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Medicine man
This guy is the George Burns of Myanmar. He smokes 10 cigars a day as they are considered "all natural" and healthy. He's 84 though so can't be hurting him too much. We hiked 60 kilometers from Kalaw to Inle Lake over 3 days and two nights. Our first night we stayed in a village and the next night in a monastery. Okay, stop laughing. I know you can't imagine ME in a monastery. Luckily there was a store selling beer just down the road. ;-)
There was very little forest to hike through thanks to slash and burn farming. The landscape was mostly of rolling hills planted with tea, potatoes, rice, corn, peanuts, etc. At the first village we stopped in for lunch, a man with a hand swollen to twice normal size appealed to us for help as he thought Western voo-doo might be better than Eastern voo-doo. Luckily one of the people in our group was a French nurse. (Well, the French part was unfortunate.) She burned a razor blade to disinfect it and then cut the wound open to squeeze out all the puss. Yuck! Nice side show for lunch, huh?
Speaking of Eastern voo-doo, we met an old medicine man in one of the villages. He made anti-malaria pills which looked like small dirt balls, the contents of which maybe included illegal marijuana and opium. He
asked if anyone wanted to take one and a couple of brave souls took him up on it. The look on the first guinea pig's face was to die for. He screwed up his face in a grimace which only reinforced the brilliance of our decision to opt out. We asked what it tasted like and he replied, "About how it looks, a mixture of buffalo $hit and herbs." Yummy. Well it's true that anything that's good for you has to taste bad.
Each village represents a different ethnic group typically from Tibet or China. But they don't really wear much traditional garb these days except for brightly colored headwraps of different colors. But even these are no longer from loomed materials but are factory made terry beach towels. I guess they would come in handy if they lived near the ocean... but they don't and the bus ride there would be a real B%$&*. Speaking of which, the big upside of the trek was that it saved us a 7 hour bus trip, or maybe it would really end up being 12!
The people of Inle Lake have developed a rather ingenious system of floating lake gardens.
Ride
Judging from his giggles, this guy was returning from a rice whiskey honky tonk. They stake long bamboo poles into the shallows of the lake. Around these they create long strips of narrow gardening beds made of lake weed mixed with dirt, 3 meters deep and 1 meter wide. They grow brilliant red, delicious tomatoes on these year round. The really brilliant part is that the gardens slide up and down on the poles as the lake level rises and falls.
Speaking of which they make gorgeous tomato salads here in a peanut based dressing. They also make a tea leaf salad which includes shredded tea leaves, fresh beans, crunchy dried beans, garlic, tomatoes and another peanut based dressing. Super tasty. But other than that, their dishes are typically very oily.
The hiking gave us blisters and sore toes, convincing us that our hiking shoes needed to go. We offered them to the young guy who worked at our guest house. He was really excited and said that he didn't have any shoes and they were going to come in handy when he returned to university in the fall. He's getting a degree in economics but he says that there's not really much point to it as there are no jobs. We
The end of the trek
Mmm, mmm, good. Noodle soup washed down by a cold beer after a 60 km trek. showed him some of our California postcards so that he could see where we were from. He asked if we had power all the time and we said yes. He replied, "Oh, not like here." You're lucky to get power for a few hours a day in most of Myanmar and that is often by generator.
P.S. Shouldn't be a surprise but it was. We never heard anything about Aung San Suu Kyi being thrown into jail until we got to Bangkok. BTW, the acronym for the totalitarian regime that's been in control for decades is SLORC. Isn't that a great name for an evil empire? George Lucas should use it for the bad guys in his next film.
P.P.S. Everyone keeps asking us when we are coming back. We are flying to Bali on June 11th with the plan to stay there a few months if we can find a way to extend our two month visa. We are shooting to be back late September or early October but no promises. Our renters have extended the lease on our house for another year. When we get back we plan to convert Toby's shop into a studio apartment
for us and alas, to get jobs again.
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Paul Zikmanis
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floating vegies
Wow that is an amazing way to grow tomatoes! I've always thought that if the roots don't dry out once in a while, the plant gets fungus. So much for dumb old round eyes! I also like the jumping cats and the noodle club. Does that guy double as the sheriff?