7/13 Inle Lake Trek Day 1

7/13/2013: At my hotel I arranged for a two day, one night trek from Kalaw to Inle Lake. Inle Lake is a popular tourist destination between Yangon and Mandalay and a little to the east. It is higher in elevation, so nice and cool, and is home to many different hill-tribes. Two days of hiking is not enough to get from Kalaw to Inle Lake, so I was driven part-way and met up with a trekking group that had left Kalaw the day before and were just starting their second day. This was nice because it made my trip cheaper and I also had some companions that spoke English instead of just the local guide.

There were two incredibly tall Dutch guys named Steph and Vitse and an English couple - Vic and Matt. Steph and Vitse were really getting stared at a lot - Steph was probably 6'5, and Vitse around 6'8. I'd guess that Myanmar is one of the shorter countries in the world. Everyone was very friendly and had really enjoyed their first day on the trail. Our guide was Uzaw, a 60 year old Burmese guy from Kalaw that has been guiding for fifteen years.

The hike wasn't really in the wilderness, but more through farmland and villages throughout the rolling hills outside of Inle Lake. The scenery was beautiful, and it felt like another world seeing how the local people lived. Uzaw was pointing out all the different crops and explaining how people make cement, etc. Whenever we got to a village, he would explain what hill-tribe it was and some of their customs. Children would come running, knowing that Uzaw gives them candy, and then some would get scared and run away when they saw us. These villages all had their own local language and customs, and in some of them, marrying outside of the tribe meant being ostracized from the village. All of the people were very smiley and friendly, although there was no way of communicating with them. People still typically wore "longyis," but the women typically wore some colorful scarves around their heads. Most people were out in the surrounding fields working on their crops. 

A hill-tribe village

We stopped for lunch in one village and were seated on the floor in a room upstairs. We had the same cook for each meal. He would cook for us in whatever house Uzaw picked in the village, then clean up and drive ahead on his motorbike to the next village and get the next meal ready. We joked about the term "trekking," which no one uses in regular conversation at home. I thought it sounded a bit more grandiose than what we were actually doing, and we debated about how to classify hikes, treks, and expeditions. For the rest of the trip, we were on any one of those three types of trips, depending on the current conditions (i.e. drinking a warm beer bumped the trip up to an expedition). A little girl, around maybe 10 years old, was hanging out in our lunch room with us and made a "paper flower" for Vic, and was practicing other origami (like "fortune tellers"). I only know how to make a cup in origami, so I made her a cup with some scrap paper I had, but she didn't seem very impressed.

The hike continued through the afternoon, passing over ridges, then dropping back into farmed valleys, crossing paths with local people along the way and smiling and waving. We eventually reached the only gap in a steep ridgeline where a bigger village had formed, and Uzaw told us we'd be sleeping there that night. 

Our sleeping arrangement for the night

Complete with electricity

We got settled into our sleeping area - an upstairs room in a wooden house, sleeping on straw mats on the floor. The little kids from downstairs were curiously watching us and eventually ended up playing with all of our electronics. Dinner was delicious, and then we headed down to the main road where there was a little shop with tables and chairs and we drank some beers before calling it a night.

Photo album: https://picasaweb.google.com/108933817613007660268/20130713InleLakeTrekDay1?authuser=0&feat=directlink