Around the Inle lake during the Water festival
MYANMAR | Saturday, 16 April 2011 | Views [735]
Got enough laying in the bed just after sunrise. It wasn´t like I was sleeping or something with all the stuff going on. By now the 600+ herons outside our bungalow started to yell aswell so I checked some photo opportunities. Some local fishermen are trying to catch the "fish of the day" just 40 meters outside our bungalow. This gives me a change to study their leg rowing technique. Presumably it´s developed so that you can use both hands while fishing and to have a better visibility while rowing through high reeds. Whatever the reason, it looks very unusual. It also seems quite tiresome since they only do it for very short periods if time. Looks definitely cool.
Our boat is suppose to arrive soon after breakfast. The local guide will show us all the main attractions of the lake. We have booked the guide from 8>17. Mental note - remember the sun block!
The boat was very large. We were sitting in wooden garden chairs on the wests. Plenty of room for two tourists. Very luxiourious except for the loud engine. The guide/captain/steerman showed us floating gardens. Amazing how they chop of a part of the floating land with big poles then tow it to a place where hey want to start a garden. What we saw was T O M A T O E S! Basically, they grow tomatoes like a MF! Small tomatoes for export to Yangon. After the gardens we saw the village on stilts, aka floating village. That was a real surprise. I was expecting shacks and small bamboo tents on stilts. In stead we saw a whole smaller city/large village with huge houses and a compete infrastructure adapted to life on water. People even kept pigs in bamboo cages above the water level. The “streets” are not deep now, during the dry season so the water is maybe waist deep in the deepest part. We cruised around in the Venice of the East Asia and saw the mandatory lotus flower silk factory/weaving factory. That was quite unusual. We´ve seen a plenty of silk factories in Asia but the silk produced from the lotus flower thread was very different. The technique is similar to producing silk from the insects but here the silk comes from the lotus steam and is much thicker. AND much more expensive! The fabric feels like linen and for a scarf they wanted 80USD. OK, ripoff or not that was a HIGH starting prise. Especially since hey didn´t accept credit cards. The rule: “the cash you bring is the cash you can spend” eliminates any big shopping since well...you never know what will happened during the remaining half of the trip. They did sell some ordinary silk for "normal" price. After the lotus silk factory we went for a small cruise around the village and ended up in a cheroot(?) cigar factory. Those huge thick joints smoked by older women, that´s the stuff. Nowadays a more normal size is used. A very happy and skilled lady showed us how she makes around 500 cigars a day. The best cigar makers in the village make around 800! The thick ones, she said, for old ladies, no popular anymore! After the cigars factory the captain took us to another village, don´t really understood the name since we were half deaf because of the small engine noise. This village took the water festival celebrations to a new level.Our guide handed us some umbrellas but it was just impossible to protect ourselves. We arrived to the first water station. EPIC! They lowered a fire fighting pump into the channel and hosed down ever boat that passed from both sides with several hundred liters of water. And that was just the first station! We stopped at the silver smith and bought something that we thought we could afford even if our budget would suffer. (During the last days we met a couple that needed to visit a local doctor. No more cash, no ATMs but a huge bill for the doctor! To keep the budget in Myanmar is a nightmare!). Anyway, after the silver smith, we visited the paper umbrella factory. Reeeeaaaaly cool stuff to see how they made the paper and then constructed the umbrellas. There were a couple of “longnecks” at the factory too. And yes, I took the picture of the poor older lady and her teenage girl but it just felt awkward. Sure, they do this for a living, posing for pictures but it felt like we were using them. Lunch at the channel excellent food. Special dish: fish/frogs 5000 and grilled fish 4000. I order a strange dish where I got a grilled fish but the inside was like a paste. They gutted the fish, stripped it of all content leaving the skin and refilled it with something, frogs for sure. It tasted really nice. The place was a perfect lookout point. We sat on the balcony, overlooking the the silver smith and just above a water station where all the tourists were drowned by tons of water by both kids and adults. The water in the main channel was hardly waist deep so the locals just crossed the streets at will, no bridges needed during the dry season.
A long boat ride later we came high up to the mountains. Some of the passages, were small dams were build to divert water onto the fields, were a bit stressful at first. It felt like the huge boat was on a collision course with the dam. The driver gave it full throttle to jump to the next level and up we went. You get used to it. Skilled boats-man for sure. Seeing water buffaloes just a meter from the boat swimming in the river was a bit fun for a while. So, SHWE INN TAIN! A very strange mix between the Angor Wat and the Bagan temples, kind off. Both the pagodas and the people here were more...”wild” or maybe “less civilised”? No, not that. They kept their old culture more pure from western influence! Really beautiful place. Worth the long boat ride and the long walk to the top. We went up the stairs and saw the main pagoda at the top. Some of the stupas were repaired. The sound of the stupas crows in the wind and the strange flora around this place was really special. We walked don on the right side of the staircase and aw some older pagoda ruined and overgrown. Indiana Jones country for sure. I wish we could say there longer. Nice! Back down I had a nice talk with a cool monk. He was the teacher at the local monastery/school. We talked about muay thai and football (yeah, I know, lame. Football is gay.) He liked my clothes because his were very thick and hot. Unfortunately for him, the orange robe are the monks mandatory fashion. No GoreTex for you my friend.
Next stop, the main pagoda on the lake. An army of hawkers approach us as soon as we left the boat selling anything that a pilgrim would need. It was after, a huge holiday and many took a journey to a pagoda since they had the time anyway. The three Buddha status were just covered in gold donated by the pilgrims. Leaf by leaf the covered the status and only three lumps of gold was visible. No women were allowed to touch the status so the guys pasted leaf after leaf on the lumps of gold. I didn´t even think there was status under the gold. I red about it later.
Off we went to the final destination, the Jumping Cat Monastery. The monastery was large, kind of nice but the most interesting thing was not the bloody cats that didn´t jump but the many pilgrims living there for the holidays. Really cool to see how hey lived in the monastery at the assigned pilgrim places. The cats however sucked!
We met some fellow travellers from C&C Travel at the hotel, again. We paid 9000 for 3 Mandalay beers. Well, a man has got to eat. We packed our luggage for the early departure the next day and ate sweet sour fish & chicken cashew. Price: 15000+7000 icluding 2 cokes and one beer. Way too much! But the portions were big!
The monk from across the lake started to send out his message again. Fakk!! Our hill monk however was silent. We do have a celebration of the last day of the festival across the lake on some of the islands. Like a discoteque, sending it´s cacophony across the water.
Early bedtime, our boat to the airport leaves the hotel at 06:00. Not a Christian time but what can you do?
Oh GREAT! Our monk woke up! Now we can liste to a buddist monk chant some holy scripts mixed with Lady Gaga in burmese the whole night.....focking great!
Tags: jumping cats pagoda, longnecks, shwe inn tain
