cats wandering around but certainly not jumping anywhere. After that, we visit a series of craft workshops, each with the obligatory retail therapy option but with no pressure to buy anything. We watch women spinning thread from the stems of the lotus plant, a time consuming activity that results in lotus fabric being mixed with silk to make it cheaper. Elsewhere, four men perform a synchronised ballet of sorts as they take turns to beat a bar of hot iron into a long knife, using heavy hammers and somehow avoiding any clash of hammer with head, while behind them a man works a simple form of bellows to keep the fire going. We visit a boat building workshop where men are building long tail boats and canoes out of teak, one man skilfully and delicately shaping planking with his axe while not removing his toes. Our lunchtime break is next to the cheroot workshop, where women deftly wrap tobacco round a central plug of corn wrapped in newspaper, and wrap the whole thing up in a cheroot leaf. This is one souvenir even the French don’t want to buy! “It is bad for health and make me sick” says our guide.

The Phaung Daw Oo pagoda is architecturally underwhelming, but has at its centre an altar with five gold mounds that look like golden Mr Blobbys. These are apparently 800 year old Buddha statues that have long since lost their shape as pilgrims (only men permitted) apply layer upon layer of gold leaf to them. Every year they are taken out onto the lake in a boat in a grand procession. One year the boat capsized, and for a long time only four Buddhas could be found, but eventually the fifth was recovered – phew!



Possibly the most interesting stop of the day is also the least expected – the ‘cat house’. This was set up as a sanctuary for Burmese cats, which were in danger of becoming extinct in the area. It’s a cat paradise, with scratching poles, cushions, individual houses, climbing frames and all manner of other amusements. Beautiful cats wander round with typical disdain for humans, scratching those foolish enough to stroke them. Even David likes them. But the real interest is in listening to the young man taking us round, as he shows us tanks with some of the local fish and explains how many of the species are becoming endangered, through pollution in the lake, over use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides in the floating gardens and the introduction of non native species. He also describes how the charity has built relatively simple, low cost water purification facilities which they use to clean their own sewage. Sadly, the local stilt houses all seem to have outdoor toilets that empty straight into the lake, which cannot help its cleanliness.

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