AN AFTERNOON ON INLE LAKE

IMAGES ADDED THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2012 UPON ARRIVAL BACK IN RANGOON

We began the day backtracking to Heho before heading on over to Inle Lake, our home for the final three days of our Burmese adventure.  On the way, we stopped to wander through a market that sets up someplace new on a rotating basis once every five days.  Since tomorrow is a major holiday, the market was particularly busy as folks stocked up for the occasion.

We made a second stop to visit briefly with a couple of Gurkha families whose ancestors from Nepal had originally served the British as crack soldiers during the era of the British Raj and who had stayed on it Burma thereafter as accepted and respected members of local communities.

Our third (very brief) stop provided the chance to photograph a beautifully preserved monastery built for a local king's favorite Buddhist monk in the late nineteenth century.

Reaching Inle Lake around noon also provided the perfect opportunity for a genuine Italian pizza lunch -- the young restaurant owner had learned his craft directly from an Italian woman and prided himself on the quality of the imported European ingredients he combined with local resources to serve up his very tasty Italian dishes.

The group then divided into three and piled into longboats for our first venture out into the vastness of Inle Lake.  The rest of the afternoon was spent roaming through lakeside monasteries, craft workshops and villages of houses built up over the lake on stilts.  Many also farm "floating gardens" set out in neat rows separated by narrow canals. Turns out these lakeside farms produce forty-five percent of all the tomatos consumed in Burma!

We had the opportunity as well to meet and talk with four Padaung women, better known outside Burma as "long necked women" for the brass rings worn around their necks.  Nominally these rings represent wealth, but also symbolically they recall the attributes of the Chinese dragon -- and may have been seen as a means of protection from sexual harassment (since the effect hardly enhanced the women's feminine charms).  Fortunately (from an American cultural perspective, at least) the custom seems to be dying out: only about twenty percent of young Padung girls elect to wear they rings with the other 80% prefering modern Korean cosmetics instead.

 Towards evening we slipped along a very narrow canal to reach the Pristine Lotus Spa Resort at the far north end of the lake.  It proved to be the most luxurious of all the hotels on our itinerary, an apt conclusion to our journey across Burma.  Best of all, we're here for three nights!