Take-Aways

We took the easy option and flew to Heho, the gateway to Inlay Lake. We still have not realised that the time here in Myanmar is half an hour backwards with respect to Thailand, so we turn up earlier to everything we plan. It will still take another day of two of silly ignorance. In the meantime, the landscape is idyllic. Soft green hills, water buffalos, horse drawn carriages, villages with golden stupas basking in the sunset. The countryside looks prosperous, busy, full of life and schools and colourful dresses with turban-towelled heads. Nyaungshwe, the village on the edge of Inlay from which we are going to base all our excursions is a pleasant market town, on the edge of a canal. A canal that leads to floating markets, houses on stilts built on the lake, canoes and fishermen balancing on them on one leg, paddling with the other with their hands free to untangle nets and harvest weeds from the water. The lake is huge and surrounded by green mountains with gleaming golden pagodas and temples on their edges. Tomatoes are the dominating feature of the canoes heading for the floating market today. Basket loads of them that follow the five day lunar cycle of the most important market of the week. They grow on floating land, claimed from the lake and artificially maintained by bamboo sticks. Along the shore, busy and industrious people fashion silver into jewellery, lotus fibres into clothes, tobacco leaves into cigars, wood into canoes and pulp into notebooks and umbrellas. It is an ancient people, the Intha tribe, that has made this lake its own. Children live above water with an absence of conventional protective measures that would make a Greek mother drop dead on the spot. They play on the canoes and use them like toy cars. The weather is pleasant, cool. It’s neither the heaving heat nor the pouring monsoon of Yangon. Misty. Thin but protective clouds envelop the green mountains and at Indein, the forest of ancient stupas or pagodas that house Buddhist relics it is quiet but majestic. The site offers a full view of the lake like an ancient balcony. If I had to chose the colours of Myanmar would be green, blue and gold. Green like the ever-present nature, blue like the sky and golden like its temples that become one with nature. Temples covered in little shards of mirror that take all the colours of the sky.