Around Inle Lake

Inle Lake introduces the first recurring sound of Burma – the phut, phut, phut of the diesel engine.  In the coming days this will become ubiquitous – used to power long boats on the lakes and rivers and the tractor like vehicles used for transporting both people and goods

Our hotel, Viewpoint, is just off main lake with picturesque cabins over the water.  It’s a great location, the rooms are lovely – more like suites with sitting area separated from bedroom - and we enjoy beautifully presented breakfasts. In fact, most of our hotels are excellent – I get the feeling that tourists have been coming here for a while, despite a widespread boycott before 2010.

We are travelling in the first half of the dry season, which is the coolest part of the year so I’d been prepared for cool mornings and evenings in this area – but not for the degree of outdoor living in Burma.  Our cabins are made of brick, but many of the traditional houses and restaurants are wooden structures with bamboo walls.   It may be picturesque, but with no doors or windows to shut out the evening’s chill, our first night is spent eating a delicious dinner at a local restaurant wearing layers of t-shirts and fleeces topped with our cycling jackets – an experience that’s repeated for several days.

Our first day’s cycling is a gentle tour of villages on the eastern side of the lake, taking in one of Burma’s latest agri-ventures - a vineyard and winery established less than 10 years ago, but already producing several hundred thousand bottles a year.  We are treated to a tasting at 9am! Perhaps it’s the early hour, but even with the help of its French vintner, the Red Mountain label is unlikely to challenge the world’s more established wine regions just yet.  The wine making kit is impressive though, and hopefully this and another winery venture nearby, headed this time by an Austrian vintner, will prove successful in the long run.

 

Our short cycle tour ends at jetty on the lake where we transfer to a more leisurely form of transport – our very own long boat.  This gives us a close up view of the communities living around and on the lake – there are stilted houses and floating market gardens with networks of waterways between, as well as schools, monasteries, pagodas, restaurants, hotels and skilful craft industries including a fascinating lotus and silk weaving centre. It takes thousands of lotus stems, harvested from the lake itself to make a small piece of cloth.  Fine strands are pulled from inside the stem of the lotus, twisted together, roughly spun and dried before the fine spinning and eventual weaving begins.  

The most famous image of the lake is the leg fishermen – so called because they row their skiffs with one leg wrapped around the oar, leaving their hands free to manage their nets.  It’s an extraordinary sight – the wooden oar almost becomes part of the fisherman’s body – and must require extraordinary strength and balance to achieve.

Another stop, at the jumping cat monastery, lacks one thing –the jumping cats – apparently they all died last year during bad weather – but the place is full of kittens who, we are told, it will take 3 years to train to jump through hoops.  I’m not sure if the training process is meant to teach the monks the virtues of patience, or if these elusive cats are just a myth.