There must be several hundred bicycles to rent in Nyaungshwe, most of them Chinese cruiser bikes with a tractor saddle and a basket up front.  The going rate is $1.50 a day, and the most recommended tour, besides riding around town, is to go west to the hot springs.  As it was Sunday when we decided to ride, we figured the Hot Springs might be more crowed than usual, if not primarily with foreigners, which we were seeing too many all ready.  We had seen a couple of mountain bikes advertised and happen to run across the back street house on our wandering several days earlier, so we opted for the high priced models at $10 a day.

Our route was to go east around the lake and see how far we got and since it was and all day adventure having gears and an adjustable seat post seems like a priority.  As it was we rode about 70 km down and back on one side of the lake, and after about the first 4 k’s we virtually had the road to ourselves.

Everything to the east of the lake was agricultural and primarily cane in the dry hills and rice and vegetables down in he low lands at lake level.

One thing that we didn’t appreciate in all of Myanmar is the smoke filled air. In Yangon is was very bad and up north with the dry season just starting all the farmers are burning whatever has dried out.

Add to the agricultural waste, the proliferation of wood stoves, sugar cane plants – large and small – the skies continually smoke filled unless there was a strong wind.  Never-the-less it was really interesting to see all the country folk going about tending their fields, hauling cane on ox carts to the processing plants.  We even saw a volley ball net strung above a field of drying cane husks.

The net is barely visible in the photo to the left, and we later learned that one of the national sports is a form of whiffle-ball-type volley ball played with feet, knees and heads called chinlone.  In Thailand they use a hanging basket 6 meters in the air and try and put a tradition soccerball high up into the net like a hack-sack game played with feet, knees and heads.

One of the most remarkable things was seeing a “chip-and-seal” crew enlarging and resurfacing the single paved road.  After digging up the shoulder and place a meter-wide of papaya-sized stones in they come back with a single layer of golfball-sized stones that are laid in place by eight girls with rubber trays of the stones (12 to 15 stones at a time).  Once the smaller stones are in place a steamroller crushes them to the size of pea gravel and then two team of two boys carry hot oil from a roadside trench and ladel over the crushed stones between steamroller trips. The finished product looks very similar to our more high tech less labor intensive methods. When there are no minimum wage levels like Myanmar the day labor rate hovers just above $2 a day and that why all the projects seem to be done by hand.

Quite accidentally we stumbled upon the break-down of the rotating 5-day market that sets up in the five alternating lake-side communities.  An entire market place is transported each day to the various appointed site.  Most items are shuffled from boat to market stall in baskets suspended on bamboo poles. We’re numb when it comes to looking  at market stalls except when it’s fresh foods. It was with particular interest that we got to see them decamping entire market place into a hundred longtail boats.  It puts into perspective how th Swiss lords travelled daily between their castles.  With enough people you can move an enormous amount of goods from cart to castle or in this case boat to market.  I guess the closest thing we have to this phenomena is flea markets or  closer to our life river rafting.

Lunch in one of the remaining open restaurants was surprising in two aspects first they had a bilingual menu (Burmese and English ) with no prices so I suspect price varies on the clientele and second the servings were labourer-sized with soup side dish of fresh tomatoes.  On the way home we stopped for a beverage and were severed complimentary oranges.

We definitely travelled back a ways in time when we got off the beaten path. with ox carts, kids rolling dead motor cycle tires with a stick, and road gangs of young women. We managed the entire day without seeing and foreigners until we got close to town.

We met someone at the airport at Heho (town above the lake) who said Inle Lake was the highlight of his trip to SE Asia.  And incidentally while we were in Inle Lake we met 3 different people who not only knew Durango but one Italian who had owned a restaurant in Aspen, a young traveller who had lived in Telluride, and English ladies who had skied at Purgatory.  Living in Trang, southern Thailand, we really don’t see many Westerners and if we do they are usually just waiting for the next train coming and going from the Andaman coast and the island resorts.  And we understand seeing the throngs of traveling tourists at the Bangkok airports, but we were still further overwhelmed by the number of tourists occupying the village Nyaungshwe at the headwaters of Inle Lake.  We asked a local how many tourists a day come to town and he estimated 100-200, but upon departure we saw no less than 8 airliners on the tarmac, with many more scheduled, so we estimate close to 1,000 or more tourists arriving daily, easily matching the local population.

The military regime of Myanmar opened the gates to tourism and commerce 3 years ago and the country is struggling to keep up with the influx of visitors (can’t imagine what is going to happen to Cuba).  It’s surprising that the country has been able to scale up airlines, hotels and tourist accommodations to this scale.  (Or maybe not surprising, since the airlines and resorts are reportedly owned by the friends of the regime.)  We appreciated the fact that they had basic broadband even though at evenings and mornings the bandwidth was untenable, for example we were never able to book a hotel at Inle Lake because in a half-day of trying the various websites never loaded.

Fortunately the airport taxi driver dropped us off in front of the boat ramp at a new small hotel (13 rooms) with one vacancy.  We soon found that Myanmar was at least two or three times as expensive as Thailand, not just because we were staying in hotels or flying, but almost across the board.  Hard to understand because the day labor wage is $6/day in Myanmar as compared to $10/day in Thailand.

Since we bypassed the Bagan temples, we planned to spend 4 days in Inle Lake.  Our 2 main highlights were an all-day boat ride on the lake and a bicycle ride along the lake.  Without a doubt the Inle Lake boat ride was worth the entire trip into Myanmar.  The narrow 45′ modified long-tail wooden boats powered by one-lung Chinese diesel motors were the primary and ubiquitous transport over the entire 13X6-km lake for tourists and locals alike.  The adventure starts dock-side negotiating a boat and fare, however thanks to Lonely Planet and consulting other tourists it is easy to know the going rate.  Our lady boat owner insisted on only 4 per boat, and $5/head, an unbelievable value, we realized, once we were half-way thru the trip.

The driver who spoke minimal English went out of his way to point out, slow down, allow for photos, and take us to the places seemed less travelled since there were probably thousands of tourists in hundreds of boats on the 44-square-mile lake.  Right off the bat there are several enterprising men dressed in fisherman costume on their 12′ wooden fishing boats, poised to demonstrate leg rowing which is a wonder I can’t wait to see McKenney or Joe or Al try once I show them the videos.

This blog is too short to cover all the sights: fisherman, floating gardens tended by farmers in boats, villages on stilts over the lake, temples, handicraft workers.  It was a full day, until sunset.  We’ll feature weaving and silversmithing in the next blog.

We felt it’s time to expand our Southeast Asia experiences by adding Myanmar to the list since it shares a border and millennia of history with Thailand.  And being somewhat reactionary to the trend of changing country names with new regimes, I have more commonly referred to Myanmar as Burma, but we were chagrined to learn that the Bama people came to the region in the 9th century and called themselves Mranma and the r sounds like y in later dialects.  That kingdom was destroyed by the British in the 19th century and was replaced by Burma which only referred to the main tribe of Myanmar’s multicultural population.  So how far should you go back, my prejudice was with the current regime and maybe Myanmar refers to all the tribes still constituting the “Republic of Myanmar”.

We chose to fly in and around the country, which is a precedent (I hope we don’t make a habit of it – you miss too much of the country and it’s people), because we really only wanted to be away 10 days from Trang, getting back before the Chinese New Year and we had to stage the trip exactly at the half-way point so as not to impact our two 60-days visas for Thailand.

The first thing we noticed on arrival was that the traffic drives on the right (as we do in the States), but the vehicles, 99% of them, are right-hand drive (only a few ancient trucks and a couple of NGO vehicles with left-hand steering).  You can imagine how hard this is for traffic that has a propensity for passing when the driver has to lean to the left or ask the passenger if it is clear to pass.  I think they compensate for this handicap by honking.  Stanna tells me that they still don’t honk as much as India, but most of the horns are anemic from overuse.  We tried to deduce where the vehicles came from, saw some from India and they share a common border, but we were told there is no legal land crossing so they must arrive by ship, as do vehicles from Japan.

The second most noticeable change from Thailand was that both the men and women of Myanmar wear their traditional clothing, albeit the men wear a Western dress shirt with the longyi skirt.  It was easy to be noticed as a foreigner not just because of our white faces but because of our shorts & capris when everyone else was wearing long skirts.  This is probably a good place for a brief rant on the average Western millennial traveler wearing their beach-appropriate and sloppy clothing reminiscent of the viral Walmart photos on the internet.  “Being yourself” at the beach or at a recreation area is probably acceptable but it makes us feel conservative when we see these folks in the airport or walking around the central city.  And we should mention that, other than at our hotel, we only saw about a dozen foreign tourists walking around in Yangon, while our second stop at Inle Lake was Tourist Central.

We chose to walk around Yangon, a city of 5 million (which didn’t feel like that many people), just so we could see how people live, peer into shops, and see the basic culture without having a windshield or glass between us and the locals.  We noted right away the prevalence of pedestals with several water jugs just along the streets.  After a lot of guessing Stanna finally lifted the lid to learn that they were water stops for people who need to quench their thirst along their walk.  Lots of street vendors & small shaded alley markets with what seemed to be a lot more colorful vegetables and flowers (and we later leaned the flowers are imported from China).

TG got busted for wearing long shorts halfway into the most famous shrine in Yangon, Shwedagon Pagoda, known for having 27 metric tons of gold leaf in its upper chedi dome (our Thai friends say it is the gold stolen from Thailand), along with thousands of diamonds and other jewels at the pinnacle 325′ up. Yangon as well as the entire Burmese country is well known for its temples, chedi and higher percentage of the population who are monks and nuns.  Although we were quickly reminded that after a while all the glitter begins to look the same to us.  So rather than go to the famous plain of pagodas at Bagan in the dry country, we went to see Inle Lake, which will be our next post.

Fascinating how thing are done in countries where labor is so cheap. They hand dig trenches and use bricks 5 courses thick to make storm sewers.  And a wood carver was crafting ornate window shutters with only one chisel and mallet on the city side walk. Or farmers hand watering a field with matching watering cans.