A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
Inle Lake, Myanmar

The bus from Kalaw to the Inle Lake area was uneventful, though it gave me a waking taste of the quality of the roads between Inle and Bagan. Once you get off the main "highway" from Yangon to Mandalay the quality dorps precipitously -- narrow and bumpy. Basically Myanmar roads (the ones that are paved at all) have been patched so many times that the original pavement is often invisible to the amateur eye. The drive was lovely, however, through villages and pine forests, mountains and vast cultivated valleys.

I took the easy way out upon arrival at the junction 7 miles f rom Nyaungshwe, the town at the top of the lake -- I hired a taxi. No matter how adventurous I am when it comes to modes of transportation, it's still a pain in the rear to cart your bags on one of these pickups bursting with humanity and livestock.

Nyaungshwe was a nice little tourist town -- really one of the only towns in Myanmar that could fit that description. It boasted such rare amenities as email service (no web or web-based email though -- not allowed by the government), trekking guides, souvenir shops, art galleries, and not one but five restaurants advertising authentic Italian food. You can get Indian food too, but really it's all about the pasta in Inle Lake. Oh, and pancakes. Apparently the Thais or someone told them that tourists are wild for pancakes, so they're ubiquitous. My residence, for example, was called "The Teakwood Guesthouse and Pancake". And the pancakes were pretty good, actually, far better than the godawful egg and white toast breakfast featured at every other guesthouse in Myanmar.

The thing that one does in the Inle area is take a boat trip, so on my second day (I'm sparing you a description of my day 1 bike ride) for a shockingly low sum I did so -- $6 for the whole day, 8 a.m. to 6:30, split between five of us. I felt compelled to give our bouncy, smiley driver a $1 tip. I mean honestly, I spent as much on lunch as for the entire tour.

We started our day winding through the canals that separate Nyaungshwe from the lake itself, grassy islands nad floating cornfields rife with birds and grass and wood shacks on stilts. In the Inle Lake area, the market is on a five day rotation, so that every fifth day there will be a market near your village. One of them, Ywama, is in fact a floating market in which vendors ply their vegetables, household equipment, grain, textiles and tourist goods from boats in the canals that serve as the town's "roads". It was perhaps fortunate that we missed that one -- it has apparently degenerated into a primarily tourist market, which is expensive (for me, as I have little self-control) and not too interesting in terms of photo opportunities. Our market was in Kaungdaing, reached in our case by docking at a wooden monestary nearby and walking past a Buddhist temple, several souvenir stands, and some crumbling brick and stucco Shan religious ruins. The market was great, I took loads of pictures that maybe I'll post someday since it's difficult to describe the general business and variety of these markets.

It would be well at this point to describe the lake itself, which is unusual in some respects. The whole thing is about 21 km by 11 km, and is located 900 meters above sea level. It's surrounded by green, largely treeless mid-sized mountains, about the size and shape of the Blue Ridge or the foothills of the Cascades. None of that is unusual, of course -- what's amazing is how they use the lake.

Although the lake is quite deep and cleer, it is blooming with underwater and surface plants. Often the lake is many meters deep but you can only see to the tops of the swaying plants just inches below (or indeed above) the surface. Rather than just approaching this festival of weeds and flowers as a boating nuisance, centures of Intha tribe members have transformed the lake into a thriving agriculture and population center. And I don't just mean by using the fertile shore along the lake. Inle Lake itself literally supports 17 villages on stilts, and fully half the lake surface is devoted to "floating gardens".

When the phrase "floating garden" is uttered, my mind turns to Monet's Giverny paintings and the like. Nothing could be farther than the practical reality of Inle's version. Using the strong, viney hyacinths that float atop the lake, bamboo for structure, and other weeds to tie things together, the villagers pile and mix mud and marshy lake weeds to create actual floating rows of soil in which a wide variety of crops are planted. To keep the rows from just drifting away in the wind they are staked to the bottom with long bamboo poles, and the farmers plant, tend and harvest their crops all while kneeling or standing in long narrow boats that they often row using one leg. They row standing from the rear of the boat in kind of a figure eight -- this technique looks every bit as bizarre as it sounds. As I was there during the rainy season (which isn't too rainy there), tomatoes were the primary product, with hundreds of boxes of them being harvested each day. During other seasons the same floating dirt rows are used to grow garlic, cauliflower, cabbage, eggplant, onions, and even melons and papaya.

It's all incredibly impressive. Years ago I visited some "floating islands" upon which a minority tribe lived in Lake Titicaca in Peru. That experience was seriously grim - loads of begging children with rotten teeth, no visible industry or agriculture whatsoever. The contrast with these floating villages could not be greater. Despite the challenges inherent in living in a country like Myanmar, thse people were hardworking, healthy, clean (they bathe using the lake water a couple times a day), and though I suppose it is distantly possible that they were faking, were friendly and happy too.

Well, that's enough for now - I've got to go catch a bus to Saigon -- back to work this week!

Copyright 2003 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 7:27 PM