MYANMAR – Inle Lake

Monks from Nyaungshwe leaving the monastery early in the morning to collect morning alms

Inle Lake has no individual or collective great sights but instead is a window on Myanmar, a taste of otherness, of a different way of life.

In the search for the next best destination many have already dismissed Inle Lake as overly touristed, a refrain we have heard from some about nearly everyplace we have gone. In Nyaungshwe, the gateway town to Inle, the guest houses and restaurants make it impossible to ignore the tourist presence. But outside of town is the lake and its surrounds, one of the most heavily cultivated areas of Myanmar and as heavily populated as a rural area can get.

Floating Gardens of Inle Lake

So the simple fact is that the vast majority of the people here are just going about their lives and the tourists roaming the area at any given time are background noise.

Even within Myanmar the people and their ways are unique since Myanmar hasn’t yet homogenized like the States and so there are as many domestic tourists as foreign ones.

Water defines the place around this broad but shallow lake, never more than ten feet deep.  Most people leave close to the lake and it is often difficult to divine where the lake ends and land begins. So melded are the two that there are farms on the land as well as their counterparts on the water – there are huge tracts of floating gardens, with crops planted on rafts of water plants gathered and lashed together in orderly rows, with bamboo poles stuck through them and into the lake bottom to keep them from drifting with the wind.

Neighborhood Streets

Entire villages are built over the water on stilts, not just around the margins but in the middle of the lake as well, It is disconcerting to travel by boat amongst these villages, laid out as they are on a watery grid, complete with power and phone poles marching down the sides of the “streets” as though they were any other subdivision in the world. Except perhaps for the outhouses, connected to the main house with a bamboo bridge but with nothing but a two meter vertical air connection to the sewer system below in the lake.

Inle Lake fisherman

Out on the lake the fishermen are always at work, in groups beating the water to herd fish into their nets or the solitary ones who use their unique rowing method, using their legs and shoulders, in order to keep their hands free for handling their nets and traps.

Market Place

Everybody who comes here does a circuit of the lake by boat which always includes a stop at the day’s market, which rotates daily among the five towns along its rim.The markets are on solid land by the edge of the lake but most all people arrive by boat so it sometimes seems like a floating market with hundreds of boats jammed together. There is a row of stalls selling tourist souvenirs but almost all of it is dedicated to produce, spices, meats and poultry and fish, housewares, and a hardware section with bamboo building poles, sheet metal roofing, and hand forged farm tools. A lot of what doesn’t leave by boat is hauled off in ox carts. This short video clip shows the sights and sounds of the market.

The boat tours also make a circuit of villages around the lake each of which specialize in a particular craft or manufacture. Some of the workshops you are taken to, are really retail operations but the craftsmen and women that they employ upfront are real and are making real products so it is fascinating still.

Using a bicycle wheel for spinning fiber

Inle Lake is the only place in Myanmar where they weave with lotus fiber, by itself or mixed with silk or cotton. It is handwoven although here the looms’ shuttles had spring loaded returns, much faster than passing the shuttle through by hand, and the spinning wheels made ingenious use of bicycle wheel rims.

The blacksmith’s village hammers out most of the farm implements we saw in the market like scythes and hoes.

Man controlling temperature by using bellows

The man powered bellows was ingenious with two bamboo tubes with the plungers capped with a wad of palm fiber as an air gasket that the operator alternately depressed and withdrew to keep up a steady airflow.

The boat makers are still hand sawing teak logs into planks and fashioning them into two sizes and designs we have to assume have been standard for a long time since 95% of the thousands of boats on the lake were one or the other. Fiberglass has not made it here yet but will probably arrive soon since even now they are importing the teak from hundreds of kilometers away, the supply in the mountains around the lake having been exhausted a generation ago.

Women making hand rolled cheroots. (cigarettes)

The hand rolled cheroots come in two flavors, sweet and spicy, the only difference between the two being the addition of honey. Otherwise you get the cheroot leaf, tobacco, tamarind, brown sugar, rice wine, banana, and pineapple flower.

And the silversmiths painstakingly craft and string silver beads and scales by rolling and hammering silver sheet that they make from ingots run through a hand cranked rolling mill. The pieces are insanely small and delicate and we have to assume that the reason all of the craftsmen were young because our tired eyes would certainly not be up to the job.

Bridge over water canal

The lake feeds a long system of irrigation canals so you can also leave the lake behind to weave and wind through the countryside on these canals. The water is controlled by ingenious bamboo weirs, each of which has a slot in the middle where the flat bottomed boats can skid up or down from one level to the next.

In Dein

In this backwater world is InDein, the temple of a thousand pagodas, a collection that has been assembled for 800 years. Some are in various stages of ruin, some have been refurbished and re-gilt, and others are new. The oldest ones offer a fascinating glimpse at the aging process for these brick temples and many have attractive and elaborate reliefs. And although none of them are big, the tightly clustered refurbished ones at the top of the hill collectively make a dramatic sight, glinting golden in the afternoon sunlight while the wind tinkles the thousands of bells dangling from their umbrellas or hti.

symphony of sound and sight as the wind moves the vanes and rings the bells

Also along the banks of these canals is Phaung Daw Oo Paya which looks much like many other temples in Myanmar but which houses five famous Buddha images, if you can call them images.

After several months in east and southeast Asia the various Buddha images in the halls and shrines are beginning to blur in our minds. We have picked up small knowledge of some of the iconography such as the meaning of the various hand positions or a topknot versus a flame but most of the subtleties of many of the differences such as those between a Thai Sukothai style and a Burmese Mandalay style image are lost on us. What is impressive here is the huge quantity of images and the veneration the more important ones get. You could (and many pious Burmese do) make a tour of the country on the theme of visiting the most famous of these images.

Stories about them abound. One was being transported from one temple to another on the back of an elephant but it got progressively heavier until the elephant could no longer carry it so they built a new temple around it. Another was lost when the boat carrying it sank and could not be raised. But when the soul of a beloved and pious queen was reincarnated, that little child raised it from the bottom with a thread tied to her finger. We wonder if the images are powerful in themselves, an extension of older beliefs that you see all around the edges of Burmese Buddhism, or whether they are conduits to some higher power. Or both. Or neither. We don’t know and haven’t been able to get answers.

Buddhas covered with so much gold leaf that are now blobs. (Only men are allowed to get up here and apply the gold leaf)

There is a story about the origins of the images of Phaung Daw Oo, brightly painted in a series of panels on the walls and apparently going back nearly a millennium although we weren’t able to work out the details. The five images themselves are tiny, not more than a foot and a half tall. More fascinating is that they are no longer discernible as Buddha images but are now vaguely Buddha shaped blobs. Buddhists here in Myanmar, as all over Southeast Asia, make offerings of real gold foil which naturally adhere to the images when rubbed on – these images have seen so many such offerings that the details have long since been submerged under the foil. And that is only from offerings by men – women are not allowed to approach them.

At edge of the lake is the Nga Hpe Kyuang Monastery, a beautiful example of an old teak monastery, with its lacquered and gilt columns and many fine images, all picturesquely perched on stilts and reflected in the waters of the lake.

Besides the water tour there the other best way to see the area is by bike, although unless you are ambitious enough to do a fifty plus kilometer circuit the bike “circumnavigation” will include a boat shuttle from one side to the other.

The hot springs are an excellent and relaxing diversion along the way, and there are hilltop temples and chedis that you can climb to get sweeping views of the lake. But the best was just wandering through the countryside.

The cane harvest was coming in and ox carts loaded with cut cane were headed to the tiny local mills where they juiced them and kept batteries of pots on boil to render the juice into the raw local sugar cakes. Or you could run across a road crew and watch them hand make the roads, no equipment at all, hand crushing rock with sledge hammers and mixing concrete with shovels and bucketing it into place.

Even the tourist town of Nyaungshwe has its charms, especially early in the morning as the town comes awake. At seven AM the monks stream out of the monastery and spread out in all directions to collect morning alms. And the mist on the lakes and canals surrounding the town make for an otherworldly sight of mist wreathed houses and the early fishermen emerging and merging from the mist.