7/14 Inle Lake Trek Day 2

7/14/2013: We were back on the trail fairly early, as the village seems to go to sleep rather early and then wakes up soon after dawn. The night before, the family that owns the house we stayed in slept in the adjacent room to ours, and we had all heard the grandmother talking in her sleep and we all had a good laugh. She didn’t remember a thing.

The hike took us past a big monastery where we could hear little monks reciting Buddhist scripture. We had one more big ridgeline to cross before starting the descent towards Inle Lake. We met up with a bigger road, one that can support cars, and apparently it had been built for access to a planned power plant and cement factory. We came across a smaller village as we continued to ascend, and they were in the middle of their annual procession up to the top of the mountain to pay respects to their ancestors and make offerings of food. It was a long line of people in colorful clothes, maybe 50 or 75 people in all. Many of the women had big plates of food balanced on their heads, and some of the men were carrying large drums, others with big crates of potatoes or other vegetables. One man offered a potato to Stef as he passed by, and he didn't know what to do with it. We waited for the procession to pass and it felt like two different worlds colliding. Many of the hill-tribes in Myanmar still practice some mixture of animism and Buddhism, where they believe that certain animals are spirits and they worship their ancestors.

We reached the top of the pass at around 4,500 feet, high enough and cool enough for pine trees to grow, then dropped 1,500 feet down to a long inlet on the west side of the lake. The other side of the pass was much drier and hotter, and reminded me more of the New Mexico landscape. We arrived at a little village along a canal that leads into the lake and had some fried noodles and celebrated a successful expedition. We hopped in a long-tail boat and cruised across the lake to Nyaungshwe, on the northern edge of the lake. Along the way we passed people fishing from dug-out canoes, as well as other people practicing the traditional fishing technique that Inle Lake is known for - standing on the back end of the canoe and handling a net while using their leg to operate a wooden paddle. The sun was shining and the surrounding mountains were beautiful. Inle Lake was a nice, clean, cool relief from the rest of Southeast Asia.

Photo album: https://picasaweb.google.com/108933817613007660268/20130714InleLakeTrekDay2?authuser=0&feat=directlink