inle Lake is awesome. Huge lake surrounded by mountains similar to the sierra foothills. The lake is 7 miles wide and about 3x as long. Most days we were there, the surface was a silver sheet broken up by clumps of what looked like water hyacynth. Many villages surround the lake and are actually built on top of the lake on stilts. Fisherman dot the lake in their longboats and balance on the tips of their boats with one leg wrapped around an oar with which they maneuver the boat while using their hands to pull in fishing nets or baskets. I guess the oar-and-leg technique is unique to Inle Lake and was really nice to watch— the fishermen were so graceful and ballet-like. Penny got some photos of some fishermen that were posing near our hotel.
The lake water is clear in most areas and you can see the plants growing just beneath the surface.
The other special thing about the lake is that there are floating farms and gardens on the lake where flowers and vegetables are grown. Its aquaponics in its most natural state!!
The only way to get around the lake is by longboat. The boats are about 35’ long and maybe 4’ wide at the top and 2’ at the bottom and made of wood. They all have inboard diesel motors and are strong enough to transport stuff you’d usually use a truck for (we saw boatloads of bricks, rice, bamboo, furniture, rocks and more being transported by these boats). Coincidentally, the place could really use a biodiesel plant in my opinion. Theres thousands of boat trips made on the lake each day and although I didn’t see many signs of pollution, I hear that its becoming a problem. God knows they eat enough fried food in Myanmar to support a recycled biodiesel industry!
A drawback to all these boats that we did notice, is the noise pollution. I kept thinking I was in Oakland hearing helicopters outside, but it was the noise of the diesel motors constantly going past.
Our best day on Inle Lake was the day we rented a boat & driver and went around to different villages on the lake and got out and explored. The place we enjoyed the most was called Inthein village, which you have to access by a 30-minute boat ride up a river. On our way up the river, the boat “jumped” over several small dams which was fun (it motored up a small waterfall in the middle of the dam). The village of Indein was home to lots of crumbling temples, stupas and pagodas (we had to google what the difference is), many which had trees growing right out of the center of them. Most were pretty small— the size of a large doghouse or a garden shed. We also climbed about 3 hills which had different cool stuff at the top— a monastery or more crumbling temples, or a cluster of over 1,000 small pagodas.
After Inthein, we boated around some floating gardens and saw a lot of tomatoes and some flowers growing, but couldn’t make out much else— it looked like a lot of beds were fallow (?)
We made 2 other stops— one at Jumping Cat Monastery which was on the water on stilts. There it was rumored that monks had trained cats to jump through hoops, but although we saw monks and cats there, we didn’t see any hoops or jumping. Lastly we stopped at a village that had a monastery up on a large hill that had awesome views of the entire lake. From there we could see how many longboats were motoring across the lake— hundreds. They are easy to spot because they have a huge plume of water that gets kicked up by the motor behind them.
