Fishing Inle Lake

If there was only one iconic image from Inle Lake, it would be one of an Intha fisherman.  The Intha People developed a distinctive rowing style of standing on one end of their boat on one leg while wrapping their other leg around their oar.  This style was developed for fishing due to the reeds and floating plants in the lake.  Because of the plants, it was hard to see if they were sitting in their boats but much better if they were standing.

They also have several styles of fishing but the one using a bamboo basket is the one that Inle Lake is most noted for and by far the most popular style that we saw as we traveled around the lake.  We saw many fishermen using this technique but I will show just one guy to try and take you through the sequence used for catching fish.

1.      They use their motors to get out into the lake to where they hoped was a good location, then they shut off the motor.  They stand on the end of the boat and while watching the water for bubbles, paddle with their leg-wrapped oar over to a good location.

2.      When they reach the location where they want to try to catch some fish, they quit paddling and get their fishing basket ready to thrust into the water.

3.      They angle their basket into the water and then give it a good downwards shove.

4.      They keep pushing downwards until the basket rests on the bottom of the lake, hopefully with some fish inside it.

5.      At that point, they take their oar or another piece of bamboo and put it down into the basket and beat it all about.  This is to scare the fish so that the fish swim hard to get away but in the process, get their gills stuck in the netting.  Then the fisherman pulls the basket back into his boat and takes the fish out of the net.

More Fishing

The second major technique that we saw for catching fish out in Inle Lake was using nets.  We saw a few different types of nets but most were just throw nets.  These fishermen used the same one-leg rowing technique used by the basket fishermen.  And again, that stand up technique was to see over the weeds to see where the open spaces were to throw their nets, without getting all tangled up with the water weeds.

1.      The guy in the first photo gives you a good clear view of his one-legged rowing technique and you can see his fishing net in his hand.

2.      The fisherman in the second photo looks like he’s wearing chaps and a cowboy hat and is ready to throw his lasso net.

3.      Many times we saw groups of fisherman all working the same general area.  In the third photo, there were six to eight guys fishing this area, all using nets.

4.      The fourth photo is a good photo for just why they use the one-legged rowing technique – so that they can see over all the water weeds.

5.      This last guy was in shallower water and he didn’t have a throwing net, but had some type of netting that he was using.

Jumping Cat Monastery

This stop was at the Nga Hpe Kyaung wooden temple and monastery.  This is a huge wooden temple built on stilts out on the western side of Inle Lake.  The original monk trained cats to jump through hoops during slow times between scripture recitals.  Consequently, the temple eventually earned the nickname, The Jumping Cat Monastery.  We spent a fair amount of time looking in and about the temple.  I came to one clear conclusion.  I renamed it “The Sleeping Cat Monastery”.  The old monk that taught the cats to jump has long since died and while we were told that some women might have taught the cats to jump through hoops, most of the cats were sleeping while we were there.

1.      You can see the temple as we approached by boat.

2.      The temple has a huge meditation hall which we had almost completely to ourselves.

3.      They have lots of Buddha statues and other items on display but this one was by far the most colorful one.

4.      You can see two of the sleeping cats in the fourth photo.  Judging by the tea pot and cups, this mat has uses other than for the cats.

5.      I did find one cat that was awake and took this photo as he approached one of the monks, sitting in the chair.

Nampan Village

Nampan Village is a village that sits out in the middle of Inle Lake, though not the exact middle.  The entire village is built on stilts.  The poles are either teak or bamboo.  My guess is that the village has several thousand inhabitants.  Nampan Village has stores, schools, a post office, factories, and just about everything.  All transportation is by boat.  Now I’ve never been to Venice, Italy, but let’s take a look at Nampan Village.

1.      This is our boat as we are pulling into town.  My guess is that this is Main Street.

2.      This is a side street, running off of Main Street.  It looks like a nice neighborhood street.

3.      Nampan Village also has industrial areas with factories.  In these areas, many of the factories were joined by walking bridges.  You can also see a tall Palm tree growing right out of the water.

4.      This is one of the factories that we visited.  You will see photos from here in a later posting.  You can see that they have electricity in Nampan Village, but not in this factory.

5.      This is probably a middle-of-the-road neighborhood and you can see the power poles standing out of the lake.

More Nampan Village

We are still in Nampan Village.  We will see some of the amenities of living there.

1.      This was a very nice looking arts center.  The building was beautiful as well as the grounds with lots of beautiful flowers and some banana trees.

2.      If I remember right, this was the school, or at least one school.

3.      This is the back of the school building and as you can see, the kids actually have a very small piece of solid ground upon which to play some soccer.

4.      This was a grocery store.  It looked to be a neighborhood variety grocery store.

5.      This is just some houses but they looked rather nice.    

QUICK QUIZ: What is the purpose of the bamboo pole floating in the water in the last photo?

It's a speed bump and a wave break.

Nampan Village Neighborhood

While in Nampan Village, our guide asked us if we would like to take some small boats and paddle through a neighborhood to get an up-close look at Nampan Village.  We did and here are some photos from that boat ride.

1.      You can see Vicky and Pete heading into the neighborhood in the first photo.  Several people have asked if the round dishes were satellite TV dishes in some of the photos.  Yes, they are and you can see a blue one in this photo in the upper right.

2.      The house in this second photo was quite impressive.  Some houses both looked very nice and had very nice gardens, docking areas, and outdoor verandas.

3.      This is one of the ‘streets’ that we paddled down.

4.      These houses didn’t look typical, so I included this photo.  You can also see that they have a fishing basket on their porch and see that they park their boats under the house, which was common.

5.      We ate lunch while in Nampan Village and you can see our restaurant in the last photo.  We could feel some movement every time a boat passed the restaurant, hence the need for bamboo pole speed bumps and wave breaks.

Nampan Village Farming

Adjacent to Nampan Village was a farming operation that totally surprised me.  We are talking about a farming operation that is in the middle of Inle Lake.  To look at the farming from some angles, like low in our boats, it almost appeared that we were looking at a land operation.  The crop that we saw mostly was tomatoes.  We saw millions of tomato plants.  Our guide said that Inle Lake tomato farming supplies 80% of Myanmar’s tomatoes.  The entire process of working the tomato crops is done by boat.

1.      I took this photo from the Jumping Cat Monastery, from one of the windows.  This is one block of tomato vines that is sitting right in the middle of the lake.  The lake extends beyond in the back.  I guess those are farm shacks or barns in the photo.  

2.      The second photo is more zoomed in and you can see the water in between the rows of tomatoes.

3.      Now we are in our boat and right next to a row of tomatoes.  On the bottom, you can also see a row of pepper plants.

4.      We watched this woman harvesting tomatoes.  She is standing in a small boat.

5.      This is a closeup photo where you can clearly see the tomatoes including a couple of ripe ones.

Floating Farm Land

So the question, of course, is how do they farm tomatoes and other crops right out in the middle of the lake?  They start by gathering lake-bottom weeds from the deeper parts of the lake.  The entire process is very labor intensive.  They gather the lake weeds in their boats and drive the boats to the farming area of the lake.  They then make floating garden beds using the water weeds and anchor the garden beds to the bottom of the lake with bamboo poles.  The garden beds rise and fall with the water level, so of course, they are resistant to flooding.  They get plenty of water since they are growing in the lake.  The lake water is rich in nutrients, from all sorts of sources.  It’s basically hydroponic farming.  It was started back in the 1960s.  Pretty wild.

1.      Here are some guys gathering lake-bottom weeds out in a deep section of the lake and piling them in their boat.

2.      This guy has a full load of weeds and is heading for the farm to create or add to a garden bed.

3.      This guy is now to the tomato farm and if you notice, he is leg-paddling his boat, which I would think would be very heavy with all those wet water weeds.

4.      Here you see the garden bed rows anchored by bamboo poles and planted with tomatoes.

5.      Our guide let us take off our shoes and climb out of our boat and onto a garden bed.  This bed hadn’t been planted yet.  You can feel the bed sink down into the water when you stand on it.  Vicky sank down to her feet.  I sank down to my ankles.  But when you think about it, I weigh 200 pounds and I only sank down to my ankles.  Tomato plants weigh much less than my 200 pounds.  Vicky is looking pretty confident standing on the floating bed.

Lotus Fiber Weaving

We visited several factories in Nampan Village.  I will just show you two or three of them.  I especially like some of the industries where they create something useful from something very ordinary and plentiful.  This factory did lotus fiber weaving.  They start with just regular lotus stems and it takes about 100 four foot stems to get about 50 feet of lotus thread.  We watched the whole process and learned that it takes about two whole days to make one longi – which is like a pair of pants that are worn by both men and women.  They sell for like $3 to $5 US.

1.      This woman is stripping the lotus thread out of a lotus stem.  This is the start of the whole process.  You can see her pile of lotus stems on the floor and she strips about four stems at once.

2.      This second photo is part of the process of turning the raw threads into real thread.  The process looks automated but the power to turn the wheels is coming from her right arm and her right leg.

3.      This is more of the thread making and thread coloring process and again, her right hand is turning the wheels.

4.      This is part of the weaving process and it too is all human powered.

5.      We are now getting to the lotus thread cloth.

Cheroot Factory

I don’t know if Burma is famous for its cheroots, but we certainly saw lots of them and saw lots of people smoking their cheroots.  So for starters, a cheroot is not a cigar.  Why not?  Cheroots contain many ingredients besides tobacco, so they do not qualify as cigars.  Cheroots contain tobacco, honey, rice flour, tamarind, banana and anise (and possibly many other things too).  They might also be soaked in rum or honey and dried first.  Whatever the ingredients were, they smelled really good.

The women in the factory have to roll 1000 cheroots in order to earn $3.  I don’t know how long that takes them but I would still be there trying to earn my first three bucks.

1.      You can see two of the ladies rolling cheroots in the factory that we visited.  They just sit on the floor with their ingredients in a big shallow basket and their tools and roll away.

2.      Vicky took them up on their offer to roll a cheroot.  You can see her rolling one in the second photo.

3.      Now she has just about finished and is cutting it off.

4.      She is showing us her finished product.  You can see the woman’s cheroots in her basket.

5.      Someone had to smoke Vicky’s cheroot for quality control, so I stepped up to the plate. She did a fine job on this one.

On a side note, Vicky and I now have three young grandchildren, all boys.  Two were born right before this trip and one was born right after we got home.  Their parents have a sleeping technique that is new to us.  They call it “swaddling”.  We never swaddled our babies.  Anyway, you put the baby down on a blanket and tightly wrap them up in the blanket with their arms tight by their sides.  We are told that babies like it because the tightly wrapped blanket all snug around them reminds them of the womb.  Prior to going to Burma, Vicky and I were not very good at swaddling our grandsons.  But NOW, those grandbabies are going to get quite a swaddling the next time Grandma Vicky swaddles them.  They are going to get her new Cheroot Swaddle!

Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda

Our last stop on the lake one afternoon was the Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda.  It turned out to be a very popular stop for both the locals and the tourists.  The main attraction is five Buddha statues, though our guide said it was actually three Buddha’s and two monks.  All five statues are covered with so much gold leaf that they are just blobs of gold.  Each statue is nine to eighteen inches high, so not very large.  The area of the Buddha statues was for Men Only. 

During a festival around September to October, four of the five statues are loaded onto a barge and towed clockwise around the lake.  They stop at many of the lakeside villages and the images are kept in each village’s main monastery each night. 

1.      Here is the Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda as we approached it by boat.

2.      You can see just how popular this pagoda is for both locals and tourists.  It was quite a boat traffic jam at the docks.

3.      Here’s Vicky inside the main pagoda area.

4.      These are the Buddha images, covered with gold leaf, and one of them is getting a few more leaves.

5.      This is the replica of a royal barge that is used to house the images when they are towed around the lake.  They get towed by several boats of leg-rowers with many other local boats in the procession.  No power motors for towing the Buddha statues.

Umbrella Factory

This factory made Shan paper umbrellas from scratch.  It was another simple local plants and simple processes with no electricity to make a beautiful and functional product.

1.      These two women work at the start of the production of the paper.  They take mulberry shoots and pound them with hammers until it’s a pulpy mess. 

2.      The mulberry pulp ends up in a water tank that has a screen already inside.  When it’s ready, they add flowers and leaves for decorations and lift the screen up, dry it, and tear off the mulberry paper.

3.      My favorite step was the guy on a lathe turning the main section of the umbrella.  He used India Trumpet wood which he said is very soft, light, and flexible.  He turned the lathe with his foot pressing on a stick attached to a piece of rope that turned the lathe.  He was fun to watch and incredibly efficient on his lathe.

4.      This woman is cutting the Shan mulberry paper to spread onto the umbrella lattice.

5.      You can see some of the finished products in the last photo.  I know that Pete purchased a couple of their umbrellas.

Misc. Nampan Village

This is just a few more photos from Nampan Village before we move on to another village on the lake.

1.      All commerce on Inle Lake is in small boats.  All are very shallow as the lake is both shallow and has many super shallow areas.  I think this boat might be hauling tomatoes.

2.      We visited a boat builder.  He makes the rooster-tail boats.  He uses all teak wood which is a light and strong hardwood.  He uses no nails or hardware.  Wood shavings (in photo) and tree resin are used to caulk the boats to keep them from leaking.  A new boat costs US $3,500.  It takes two men four months to build one of these boats.  The workers earn US $ 5 to $ 8 dollars a day for eight hours work.  They also build the smaller canoes that you have seen and those sell for US $ 800.

3.      You might think Burma a third world and backwards country, but sure enough, even out in the middle of Inle Lake in Nampan Village, there’s always some guy that will put up a fence around his property to keep everyone out.

4.      I’m guessing that this is a farmhouse since it is right out in the middle of the tomato growing area.  It doesn’t look much different than the houses in town.

5.      QUICK QUIZ: What is this structure in the last photo?

A Fixer-Upper, of course...

High and Dry

On this afternoon, we kept noticing that the clouds in the west were building up and looking quite menacing and the west was where we were headed for our hotel.  The clouds were high and dark and eventually started leaking rain.

1.      You can see that we eventually drove right into the rain.  The rain drops were big but the temperature was still warm, so it was fine with me as it seemed to cool us down. 

2.      Our rooster-tail boats also came fully equipped for the rain, as you can see in the second photo.

3.      We made it back into the narrows and the water weeds and we were speeding along just fine when I noticed that a particularly narrow passage didn’t have an opening just ahead of us.  Sure enough, we propelled ourselves up onto the weeds and were high and dry.  The boat engine was out of the water and we were stuck.

4.      Our companions came by and hooked up a rope to tow us off of the pile of water weeds.

5.      After several attempts, they finally succeeded and we were headed for home.

Indein Village

On this day, we went by boat to Indein Village.  Indein is a small village on the western bank of Inle Lake.  It is right where Indein Creek comes down from the mountains.  So this village is not on the water, just right next to it.  We traveled by crossing part of the lake and then taking various canals and creeks to get there.  And though it is not on the water, most structures were still built on stilts.  Most of the people living here, like 80% to 90%, are Pa-O people.  Most of the people are farmers and our guide said that the major crop was oranges, though we never saw any oranges.  We did see papayas and bananas. 

1.      You can see a small part of Indein Village in the first photo.  This is the Indein River, and like Inle Lake, the river is very shallow.

2.      This was one of the most popular vending items that we saw in this village.  The people were very friendly towards us.

3.      This woman is cooking rolled flat sticky rice in river sand.  It comes out the size of a large tortilla, very light and tasty.  A small creek is right behind her.  Vicky tried it and was successful in making one.

4.      These women are carrying tobacco leaves, used for making cheroots.

5.      This is a small portion, less than half anyway, of the walkway to the SHwe Inn Thein Temple, or the Pa-O Temple.  It was a very long walkway and every inch of both sides was packed tightly with vendors selling just about everything.

Indein Village Pagodas

Surrounding the SHwe Inn Thein Temple, or Pa-O Temple are 1,058 pagodas.    There were originally about 2,000 pagodas (yes, two thousand) that were built in the 17th and 18th centuries.  You can still see the corpses of many of the thousand that are no longer standing.  And while many of the pagodas are in poor shape, many new pagodas are being built.  And after all the pagodas that I’ve already posted, I will only include this one post for the pagodas here at Indein Village.  The pagodas here were all very close together and mostly small.

1.      This is what most of the pagodas looked like and you can see the base of one former pagoda just to the left of me in the photo.

2.      I liked the crooked tops and the tree growing out of one of the pagodas on the right side.

3.      But then we came across these nice new pagodas, all straight and shiny.

4.      And then we came across more new pagodas, but painted to look like they were old pagodas.

5.      This area had different types all mixed up, which was more interesting.

Indein Village Lunch

We ate lunch while in Indein Village.  We ate at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the Indein River.  This place had a very large brick pizza oven built in the middle of the area where they were cooking, outdoors, of course.

1.      One “must” for our restaurants is “facilities”.  After using the restroom, I couldn’t find the sink to wash my hands.  I asked Vicky and she said, “What are you talking about – I saw you using the sink”.  I told her, “No, that was the urinal” (first photo).  I never said that they had ‘great’ facilities, just facilities.  Though of course, it did have a pleasant view and lots of fresh air.  And I did manage to find the sink.  And in case you’re curious, the women’s facilities were all indoor and quite good from what I was told.

2.      This is our table and we are overlooking Indein Creek, though the water is brown from recent rains and hard to see in the photo.  The beer was nice and cold too.

3.      This was our salad and one of the best salads I’ve ever had in my life.  It was avocado, red bell pepper, onions, and tomatoes.  Everything tasted like it was picked five minutes before I ate it – and at absolute peak ripeness.  Delicious!

4.      We each got one slice of three different types of pizza plus some pasta and some kind of sweet native ‘something’ in the middle of the plate.  After our long trip, the pizza tasted wonderful.

5.      For dessert, we got dessert pizza with cinnamon and brown sugar, plus fresh papaya.

Goodbye to Burma

This is the end of my Burma trip.  I determined that 78 postings and almost 400 photos was probably over everyone’s limit.  It was a great trip for us.  From the standpoint of seeing and doing new things and being very active and interactive with the locals, this was one of our best trips.  Our tour guide did a great job for us and never hesitated to talk to anyone or ask anyone about something that we wanted to know about or to ask if we could try to do something.  That made it a very exciting and enjoyable trip for me.

I’ve included a few photos to wind up the trip.  They are just some miscellaneous photos but like all my photos, they have a story.  And speaking of photos, I want to thank my wife Vicky and her brother Pete for giving me their photographs to peruse along with my own, making for a better presentation of all the things we did on this trip.

1.      This was near Dala on the southern bank of the Yangon River.  I was about to take off with 50 pounds of plums on my shoulder.  I watched many of the vendors carry these rigs and they made it look quite easy.  The 50 pounds was no problem but it was much harder than I expected.  That’s because I expected the two sides to sway in unison with an expectant weight shift.  But somehow, the two baskets got out of sync and were not in unison.  When I got one side coming and one side going in opposite directions, it was a real challenge.  I felt like I was caught in the middle of a tug-of-war and my feet struggled to adjust.  I never dropped anything, but I have much greater respect for the people carrying these rigs.

2.      This photo has Vicky, wearing Tanaka on her face, placing some gold leaf on a Buddha statue.  We did this several times and we fit right in with the locals doing it.

3.      We were very active on this trip, but I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that we never got a chance to relax.  Pete and Vicky are doing just that as we drifted along the Irrawaddy River.

4.      Several people asked me how the Inle Lake boatman managed or learned to paddle with one leg while standing up and fishing.  I don’t know but I learned that they start practicing at a very young age, as you can see in the fourth photo.

5.      Every trip has to come to an end and this is my ending, from a boat on Lake Taungthaman looking at the U-Bein bridge.

 Mingalabar, (which again means “Auspiciousness to you”)