Inle Lake - Notes from Dad

My parents are having a good time together, and this time, my dad wrote. They went away for the weekend to another place called Inle Lake, and as you can tell from this description, it sounds like an unusual place to visit, and live.

This weekend we went to Inle Lake. Our luck was very good, and it did not rain – unusual for the monsoon season. Inle is a very strange place. The physical setting resembles Lake Tahoe in some ways – a big lake about 20 miles long bordered on two sides with mountains. The mountains were brilliantly green, interspersed with the darker green of pine trees near the top.

The lake itself is very shallow, maybe 20 feet at most, with large parts of it covered by water hyacinths and other tall grasses. Around all the edges are swamps with thousand of canals and creeks running into the main body of water. The villages all around the lake are built on stilts and everyone goes around on boats – it’s impossible to walk: not enough dry ground. They even raise pigs in little cages on stilts. Most remarkable are the floating gardens. The farmers raise vegetables – mostly tomatoes – floating gardens. There is not enough soil for them to walk on the planted areas, so they plant and harvest the crops from small canoes that ply up and down the canals. Two rows of tomatoes, about four feet wide, are separated from the next two rows by a four-foot-wide canal. They harvest lakeweed from the floor of the main lake and then use it in the gardens as fertilizer. Each fisherman in the area is responsible to the government for removing one basket of water hyacinth a day from the lake to keep it from being overrun like Caddo Lake. (neighborsgrrl's note: caddo lake is the only non-man-made lake in Texas, there was a recent article on the front page of the NY Times. It's a spooky place, with cypress trees and moss hanging down, and alligators in the water)

Our hotel was also quite beautiful, though it didn’t have airconditioning or a pool or tv. The airconditioning wasn’t necessary since Inle is 3000 feet above sea-level and therefore fairly cool. The grounds of the hotel were beautifully landscaped with two large lotus ponds and lots of other flowers. Our cabin was right on the water with big picture windows looking out over one of the inlets. We were surrounded by water and tall grasses and rice paddy fields on the other side, with tall mountains behind that.

The second day we traveled up a small, placid river about six miles to the town of Indain. Indain is the site of a famous Shan temple with a group of ruined Indian-style temples built in the 16-17th centuries. The Shan don’t believe in restoring temples. They just build new ones in new places. So these old ruins were being taken over by the jungle with Banyan trees and other plants growing right down through the ancient carvings.

The only negative part about the trip was the flight back. These planes spend ever day flying between Rangoon, Bagan, Mandalay and Inle. At each place they stop for about 25 minutes, and each time they turn off the airconditioning, which means it gets extremely hot in the plane. The poor stewards and stewardesses were just wiping the sweat off their brows. Despite this, however, the trip was a great success.