Mingalabar! Myanmar Part III: Lake Inle (Inlay?)

With the practically total absence of Chinese tourists which make up the biggest part of travellers in this region at this time of year, the hotels are quite empty and offering great rates. We end up in the stunningly located Ananda, which offers a drop dead gorgeous sunset view over the lake. They also have the local white wine on the menu, the Red Mountain Sauvignon Blanc which, it turns out, is not half bad. Or maybe we are so desperate now that our tastebuds have gone off 😝 We decide to just chill and take it easy for the next 24hours, enjoy our new beautiful home and stretch our limbs. That evening we might a lovely Belgian-French but living in L.A. family that is also travelling for a while. They have two children our kids’ age and so, the entertainment for the evening is done. We all only finally make it to bed shortly before midnight, Anjali heartbroken that her new friend Luna who shares 100% the same interests, has to leave the next morning. Lucky encounter, or unlucky timing? We decide to take it positively and arrange to meet up in Indonesia where we are planning to be at the same time in April (ah, the beauty of naïveté!). 

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After a day of lazying around, we book our first boat tour around the lake. Besides taking in the atmosphere and beauty of the lake, our boatman is to take us to some of the old handicraft workshops still operated by Intha artisans: a silversmith, cigar making and – one of my personal favourites – lotus weaving. Lined up in our cushy chairs on our longboat, we speed across the misty water, watching farmers pull in the abundant lake plants – these are mostly water hyacinth tubers. Farmers grow tomatoes and other horticultural crops on masses of these floating roots on top of the lake. Eggplant, squash, and string beans are grown on the islands, but tomatoes are the primary crop, since they are the most lucrative. Farmers grow two seasons of tomatoes every year and rely on a cooperative system of labor exchange with their neighbors to plant and harvest their floating fields. Tomatoes are then sold to markets all the way down to Yangon. We come across several “chemical free zone” signs on the way, indicating the effort made to keep this form of agriculture as unpolluted as possible, especially considering the horrible effect chemical fertilisers have on the water quality and thus fish population.

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Our first stop is a silversmith workshop. The children enjoy learning how silver is transformed through heat and mechanical impact and how it is then worked to form such beautiful jewellery. We girls are spoiled as the boys choose a beautiful set for Anjali and I, in a tribal Shan design.

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Textile production is a traditional handicraft on Inle lake – some weaving businesses have been around for 200 years! We had only recently heard of lotus weaving. Fibers can be extracted from lotus stems and spun into thread, which is then woven into all kinds of garments. It is a very labor intensive process: you need about 4000 lotus stems to make a single scarf. Once extracted, lotus fibers must be rolled and dried, spun into thread, dyed, and then woven. The whole process takes about a month from start to finish. The resulting product has a very unique texture, a little rough at first, but with use and age it gets very soft and is highly resistant to tear.

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After lunch we went on to discover a cigar maker and boat making workshop. Myanmar in general, but specifically around the lake region, is famous for its dark-green cigars or cheroots (basically, cigars with the ends snipped off) which they make from all kinds of different ingredients and are particularly proud of their sweet, flavoured kind. In this workshop, each lady will roll up to 500 cigars a day, and their rhythmic, precise handwork is impressive. There isn’t much tobacco to be found in these, in fact, the only tobacco in them is often the single leaf that holds the rest of the ingredients together. Rolled inside is an elaborate blend of dried banana and pineapple, sometimes star anise, brown sugar, tamarind, honey, and/or rice wine, among other ingredients. To our children’s indignation and incomprehension, Thierry and I take take a puff, you can definitely taste the banana….

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After lunch our last stop is a remote village on the northern shore of the lake, known for all things tofu. Our boatman is a bit dismayed that we want to go all the way there, but I had read online that it was a worthwhile stop, educational and entertaining. Once ashore we walk up into the deserted village. Flat, brown disks are drying out in the sun on one side, carpets of pumpkin seeds on the other. A 10min walk later we come across the sign “Mr. Zaw’s tofu. Snack & food tour (Good one)” With that sales pitch, we get warmly welcomed by Mr Zaw and a cup of green tea who then takes us for walk around his village. The tofu here is based on yellow lentils or yellow beans, not on soy. Soy grows much further north in the country, but not here, it appears. From these and from rice flour, the villagers make all kinds of savoury and sweet snacks from chips, crackers, soft tofu, firm tofu, tofu crêpes, tofu flan, lots of it deep-fried, some of it steamed over beautiful, massive pots covered with a cotton cloth like the massive caramel-rice flour cake that Nilay cuts in the picture below. Besides the lovely wide smiles that greet us as the cooks and crafts(wo)men share their work with us, it is truly fascinating to see the versatility of simple ingredients, transformed based on mostly the processing or cooking method. At the end of the tour we come to the pumpkin roasting specialists where they don’t just roast them plainly with salt but they also add loads of ginger and some sugar. Let me tell you – they are simply divine. Fortunately you have to go through the labor of cracking the seeds open first, otherwise we would have probably devoured more than our bellies could handle.

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After snacking at every stand, we don’t have much space to enjoy Mr Zaw’s wife’s culinary preparations, but especially her fried tofu dipped in peanut sauce is just too yummy to resist so we roll our ways back down to our boat and the beautiful one hour long ride back.

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The next morning we agree to meet up with our friends six.en.sac to visit one of the famous floating markets on the lake and the pagodas of Indein. The market is a big letdown, tourist trap vs. local market, and the immense agglomeration of pagodas is certainly impressive but maybe we did not hit the best time of day at midday, or maybe just some travel fatigue set in or maybe we are all just happy to have an excuse to cut the visits shorts and hang out with newfound friends instead. Our boatmen get lost on the way back to the hotel, which gives us the opportunity to discover the farms upclose, juicy cherry tomatoes dangling into the boat left and right. Another lovely sunset later, it is already time to pack up, yet again. We need to drive the 5+ hours to Mandalay and take our flight to Chiang Mai.

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