Mandalay Dining

The first meal was at the President’s Tea House.  At a tea house, you can sit down at a table and are served tea for free.  You can sit there all day drinking free tea.  I don’t know why but that is what we were told.  The tea houses serve breakfast and lunch.  The food is very much along the lines of what we might call ‘fast food’.  By that I mean that they serve it very fast and it is rather cheap.  But we enjoyed the food.  We were told that some people use the tea houses like a business office and sit and work on their computer, drink tea and have breakfast and lunch.  We were happy to have made it to Burma before McDonald’s and Starbucks.  But as Vicky said, once they arrive, it might mean the end of the tea houses.

1.      You can see Vicky and Pete in the President’s Tea House.  There were no walls on two sides of the building.  You can see some students or business people behind them in the restaurant.

2.      You can see our tea house lunch in the second photo.  I’ve untied the banana leaf which held sticky rice and pork.  We also had chicken dumplings.  The meal was very good and cost us about US $1.50.  The tea was free.

For dinner one night, we walked from our hotel to a nearby noodle shop.  This will be the next three photos.

3.      I had fried rice with pork and Pete had fried noodles, though Pete’s looked like chow Mein to me.  We also had some soup and some Myanmar beers.

4.      Vicky ordered chicken noodle soup with quail eggs.

5.      It was quite common to have a local “extra” join us for a meal and that was the case at this meal, as you can see in the last photo.

Jade Market

Many of our favorite stops were unscheduled, like this one.  This stop was at the local Jade Market.  It’s a wholesale jade market, not a retail jade market.  The location appeared to be right in a regular looking neighborhood area.

1.      The market goes on for many blocks and vendors just set up their wares right along the edge of the roadway.  The road was very crowded with people, cars, carts, and motorcycles.

2.      The first photo looks down the street while the second photo was taken at a right angle to the street, looking into the block.  Vendors could be one or two tables to as many as six or seven tables deep into the block.

3.      You can see that there was quite a variety of jade and again, this is a wholesale market, not a retail market.

4.      These are some smaller stones but if you notice the person’s hand near the top, these are still good size chunks of jade.

5.      I had Vicky and Pete put their hands on this stone to give you an idea of just how big some of the jade stones were at this market.

More Jade Market

We are still at the jade market.  At one point, we went into one block of the jade market.  As we got farther in from the street, the jade stones got smaller.  I think this is because people were hand carrying their jade to their tables.  So the big jade rocks were nearest the road where the vendors could pull up their carts and unload them without having to carry them very far.  People with smaller sized pieces of jade had it easier and so were placed further back from the street.  At least, that’s my assumption.

1.      You can see Pete and Vicky as we worked our way into the block and away from the road.  It was very crowded and we really had to take our time to make our way through the crowds.

2.      As we got clear to the back of the market, past all the jade sellers, we came upon several rows of machine workers doing grinding and polishing of jade stones.  You can see one such table in this photo. 

3.      You would probably not have noticed, but the jade market did not have any electricity.  Rows and rows of machines were all powered by foot.  It was hard to get a good photo but eventually, I found a machine setup that had a broken belt, so I took a photo.  So you end up with two wheels turning from one pulley and from two to four people working at each grinding or polishing table.  But only one or two of the workers are supplying the pedal power at a table. 

4.      In this photo, the guy in the yellow shirt and the guy at the other end but near side are the two supplying the pedal power for this table.

5.      This last guy is a polisher and you can see the small piece of jade he is working on.  We chatted with this guy and he said that he is very busy and has all the work he can handle.

The Irrawaddy to Mingun

We got in a boat on the Irrawaddy River to travel an hour up the river to see the Mingun Paya.  But the river was interesting all by itself.  The riverbank in Mandalay is a slum, per our guide.  He said that it is mostly homeless people who live on the riverbank in Mandalay.  He said that the police have rid the area of prostitutes but that it’s still the wild, wild west along banks of the river.

1.      The first photo will just give you a tiny glimpse of the Mandalay riverbank.  It’s a wild mix of commerce, both by truck and boat, makeshift houses and warehouses, boat housing, and of course, during the day, you can add tourists and vendors to the mix.

2.      Leaving Mandalay, our guide pointed out the area of the second photo.  He said this was a lawless area where anything goes which might include drugs, gambling, murder, and just about anything else.

3.      In the middle of the Irrawaddy River are islands which are very large.  The islands only surface after the rainy season has ended and the river level drops.  At that point, people move onto the island and build temporary houses like you see in this photo.  These people farm the islands growing peanuts, bean sprouts, tobacco, and other crops.  They harvest their crops and move off the islands before the river rises up to cover them.

4.      We saw all sorts of commerce along the river including people fishing, hauling sand, and doing other work.  We also saw some “Huck Finn’s” along the river as you can see in the below photo.

5.      We, however, were not among the Huck Finns, as you can see in the last photo.  It was very cool, at 85 degrees, on the river and we enjoyed the break from the heat along with some ice cold beer and snacks.

Mingun Paya

King Bodawpaya decided to build the world’s biggest pagoda at Mingun.  He started construction in 1790.  His pagoda was about one-third finished in 1819, when King Bodawpaya died.  At that point, construction stopped.  The base of the pagoda, or paya, is 240 feet by 460 feet.  The one-third completed height is 150 feet.  The base still stands there but not like it was when King Bodawpaya was building it.  A massive earthquake in 1838 split the monument and a 2012 earthquake worsened its condition.

King Bodawpaya must have liked “big” things because he also planned to have the world’s biggest bell.  He had it cast in 1808.  It’s about 12 feet high and 16 feet across.  The bell was moved to its location at the height of the rainy season by digging a canal to its location from the river.  Buddhists use the bell for sharing: having done a good deed, marriage, for the intention of Buddha, etc.

1.      You can see the one-third finished pagoda from quite a distance down the Irrawaddy River.  Initially, the pagoda and bell were the only things in Mingun.  But eventually, where there are tourists, there are vendors and some infrastructure to go with it.

2.      This is a much closer look at the Mingun Paya.  It had entrances on all four sides.

3.      Here’s the marble info slab at the Mingun bell.

4.      Vicky gave the bell a good ringing while we were there.  It has a substantial ring to it.

5.      I mentioned Mingun’s infrastructure, which of course included Taxi service.

Home Hosted Dinner

One night for dinner in Mandalay, we got to go for a home-hosted meal with a local Mandalay family.  It’s an arrangement that our OAT tour company makes for us but we went without our tour guide.  The family makes the meal for us and we eat in their home, like part of the family.  Their home was, I suppose, a middle class home.  The dad is retired from a government tax-assessor position.  There were 10 people living in the house plus a dog.  The family included three generations.

1.      In this photo, we were sitting in the small living room, looking at the dining table.  The kitchen was very small.  You can see six chairs and there were five of us.  The five of us ate with the dad, while the others in the family served and chatted with us.  It was a bit uncomfortable for us to not be able to eat with the whole family, but there simply wasn’t enough space.

2.      This photo is the living room coffee table and we were having appetizers before dinner: beer, cashews, and spring rolls.

3.      This is eight of the ten family members who hosted us for dinner.  There is one daughter and one small child not in this photo.

4.      Here is our dinner table: egg drop/fish ball soup, butterbeans, fresh vegetables, asparagus and mushrooms, roasted eggplant, shrimp/tomato salsa, a tofu dish, beef jerky with lime, and pork pot roast.  I might have forgotten a dish or two.

5.      This was dessert: potato pudding, carrot pudding, condiments, dragon fruit and Asian pears plus avocado juice for after dinner.

We were there for two hours and the conversation was great.  We covered the whole world of topics.

Mandalay Miscellaneous

This will be my last email from Mandalay and it’s just a few odds and ends photos and stories.

1.      This is a closer view of Mandalay Hill.  Since this is the signature location in Mandalay, I thought I would send this photo.  I took this from the bridge leading across the moat to the east gate of the Royal Palace.

2.      Just to the left from the first photo is the east palace entrance.  On the palace wall above the entrance area is this sign.  We wondered what the heck it meant and asked our guide.  Some people have asked me about the presence of the Military government in Burma.  This was one of the few outward signs of their presence.  The Royal Palace is an installation of the military government.  Tatmadaw is the military organization of Myanmar.  I guess they just want to let people know…

3.      We saw women carrying goods on their heads all over Burma, but much more often in Mandalay.  There weren’t many things that we didn’t see on women’s heads, including a flock of birds (for sale).

4.      This was near the jade market and I’m just including it in case anyone ever wondered what a Hearse looks like in Burma.

5.      Monks go out for food donations from the people every morning at dawn.  Nuns only go out twice a week and they go out during the day.  This was about noon in front of a restaurant in Mandalay.

A Pa-O Village

We flew from Mandalay to Heho, which was only a thirty minute flight.  Heho is about 3800 feet elevation.  The Heho area is an agricultural region.  It looked great flying in with field crops of yellow, red, and green and varying textures due to the orchards and mountain plants.  The agriculture that we saw included rice, sesame, sunflowers, mustard, wheat, corn, bee hives, avocados, Asian pears, bananas, potatoes, and papayas.

From Heho, we drove towards Kalaw which was over an hour away.  Our guide said that the Pa-O tribe is the biggest minority in this area.  We stopped in at the major Pa-O village on our drive.  I asked our guide for the name of this village and he said that he couldn’t pronounce it or spell it.  It was a weekday and most of the adults in the village were working and most children were in school, so we didn’t get to meet very many of the Pa-O people in this village.

The Pa-O people are one of the larger ethnic minorities in Burma, and the largest in this part of Burma.  The Pa-O have many subgroups.  The majority of the Pa-O are Buddhists.  Most Pa-O are farmers and grow rice or vegetables for a living. 

The Pa-O people prefer to build their houses out of cherry or pinewood, but they use bamboo if wood is scarce.  They build their houses on stilts to house buffalo or oxen or cows on the ground floor of their home.

1.      Wood was evidently scarce in this area since the majority of the homes that we saw were made from bamboo, as you can see in the first photo.  You can also see the bamboo growing behind the house and see, from the poles, just how big this bamboo can get.

2.      In the second photo, they also have a separate barn and the barn is also made from bamboo.  They keep the animals on the ground floor of the barn and the hay and feed on the upper floor.  I’m not sure why this woman is drying her clothes on the pile of fire kindling but we saw several of the houses where they did that.  You can also see some large banana trees behind the barn.

3.      The house in the third photo was the nicest house that we saw in the village.  But even here, you can see that they have an attached bamboo house to the main house.  Whether that is a “mother-in-law” house and she prefers a bamboo house or whether that was the original house and they have added the wood house, or some other explanation, I don’t know.

4.      We only saw motorbikes for powered vehicles in this village, though they may well have some cars or trucks.  But we did see some carts in the village pulled by oxen.

5.      We met these kids along the main road where we parked our bus.  They were going home from school for lunch.  Some of the kids live close by, so they don’t bring lunch to school, they just go home for lunch.  Other kids live farther away and they bring their lunch.  In this case, the kids that brought their lunches were going to the homes of the kids who live close – to eat their lunch.  You can see one girl with her “bento box”.  The bottom had steamed rice in it while the top portion had some curry to put on the rice.

Pa-O Bamboo House

We are still in the same unpronounceable Pa-O village.  I thought you might like to see the insides of a bamboo house.  Most of the bamboo houses were made of 100% bamboo with the sometimes exception of the roofing material.  Some of them had metal roofing material.

1.      This is the outside of the house.  You can see that the poles are made from very large pieces of bamboo, probably four to five inches in diameter.  The bottom floor was for their animals but no photos of that.

2.      The other photos are all upstairs rooms which is where they live.  The second photo shows hanging laundry and green tomatoes from their garden that they are ripening to sell in Yangon to earn money. 

3.      The next room was a bedroom and utility room.  This house had very little furniture.

4.      This is the kitchen and probably the room where most of the rest of their activity takes place.  They have a wood-framed area that is filled with sand and this is where they make a fire for cooking food.  Their water and “sink” are outside the house. The kitchen was smoky.

5.      This is the mother of the house and her son.

Kalaw Train Station

We drove from Heho to Kalaw.  Kalaw is a hill town founded by the British to escape the heat of the plains.  It was cooler in Kalaw but still warm.  The area was quiet and peaceful and the hills are covered with pine tree groves and bamboo groves.  The town itself still has some Tudor-style houses left over from the British years.  The town has lots of big trees and tree-lined streets.  Kalaw is also now somewhat of a tourist town with many trekking companies and reasonably priced guesthouses.

The British were great railroad builders and they brought the railroad to Kalaw.  We visited the Kalaw train station.  I was not going to take any photos of the train station and would not have made a blog posting for the train station, except that while we were here, a train just happened to pull into the station.  It’s a small station and before the train rolled in, the station was empty of people.  It was just some bench type seating and a small loading area.  But when the train pulled in, people suddenly appeared and went right to work.  Most of the people who showed up were vendors.  I didn’t actually see anyone get on or off the train, but goods were purchased and cargo was loaded and unloaded.  It was a rather amazing event to watch.

1.      This photo was just as I came out of the train station and within a minute of the train arriving.  Before the train arrived, there were no people there. 

2.      This is towards the front of the train which is where the passengers ride.  There was a whirl of vending activity and almost all of it was for food items.   

3.      This will give you a close-up of the action.

4.      Most of the goods being sold were fruits and melons, but the woman on the right had carrots for sale.

5.      In the back of the train, cargo got loaded and unloaded.  In our modern high-tech world, this was still all done by hand.

Kalaw Market Shopping

We started our last day in Kalaw at the Kalaw Market.  Our guide divided our travel group up into teams.  He gave each team a list of food items to buy and some money to make the purchases.  We had one major problem.  He wrote all the food items to be purchased in Burmese.  So we set out to buy five or six items but we didn’t know what they were.  Our task was to communicate with the vendors to see what we were supposed to be buying, find the items, and purchase them.  Our guide further put out the challenge that this was a contest and that the first team to arrive back at the bus with all the items on their list would win a prize.

Vicky, Pete, and I were designated as the Green Team.  We had five items on our list and away we went.

1.      Pete (Vicky’s brother) and I may not be the two sharpest tools in the shed, but we were smart enough to put Vicky in charge of our shopping spree, as you can see in the first photo.  We gave her the list and money and tried to keep up with her. 

2.      The vegetables, fruits, flowers, and spices in the Kalaw Market were fantastic.  You can see one vendor in the second photo.

3.      As you can see in the third photo, I’m collecting our purchases and Pete is taking photos – while Vicky was doing the “heavy lifting”.

4.      We were glad that there was no Chicken on our list as we wouldn’t have been too anxious to make that purchase.

5.      Only about 25% of the Burmese have electricity.  That means that most people do not have refrigerators.  I don’t know if that’s why we saw so many peppers for sale or not – to spice the food – but you can see some of the many peppers for sale in the last photo.

Our team won the prize.  We had our five items purchased with money left over and we were back on the bus in about six or seven minutes.  Our guide was shocked by our speed to accomplish the task.  He carefully checked our purchases over because he didn’t think we could have done it all that fast.  But we did and we won.  Vicky deserves the credit.  She started us off by picking a vendor with a huge variety of goods.  That person ended up having three of our items and took us to someone nearby who had the other two.  Like I said, Pete and I made one smart decision….

Myin Ma Htie Village

We left Kalaw and drove towards Inle Lake but first we drove up into the hills for a visit with the Danu hill tribe.  The area was very heavy agriculture which is what the Danu people do for a living.  We went to the Myin Ma Htie Village.  The village has 560 people who are basically all related.  The village has twelve leaders elected every four years by the village members.  They also have a monastery and a school.  The village has no set rules.  The leaders preside over the whole village including the monastery and the school.  The leaders discuss decisions with the families and make their decisions.  The leaders said that the biggest problem in the village is quarreling spouses.

The leaders try and resolve all issues, like water, crops, school, and spousal disputes.  The leaders said their goal is to prosper and do it without growing opium.  This is a major opium growing region and they said there was opium growing within five miles of us.  The current village leader has been the leader for eight years and he is very proud of his accomplishments.  His three main projects were that he brought electricity to the village, he improved their water supply, and he built a main road to the village.  The government taxes the village on land and electricity but nothing else.  The village leader said that “they only drink (alcohol) on two days: days when it rains and days when it doesn’t rain”. 

The four main crops grown by this village are rice, peanuts, ginger, and potatoes.

1.      This photo was taken from our moving bus so it’s not a great photo but it shows the village and the surrounding area.

2.      The main crop seen in this photo is rice but you can also see some vegetable rows and other crop areas.

3.      The main crop in this photo is ginger and you can see some orchard trees and one of the houses.

4.      This shows ginger, some vegetable crops, and orchards.

5.      Vicky is standing with a village elder and you can see some different vegetable areas and an orchard intercropped with ginger.

Village Monastery

On arriving at the Myin Ma Htie village, we needed to switch vehicles in order to make the climb up to the monastery.  The monastery belongs to the village and they take care of it.  Their monastery is 80 years old. 

The monk offered us a blessing which he said could be for us or for sharing with others.  I opted for sharing his blessing with family, friends, and my electronic travel companions.  The monk offered a number of blessings including things like “to be safe”.  The most interesting part of the blessings was when the monk said “Not to be annoyed by the government”.  I think that says a lot about Myanmar.

After the monk’s blessing and a Q&A with him, he invited us to take a meditation lesson.  He said that any position was fine: sitting, kneeling, etc.  The monk said that concentration is the most important thing.  He said it’s easiest to close our eyes, relax, and concentrate on our breathing.  We might want to concentrate on the tip of our nose.  He said breathing is like life, we can’t stop it and we can’t always control it, but we can try to concentrate on controlling it and hopefully we can gain an advantage.  Nothing is permanent and we can’t control our Karma but we can work towards Nirvana.  I’m working on that one…

1.      Three of the village leaders drove up in the vehicles you see in the first photo.  These are homemade trucks using Chinese made electrical generators for engines.  The truck engines double as water pumps.  

2.      The village elders asked if anyone wanted to try driving one of the vehicles and you probably already know the answer to that.  I drove just fine once I got used to the very “loose” steering.  I drove six people up to the monastery.

3.      The 80 year old monastery is made of teak wood.  It’s built on stilts and the stilts are painted with whitewash and lime to keep the termites out of the monastery.  The roof could use a paint job.

4.      The monk is 48 years old and has been a full-fledged monk for 29 years, after joining the monastery at age 5.

5.      Even though this area was very green, you can see the large sheet metal rain gutter in this photo on the inside of the monastery.  It is used to collect the rain water off the roof which is then piped into water storage containers.

Village School

After visiting the monastery, we walked down the hill to the village school.  The village school is for grades one to five and the school has 46 students and 4 teachers.  Our travel company, Overseas Adventure Travel, is owned by its parent company, Grand Circle.  They have their own foundation called the Grand Circle Foundation and they adopt schools in the countries where they do business.  One of the things that I really like about their foundation and their school program is that they get involved with the school and do whatever seems most in need for the school.  They don’t limit themselves to buying school supplies or books or computers, they help the school get what each particular school needs.  In the case of this school, Grand Circle Foundation built the school a new roof, two toilets, and a water purification system.

1.      You can see the school in the first photo.  It’s a short walk down the hill from the monastery.

2.      This is one of their classrooms and the class in progress.

3.      When we got to the older kids, our guide asked for someone to “teach” the kids an English lesson.  I was shocked that Vicky didn’t volunteer, so I volunteered.  You can see me giving my impromptu English lesson in the third photo. 

4.      Behind the main school building are the two new toilets built by Grand Circle.  I gave them a try and they get a thumbs up: Western style on the left and Eastern style on the right.

5.      The teachers had all the school kids come outside into the school yard and sing us a few songs.  We sang them a song as well, with Vicky taking the lead for our tour group.

Village Lunch

After our school visit, we went to a village leader’s house for lunch.  The food for lunch was a combination of the food that we had purchased in the market this morning and vegetables and things from their own gardens.  In addition to having brought part of the food to eat for lunch, each of us was assigned a job or two to help in making our lunch.  Most of the locals spoke no English, but we all managed to join together to produce a fine lunch, enjoyed by our tour group and a large contingent of village elders and their families.

1.      Vicky was one of the first ones chosen and she was sent out into the fields to pick some cabbages, garlic, and other vegetables and bring them back.  You can see her in the first photo with one of the Danu people.

2.      Some of us, like Pete and myself, were assigned much higher duties.  Our first assignment was making Rum Sours.  Their recipe was a half-bottle of rum, one finger of raw honey (see second photo), one finger of lime juice, and the rest water.  It was really hard to mix it all up, due to the honey, but eventually, I got the whole bottle blended together and ready to try, or I mean serve.

3.      I wanted to make certain that I had correctly made the Rum Sours, so I took my bottle outside and found a village elder and some other members of the village and poured them a round to test it.  I offered a toast first, though none of them spoke English.

4.      As if making the Rum Sours wasn’t enough, Pete and I got assigned to cook a vegetable dish in a wok over an open fire.  We cooked up some garlic, cauliflower, carrots, green beans, and seasoning.  I improvised when I saw some basil growing not far from the kitchen.  I had one of our hosts go pick some basil and we added it to our dish.  You might notice that while stir-frying up a storm, I still managed to keep a rum sour in my other hand.  Our dish came out excellent with all fresh ingredients.

5.      I never quite understood the ending of this party.  Somehow we all ended up out on the patio dancing to some cymbal and drum music.  You can see Pete showing them how it's done in the last photo.

Road Building Crew

After our visit to the Myin Ma Htie Village, we drove to Inle Lake.  As we were getting close to the lake, I started to notice piles of rocks all along both sides of the road.  Then I started to notice smoking barrels of tar cooking along the road.  Eventually, we got stopped by a traffic person.  We asked our guide what was going on.  He said we had been stopped by a road building crew.  Then he asked if we wanted to get out and see what they were doing.  Of course, we did.  At that point, our guide told us that they have a saying in Burma, “Everything in Burma is handmade, even the roads”.  In our discussions with the road crew, we found out that they earn US $4 day for 8 hours of work.  When commenting that those wages seemed very low for this work, our guide asked them some more.  He said that they were only earning $2 to $3 a day doing farm work.  I thought to myself that at that rate, they might run out of agricultural workers soon.

1.      We saw lots of piles of rocks along the road and eventually saw this guy, who was putting the piles of rocks along the road.

2.      This was one of the guys cooking tar along the road.  It was raining and the bus windshield was wet in this photo.  They just dug a short ditch, built a fire in it, and put the 55 gallon drums across the ditch to heat up the tar – every several hundred yards.

3.      This was when we got stopped by the traffic person.  This is the majority of this road crew.

4.      Women carried rocks from the rock pile to the road and dumped them on the road using metal disc type plates.

5.      After some Q&A and time to observe their work, our guide asked us what we thought.  I told him that the crew’s limiting factor was that the two guys doing the shoveling couldn’t keep the dozen women carrying the rocks busy.  He asked if I wanted to show them how.  While I wasn’t out to embarrass anyone, I put the women to work with some quick shoveling.  I just wanted them to understand that they needed more people shoveling or less women carrying rocks to be more efficient.  I worked up quite a sweat as it was over 90 degrees.

Pristine Lotus Spa Resort

We made it to Inle Lake and checked into the Pristine Lotus Spa Resort.  We were greeted with watermelon juice, a cold washcloth, and a five-minute backrub.  This was an incredible place to stay, luxury beyond our norms.

1.      This was the entrance to the resort.  The lake is behind me in this photo.  The resort is on both sides of the lake road.  You can see Vicky standing by the resort sign. 

2.      The resort “lobby” and reception area, is the gazebo on the left and the larger gazebo behind is the resort restaurant.  

3.      You can see Vicky at dinner in the restaurant one night.

4.      They had free cheroots in the lobby and one afternoon, I chatted up one of the locals – who was always sitting in the same chair.  He was a good listener but not much of a talker, though the conversation lasted quite some time.

5.      You can see Vicky standing in front of our own not-so-little bungalow.  Pete was next door to us, to the right.

Our Bungalow

1.      This was one of the nicest rooms that we ever had and we enjoyed every minute of our time in this bungalow. The stairwell on the right leads to an upper story.  On the right was a big TV and music area and on the left was a desk for my writing.

2.      The second photo was taken from the same place as the first photo, I’m just turned around in the direction of the outside porch.  You can see the resort lobby in the background in the trees.

3.      This is the bathroom area, which is behind the bed.  The toilet is on the left and through the door to the right, there was a bathtub on the left and a shower on the right.

4.      The bed had mosquito netting and we used it, but we really only came across a couple of mosquitoes while staying here.

5.      Vicky is relaxing up in the loft.  There was also a loft balcony and we could see the lake from up there.

Getting to the Open Water

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.

Inle Lake

Inle Lake is a freshwater lake in the Shan Hills area of Burma’s Shan State.  It’s the second largest lake in Burma with a surface area of 45 square miles at an elevation of 2900 feet.  With a mountain lake and plenty of water, the area must make its own weather as there were clouds on the mountains around the lake the entire time that we were there.  The temperature was still in the 90’s but it felt so much better when we were out on the lake.

1.      The first photo is just to give you a sense of the size of the lake.  We could always see across it but it was a large area of water nonetheless.

2.      The long narrow boats were called “rooster-tail boats” due to the spray of water that they sent flying out behind them.  You can see this in the second photo.

3.      And “yes”, they still had pagodas, even at Inle Lake.  You can see a gold-domed pagoda in the photo.

4.      While the lake was not crowded, there were always boats in sight out on the lake.  You can also see plenty of floating water weeds in the background.

5.      The last photo is a local transportation boat.  Many of the locals would wave at us as they went past.