David's Take on Inle Lake

Thursday, January 24, 2013Bagan to Inle LakeUp at 5:30 am for a 6:30 am pickup for the flight to Heho, the airport closest to Inle Lake. The car fails to arrive at 6:30, or 6:35 or 6:45. Lora is pacing at the fear of missing the flight. I figure that the local travel agent is providing the driver, and of anyone, they are in the best position to fix their own screw-up. The driver finally shows up and we get to the airport 15 minutes before flight take-off. All is well.Once we arrive in Heho, we drive an hour to a small town, Nyaung Shwe, and get dumped curbside next to a pavilion. We have no idea what’s going on until the driver and another man carry our bags across the pavilion to broad steps alongside a canal. In essence it is an aquatic equivalent of Grand Central Station. The driver deposits us in a long narrow boat (about 40’ x 4’) with an unmuffled 1-cylinder diesel at the stern -- the Burmese version of the Thai long tail boat. Just the two of us as passengers, and we’re off down the canal and then to the other end of the lake, an hour’s ride, to the Shwe Inn Thar Hotel. It’s an idyllic group of bungalows built on stilts over the water. The boat ride and isolation of our floating bungalow are very romantic, but will be less so in a few days when we have to reverse the process at 6 am to get our flight out.

Once we get settled in we see a sign in the room that suggests there will be a pause in the serenity of this place in the middle of nowhere.

It turns out that today is the “fith day” and at 4 am, it felt like Billy Graham and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir were racing past our room in the Indy 500. So we got up and took a boat over to the market. It was worth the early morning rousing.Friday, January 25, 2013Inle LakeThe lack of sleep may have contributed to the other exciting adventure of the day, something already mentioned by Lora. We took a boat over to a small village called Indein. The draw is a beautiful pagoda on top of a hill behind the village, as well as a ride through long winding channels filled with water hyacinth. Our boatman leaves us on the riverbank at one end of the village and we walk to the other end where there is a half mile long arcade, lined on both sides with trinket vendors, leading up the hill to the pagoda. Half way up we see a profusion of small crumbling pagodas in the jungle off to one side. The scene could have been straight from Indiana Jones or Romancing the Stone, so we took a detour. Lora was absorbed in taking photos and I was absorbed in just poking around. I found a pagoda that I thought Lora would like and called to her. But she had disappeared and didn’t respond even when I called “Joan Wilder! Joan Wilder!”I think the rule is that when you are lost, you stay where you are and let someone find you. After 15 minutes I gave up on that rule. I asked one of the vendors if she had seen an unaccompanied woman and she said “yes” and pointed up the arcade toward the main pagoda. Not realizing that she answers every tourist’s questions with “yes” I head up the arcade. After 10 minutes, I encountered a tourist coming down and figured that she must speak English because she looked exactly – EXACTLY – like Judy Dench. I asked her two questions: “Are you Judy Dench?” and “Have you seen this woman?", showing her a photo of Lora on my phone. I’d like to think that she gave me an enigmatic smile to the first question, and she clearly said “no” to the second.So I headed back down the hill to the boat, thinking that perhaps Lora had retreated to one place we both knew as a spot we had to meet up with each other. But of course, she wasn’t there either. I found our boatman, but how does one make a person who speaks nothing but Burmese comprehend that my wife is missing. A kindly vendor started speaking to him in Burmese. His eyes suddenly popped wide open and this man to whom the hotel had entrusted its honored guests went running up toward the arcade and pagoda. I tried to walk quickly in order to retain a sense of calmness but it was getting dark and all the vendors were packing their wares and leaving behind what was about to become a deserted tourist area. So I started running after our boatman until 2/3 of the way up the arcade we came upon a worried Lora making her way back from the pagoda.She and I then retraced her steps up to the pagoda. It was worth the adventure. The best feature was around behind the pagoda where there were several dozen small stupas ("small" meaning 15’ tall) with intricately carved metal crowns from which a many small bells were hung. The overall effect in the breeze was an orchestra of tinkling bells that cast a magical feeling of serenity over the area.