The Road to Mandalay Part 2

:: Locals at Indein Market ::

A long (19 Hours) overnight bus journey covering 660 Km brought us to Lake Inle, a freshwater lake in the mountains of Myanmar's Shan state. The lake shores are home to 70,000 people who live in wood and woven bamboo huts on stilts and live simple lives as farmers and fishermen. The dominant ethnic group in this area is the Intha people who have developed a distinctive one foot rowing style. Standing on the stern of the boat with one leg the men wrap their other leg around the oar and power themselves along using just their leg. The one advantage this weird style gives the men is better visibility over the reeds ahead.

:: Leg rowing ::

We used the village as Nyaungshwe as a base to explore the area. The village is located about 5 miles upstream of the lake. One thing we immediately noticed in the village was that there were crates of tomatoes being loaded up into trucks everywhere. We took a walk around the village and came upon warehouse after warehouse full of people sorting hundreds of thousands of tomatoes into different boxes. A day trip out on the lake revealed the source of the crop. Using seaweed from the lake, farmers have constructed rows and rows of long floating saturated platforms; so-called floating gardens covering kilometres of the lake. According to the season crops such as tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers etc are sown by the farmers who access the floating gardens in little wooden boats. While we were there the local ladies were out in force in their little boats picking the ripe tomatoes as far as the eye could see on the lake there were floating tomato plants laden with fruits...... important learning point .... from what we've seen it's not possible to over water tomatoes!

:: Harvesting on the lake ::

Our day trip swung past the local rotating market in the lakeside village of Indein, where local hill tribe ladies decked out in luminous orange head scarfs sell their wares. Tourism unfortunately has taken a lot of the "local" focus from this market leading to lots of tourist driven trinket stalls. However on saying that there is still plenty of local produce and lots of groups of little old ladies with bright orange scarves on their heads sitting around smoking cigars. A short walk out of Indein brings you to the top of a hill home to hundreds of small stupas.

:: "Jump !" ::

The just for thrills stop of the boat trip was at the "Jumping Cat Monastery"...... bored monks here have taught their cats to jump - well that was the info we'd been given. Arriving to a beautiful old teak monastery on the lake we disembarked and entered to find twenty or so cats sitting around relaxing.. we told them to jump but it didn't work.... I think we just expected them to jump upwards. Later we saw then in action jumping obediently through a hoop for a small treat. Still think jumping upwards would have been cooler.

An obvious left over from the colonial days is the practice of frequenting tea houses. Tea, cakes and savoury snacks are offered either on curbside plastic (kindergarten sized) tables, or in minimalist shops (concrete floor and adult sized plastic tables). Busy from breakfast until dinner time, men, women and families drop in for a hot drop and a nibble. At the other end of the spectrum, beer stations are the Myanmar versions of pubs. Normally all-male, concrete floored and equipped with 1 beer tap (serving whichever brand the beer station is affiliated to) the really interesting thing about them is that most people there are not drinking beer. Spirits in Myanmar are stupidly cheap. $2 AUD (1.2 EUR) will get you a 700ml bottle of decent whisky (even cheaper for Rum or white spirits). For the price of a beer you can get a quarter bottle of spirit so most guys opt for the whisky. They buy a bottle and sit down with water to finish it (half or qtr bottles mostly) or they get a slug put into their mug of draft beer. Apparently these boozers are a fairly new arrival in Myanmar, they seemed to have hit a sweet spot as they were to be found in most of the towns we visited.

From our chats with locals, another interesting point kept coming up. The governments intervention in communications. Personal incoming and outgoing mail is routinely read. There is only one mobile phone company - Government owned, so thats covered (and a SIM costs $2000 USD) and only one ISP, so they watch your internet movements as well. One example given to us was that email sent internally takes between 1 and 2 days to arrive (read make it through the government censors).

I think this photo I took at the Mandalay airport pretty much sums it up.