The Way of the Buddha

Of all the places we've traveled we've never experienced Buddhism like we have in Burma. Monks and nuns are everywhere and there are more monasteries and pakodas then anywhere on earth I'm sure. The absolute splendor of some of them surpassed anything we'd seen and the serene simplicity of others was breathtaking. While we were there the school holidays were coming and many people were preparing to send their children to the monasteries for a few months. The numbers really grow during this time. The nuns wear an orange underskirt with a pink overdress. Both monks and nuns have matching umbrellas to protect them from the sun. I don't know if it's just in the Inle Lake area or the whole country but I was told that the nuns can only be given alms twice a week so they must collect enough food to sustain them at those times. I think I saw novices both male and female around 5 years old. Many of the monks we met who were between 20 and 30 years old had already been in the monasteries for many years and wanted to maintain that life.
One day we rode by a monastery that was described as the most photographed monastery in Burma.It's a bit disturbing because tourists are distracting the monks. I even saw a woman taking pictures of the monks bathing behind the building. The boy monks who were at the windows seemed to be confused about the attention and you've never seen so many giant cameras in one place in your life.
In Thailand, Laos and Cambodia when you visit a temple you must take off your shoes before entering but in Burma you must take off your shoes before entering the grounds which made for a lot of walking in bare feet on concrete, marble or tile. It was hard on the feet and could be really dirty with pigeon poop and other unidentified stuff. We walked up and down hundreds of steps in our bare feet and sometimes had a hard time keeping track of our shoes!
Another thing that was different was the way monks behaved. In Burma it's possible for a woman to speak to a monk and you can look directly at them and they at you.
We went to one teak monastery that was the oldest in Burma and there were only two monks there in a giant space. One was elderly and one young. The elder greeted anyone who entered and offered a seat and fruit to eat. He was very very interested in where we were from and our lives at home. We visited him again another day and took out computer to show him. He examined every inch of it while asking endless questions about it. I would have loved to give him one. His is the first picture.We had the experience over and over of talking to people and when we asked if we could take their pictures they became really solomn. He was so warm and his face radiated kindness but he looked very serious in the pictures.
These are some of the images of that life we took around Inle Lake.

Handrolled Cheroots and Tea

While we were staying in the town at the end of Inle Lake we roamed the countryside on bicycles exploring every nook and cranny. One day we rolled through a little village and were beckoned up onto the verandah of a beautiful old teak house where two women were rolling cheroots at a low table.
I was happy to find them because I read a lot of books about Burma, both fiction and non fiction, and in nearly all of them cheroots were mentioned. I read Burmese Days by George Orwell, Amy Tan's Saving Fish From Drowning, The Glass Palace and a few others.
They served us tea and wonderful rice crackers and even gave us a try at rolling. They had the most primitive and effective handmade tools that made it look much easier than it really was. The younger was the neice of the older and they lived together in the house. We visited for nearly and hour, talking amid the bustle of rolling. They were so friendly and eventually asked about my sunburned face offering to put some of the ground bark on me.
The bark was ground on whet and applied in quite a liquid state. When it dries it's really cooling and protects the skin from sun. I didn't look nearly as lovely and exotic as the women of Burma with their brown skin providing more contrast.
Philip bought some of the cheroots and for weeks afterwards we gave them as gifts to folks who considered them a real treat and normally couldn't afford them!

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.

Aung San Rally

These are the pictures of us taken in Mandalay at the political rally for Aung San's party. She's called 'the Lady' by Burmese people. We had only been in the country a few days and had visions of being kicked out as there were tv cameras there filming it all and we were the only foreigners there.
It was explained to us many times over the course of our travels in the country that the votes for her party come from urban areas because the rural people don't understand voting and are manipulated and intimidated by the ruling party. There has been a lot of interesting media coverage in the rest of Asia about what's going on in the country and what it may mean.
I even saw a t-shirt in Yangon with Aung San and Hilary Clinton together on it. I wasn't a big fan of her going there because I was worried that she would push too hard and the door might slam shut again on the country and leave Burmese worse off than ever but when I asked people I met how they felt about it they all felt more optimistic about the future because of her visit.