Inle Lake and the End of Myanmar

We landed in Heho, the Inle Lake airport, and found ourselves both cold and wet. It may be the dry season, but the lake region was getting soaked by full-on rain on our arrival. For our first day or two there, because of the rain, we were stuck in the hotel and read/napped. Fortunately, our hotel was small and the hotel staff was extremely attentive while we lazed around, offering us juices and teas regularly – they even gave us a full plate of fruit, including a whole papaya!

When the rain finally let up, we quickly discovered that there was not much to do in the town and took a cab to the winery on the outskirts. The winery was an open house looking over a vineyard by a lake; it felt almost like we were in Napa Valley or the south of France! And yes, Myanmar has wineries – though the grapes are young and the wine is not fully developed – and we were given a tasting menu each as we lunched at their open restaurant.

While we enjoyed our wine, we came to talking to another pair of lovely ladies. They happened to also be from NYC; being homesick, I relished the conversation around US politics and NYC haunts for a few hours.

I was wrong about my initial analysis of Burmese food. Marion and I found a restaurant that served Shan-style food (an eastern state and tribe in Myanmar), and I was blown away by how tasty the food was! We went back every day in Inle Lake to have fried yellow tofu (from the same vendor), and at least once a day I savored Shan-style sticky noodle soup (spicy and peanuty goodness!) that every restaurant offered.

In Inle Lake because we repeatedly saw people using the extremely polluted waterways for domestic purposes. The water was a hazy, opaque green, yet people would squat on piers and clean. This cleaning included laundry, teeth, and general bathing. Marion was disgusted and confused as to why people used the water when it was so clearly unacceptably gross; I tried to explain how sometimes they do not have another choice, either because they cannot access clean water at home yet, or cannot afford it. It is clear, though, that Myanmar has miles to go in terms of giving people access to clean water supplies for daily domestic purposes (one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals).

One day, we climbed into a longboat and sat on two precariously-stationed chairs in the middle while a boatman drove us around the Inle Lake. We started in the murky canal waters and made our way to the vast main lake area, where fishermen fished everywhere. The water seemed surprisingly shallow and full of high water weeds (so sometimes I was concerned the boat would bottom out). The mountains surrounding the lake rolled breathtakingly for 360 degrees.

The boat driver was a funny guy, but he had a strict schedule for us – mostly including cottage industry shops set up in the floating villages. As foreign tourists, I feel it is seen as our duty to buy as many souvenirs as possible to stimulate local economies, and we were shuttled through shops that carried handmade silver, silk weavings, wood carvings, rolled cigars….you get the picture, we saw a lot of different shops. In some places, we happily obliged buying a couple unique crafts, but in many, we politely walked through the shops and rushed back to the boat. One of the shops included some long-neck (Karen tribe) women weaving, their necks elongated by heavy metal coils and swaying with the rhythm of the looms. It felt awkward for us to watch them weave, partly impressed by their hand skills and partly in awe by their necks – I did not feel comfortable taking pictures as they scowled at us.

Cruising through the floating villages was a strange thing; it felt often like we were driving down the roads of a normal village, only the roads were made of water and our car was actually a boat. There were electricity poles and wires dangling above the streets, like any other place, except if you ran into these poles you might get electrocuted more severely. We also got off of the boats and walked through towns on more solid ground, where many of the temples were guarded by lines of souvenir stands manned by the locals. There were other temples that were accessible only by unstable, wobbly bridges over which we had to walk.

We also went to a village off of the lake some ways, called In Dain. There, we hiked a little bit to the top of a hill for a view of the lake. In the village, we also went to a pagoda. Most pagodas we visited in Myanmar had a long parade of souvenir shops you had to walk by to get to the center, as I’ve mentioned briefly, but this pagoda had nearly a kilometer of shops. The center had a forest of stupas of different styles/ages/sizes we walked through before reaching the Buddha. The place was lovely, and walking on the ground for an hour or so was a nice change from the rocking of the boat.

We ended the day watching the sunset in the middle of the lake. Some costumed fishermen (or were they just businessmen, we are unsure) posed for the tourist boats in the traditional way the lake’s fishermen balance – with one foot pushing an oar into the water and the opposite hand managing the fishing cage. It may have been contrived, but the effect on the water with the sunset in the back was beautiful, as they teetered on the edge of their boats in the golden light.

Our last night at Inle Lake included a movie at the local French café. The visuals in the movie were great, but the plot was a bit confusing and too much like a soap opera. The movie was about a monk who worked in a hospital and fell in love/knocked up a patient dying of cancer. The lady died in childbirth, and her brother brought the baby to the monastery, telling the monk secretly that he was the baby daddy. No one else knew the secret, though, and when the monk was in a coma from a fever, the child ended up getting adopted by a loving family with a crippled son, leaving the monk alone and heartbroken. What a show! And what a way to remember the Shan state.

We flew out to Yangon as our last stop before Cambodia. Yangon is the antithesis of what we experienced in the other areas of Myanmar – it is flashy, congested with cars and people in more Western clothing, and cramped with stores of all calibers and restaurants of all types. We found out there was even a Yves Roche store somewhere in town! And people were selling everything you could think of on the streets, including remote controls in piles. We visited the Shwedagon Temple (a headliner pagoda for Buddhism), which was massive and golden, but we had seen so many temples by then on our adventures that we were not as excited as we could have been. Otherwise, we spent a lot of our time picking up last-minute souvenirs and eating Shan noodles before we left for other countries.

A Birthday in Bagan

French Marion suggested that we stop in Bagan for my 30^th birthday and I was more than thrilled. Bagan is an area famous for its stunning temple-blanketed plains. It has been a dream of mine to visit the area for about a decade after I came across a picture of the temples while fantasizing about exotic future adventures.

We took a boat ride southwest to Bagan from Mandalay early in the morning. I thought it was going to be a four-hour ride, and was startled when ten hours later we finally pulled up to the port. We got off of the boat with a simple two-logged plank to a shore full of eager taxi drivers.

After much haggling, we got ourselves into a cab and drove to our hotel in New Bagan (as an FYI, New Bagan is the new settlement for the people who formerly lived in Old Bagan, where the main temples are, and were booted out by the government for preservation purposes). On our way to the hotel, we were already impressed with the spiky horizon riddled with stupas….and we weren’t even going through the Old Bagan area.

Bagan definitely lived up to what I had hoped for; for a few days, Marion and I were awe-inspired as we wandered, gazing at hundreds (thousands?) of beautifully old temples. The golden sandy ground complemented the majestic sights only more.

I was surprised that we seemed to be permitted to climb up and sit on top of most temples we visited. Throughout our visit, we would enter barefoot through the dusty archways of each temple and be greeted by a temple keeper who invited us up a small hidden staircase up to the top of the structure. I am not exactly sure how (or why) we are allowed to use the temples as our own personal jungle gyms when they have claimed efforts towards preservation. In any case, it gave us some impressive views.

People and guidebooks warned about hoards of tourists showing up in Bagan, but usually, it felt like we were the only people in the area, save a handful of other francophones roaming a ruin here or there. Only one night did we end up with all of the other tourists, and that was during a full moon sunset on top of a temple with the most photogenic skyline imaginable. We had arrived at the temple and saw the top edge of the temple completely lined with tripods. It was the only time there I genuinely felt claustrophobic and anxious about being on a roof with too many people.

In New Bagan, there was not much more to report other than we slept and had a few meals there. It was a dusty town geared towards tourists in some places and recent resettlement in others. We ate passable French food. It was hard to get around the area at night because street lights have not really been introduced yet, so our dinner adventures included stumbling in the dusty darkness with a flashlight towards better-lit restaurants.

My birthday included walking through (and climbing) an uncountable amount of temples as we explored the Old Bagan area. In the evening, we socialized with a young Burmese man who was extremely dedicated to selling us paintings. We had a deal – he had to show us his favorite sunset spot in the area in exchange for a few art sales to us. The area has more art peddlers than tourists by a lot (everyone you meet wants to sell you something in this country), but we agreed and were pleasantly surprised to find the guy’s sunset spot was a genuinely great experience. He also answered some of my questions about the country five years ago, before the borders were opened; he asked us some very amusing questions about the romantic lives of westerners.

We ended my birthday with a traditional marionette puppet show at our hotel, and I drank far too many Shirley Temples and felt a sugar high for hours. The puppet show was fun – the puppeteers manipulated a slew of strings and made the puppets seem alive and dancing, even if we don’t actually know what the storyline was about. After the show, they allowed us to try out the puppets for ourselves, where we discovered that we would never get far in the world of puppetry.

The next day we rented a moped so we could speed around the temples faster and get to a nearby temple for sunrise early without hassle (there are not a lot of cabs there). In the dark, we fumbled through the old staircases of a quiet temple off the road and found ourselves sharing the sunrise with a handful of other people on the top of the tower. The sunrise was nice, as the morning mist laced through the temples below. What really made the experience memorable, though, was when 21 hot air balloons slowly rose into the air in the distance and made their way through the temple plains towards us. They bobbed up and down until they glided over our heads and our temple’s top, making their way to a plain further south. I cannot full express how lovely the experience was.

The rest of the day included endless more temples; a lot of the temples we saw were interesting outside, but inside had magnificent and intricate thousand-year-old paintings scattered on the walls and ceilings. I think I will not need to see a temple for a long time after this trip because we saw so many awesome ancient temples. We also discovered that mopeds in the sandy terrain are horrible; we continuously (and infuriatingly) got stuck or lost control in a pit of sand, and would have to slowly make our way to a more stable road.

I took our last day in Bagan to rest, feeling a bit templed-out and needing to work some on my research. Then, we hopped into a little plane and made our way to the big tourist area called Inle Lake.

Mandalay

French Marion joined up with me in Bangkok and we made our way to a great adventure through the magical and not-so-well-traveled country of Myanmar. We are still in the middle of our journey, but we have had so many adventures I should start telling them now.

We started our trip in the old town of Mandalay. The city is not terribly noteworthy, as it was razed by the Japanese in World War Two and simply rebuilt on top of the ashes of the ancient town that once was. Even so, it was a good place for us to get adjusted to the country a bit before setting on towards other locations.

We both noticed a few things about Myanmar so far that I think are worth sharing:

• People wear yellow makeup: It’s an age-old tradition in Burmese culture to smear a yellow paste on the face for improving the complexion and keeping it healthy (and, I suspect, hidden from the sun); most people we have seen have large yellow patches on their cheeks, noses, and foreheads. Neither of us knew this until we got here, and it was a surprise to see so many yellowed cheeks. We had to look it up to see why the women – and some men – were colored in that way, and even got to try it on ourselves and see if it works on our faces as well.
• Not many tourists yet: Myanmar opened its borders to tourists in 2011 after a couple decades of closed rule. While there are definitely tourists here, it was surprising just how few in numbers we are here. It has been really nice in a lot of ways to go through beautiful areas in the country without feeling suffocated by tourist groups and piles of stupid tourists (oh come on, you know there are always that pile of disrespectful tourists anywhere). As a result, we are considered novel to locals. We are stared at everywhere and people excitedly shout out “HellohowareyouIamfine!” to us when they drive past. Those with smartphones whip them out and take pictures with us to place on their mantels at home. I stopped counting how many people touch and squeeze our arms when they walk by us. We are very much celebrities in Myanmar.The other nice thing about not having a lot of tourists is that the culture has not yet been altered with westernization. The yellow makeup is one example; the fact that everyone (including men) wears long sarongs is another. One person nicely explained to us that the Burmese embrace the opened borders because they are getting more money and business, and we saw many newly-built English schools in Mandalay where people were diligently talking in English, improving their language skills. It has been fascinating to explore.
• But monks everywhere: Not surprisingly, as we are in a Buddhist country, there are Buddhist monks (and nuns) everywhere. So there is that. 
• The food may not be for us: The traditional food in Myanmar we have had so far has left us not so interested in eating traditionally while here. The food is mostly acidic or incredibly sour, like there is a lot of vinegar in the meals. While they are interesting tastes, we have yet found something we have wanted to order more than once. I ordered a chicken curry, for example, that seemed nothing like curry except for the fact that I got rice with it, and I got some chicken meat. Instead, it was eight plates of other things that were not chicken or what I know to be curry, and all had me wondering what it was exactly I was putting in my mouth.
• What’s your nation?: When we are walking around those who interact with us (eg, just by saying hi or trying to sell us stuff) asks us for our nations. Whenever I respond with, “the US”, they smile and excitedly say, “Oh! Obama! Good good!” Some will remind me that Obama visited Myanmar, as well, and make sure I like Obama as they do. Thanks Obama, for making people like me more in this country. When Marion says, “France”, in response, they always quickly retort with a, “BonJOUR!” 
• No one walks much: This one has been a bit of a bother for us – people do not walk around outside much. Marion and I like to walk to explore new areas and better understand our surroundings, but it seems to have made people very concerned about our wellbeing. Scores of people drive by us on their cars and motorbikes asking us if we’re alright and why we are not in a car. Many have offered to drive us somewhere else. We insist that, really, we are alright and just like walking. As a response to our insistence, they often decide that we are actually just exercising, and they not approvingly and drive off…only to soon after have another concerned driver asking if we are okay. Sure enough, we have not viewed many Burmese walking streets anywhere in our travels, and are often alone on the dirt paths that resemble vaguely a sidewalk.

Mandalay is not such a hopping city for visiting and we were not overwhelmed before we continued into the country. That said, we did a number of interesting things, including visiting a lot of pagodas and temple areas that cover the country and town everywhere. That will be the running theme of the trip in Myanmar, we’ve realized.

Our first evening in Mandalay took us confusedly in one temple with oddly-shaped stupas and Buddha displays for several city blocks. It also had (when we were walking through) a movie screening of one of the many older versions of the Monkey King that looked beyond surreal.

One morning we walked to the jade market in Mandalay. Once walking through dirty paths, we found ourselves in a deep set of stalls that held hundreds of huge jade slabs. Jades of all colors – green, white, purple, red – and other valuable stones were being sold there, and a loud workshop where the jade is polished and cut sat inside the open stalls and buzzed as we walked through. I was shocked to realize we were the only tourists in the area shopping for jade. After a haggle with one woman (and us being assisted by two older Burmese men in talking her down in price), we walked out triumphant.

That day we also walked around the large palace grounds in the middle of the city. The palace is surrounded by a square moat and heavy walls. Much to our surprise, the large 4 square kms of grounds within the moat area was mostly guarded territory and forbidden to tourists. The tourist-friendly area where the palace sits - in the middle - was small and intimate. The palace was nice and simple, but it had worn with time and restoration is not so prevalent in the country yet. We walked some more to visit some of the pagodas and payas in the area, including a beautiful shrine with the largest book in the world written on huge marble blocks housed in rows and rows of stupa-like structures.

We finished the day with a car ride to the top of Mandalay Hill to watch the sunset.

There are eccentricities in Myanmar that are hard to explain, but one of them included the 3-story free-standing escalator you have to take to get to the top of the hill’s temple for the sunset viewing. At the bottom of the escalators, you take off your shoes (shoes are not allowed in most places here), and you stand on the tall, winding escalators up the thin towers, and pray. Sure, you could pray because there is a Buddha statue nearby, but we prayed that the frightening escalators would take us up (and later, down) safely.

After a few days of quietly walking through Mandalay, we woke up one morning bright and early to climb onto our leisurely-moving barge that would take us 10 hours down the river to the ancient area of Bagan.