Inle Lake

After Kawlaw we headed on to Inle Lake, one of the most famous places in Burma. It's a beautiful shallow lake surrounded by mountains with it's edges full of floating villages and gardens anchored to the bottom with water hyacinth. There are revolving markets which move from village to village each day and are full of tribal people. There were everything from barbers and blacksmiths, card readers and herb sellers who moved from place to place each day with a new market.
The floating villages of the lake were also home to many craft workshops. We saw some of of the finest silk ikat weaving there that we had ever seen. There is also a type of weaving done from a plant that is harvested in the lake. The resulting fabric is soft and natural looking but very very expensive, even more than the silk. There were also silversmiths and blacksmiths in various villages.
The Inthe people of Inle are the only people in the world to row with their leg. They perch at the end of their wooden boats on one leg while wrapping their
other leg around the oar. They are so perfectly balanced that they can use both hands to throw their nets into the lake or beat the water to disturb the fish hiding in the water plants just below the surface.
We spent a day on the lake with a friend in our own longtail boat that ferried us from place to place. It was an enchanting experience, sometimes like Apocolypse Now, when we floated down 'streets' through the wetlands and lake edge.
We stayed in a town at the top of the lake and rode bikes around the countryside. The sugarcane was being harvested and cane sugar was in the making. We stopped by quite a few of the sugar operations and it seemed to be a labour intensive and brutal way to make a living for the people involved. I couldn't help but think of the film I saw years ago called 'Big Sugar' about the Haitian cane workers in the Dominican Republic and the subsidizing of ' Big Sugar' by American tax dollars.