Our hotel was “right on the lake”. But that didn’t mean that we could really see the lake, as it was. Why not? Inle Lake has an average water depth of 5 – 7 feet in the dry season and about 12 feet in the wet season. In other words, Inle Lake is a very shallow lake. Inle Lake has about 48 villages around it and some 180,000 people live there. I don’t think that their sanitation situation is anywhere near equal to our own. All of this adds up to Inle Lake having a huge water hyacinth problem. Water hyacinths and other water weeds clog much of the lake. That is especially true around the edges of the lake in the shallowest waters.

1. This is our resort’s dock. Our hotel is in the trees in the background. You can see Pete peaking around our friend Sawyer as we get ready to head out into the lake.

2. We had to navigate many water weed crowded narrows to get to the lake. You can see just how narrow some of them were in the second photo.

3. We passed some of the locals in this narrow water while navigating our way out into the lake proper.

4. The woman in the fourth photo was demonstrating a very typical rowing method used by the locals.

5. You can see Vicky smiling as we finally found our way out of the water weeds and into the open waters of the lake, after about 10 minutes through the weeds.