We’ve started our Myanmar bike trip, known to one of our favorite stuffed animals as the Best Bicycle Bonanza in Burma! We’re starting slow: yesterday we flew from Yangon to Heho, a provincial capital about an hour north of Yangon, and then drove another hour to the small town of Nyaung Shwe where we’re staying for two nights. This morning we got on our bikes, but only for about 15 kilometers, spending most of the day on a boat tour of Inle Lake. Tomorrow, though, it gets serious, covering 75 kilometers, including an 11-kilometer climb up out of our valley and into the Western Shan Hills.
The highlight today was time spent on Inle Lake which, at about 45 square miles in surface area, is the second largest lake in Myanmar. It’s a beautiful, calm lake with large floating communities, gardens, and lots and lots of fishermen. The fishermen have a strange and unique style of boating: they stand on one leg at the back of the long, narrow boat. Their other leg is wrapped around the oar. That leaves their hands free to work while giving them the height advantage to see over reeds and other plant life that is all over the lake. Fascinating to watch.
Early in the day, after biking just five or six kilometers, we stopped at a vineyard for a wine tasting. Really? Burmese wine? At 8:30 AM, barely after we’d started riding? It turns out Burmese wine is slightly better than you might expect, provided your expectations were extremely low. After that our trip included a stop at a satin weaving shop, where women were doing incredibly complex work on old-fashioned wooden looms, paid about $4 a day I was told. And then there was the Buddhist monastery, famous for the cats trained to jump and do other tricks. We were pretty excited about that, until we learned that the trained cats had pretty much all died out. There were still cats, and some adorably cute kittens, but no trained cats. Perhaps they were just an urban legend.
So that was our first full day; a little biking, lots of boating. Tomorrow is a whole new ballgame.
Nyaung Shwe is at about 3,000 feet altitude and we were shocked by how cold it was. This is early morning on the canal that goes out to Inle Lake, all early morning mist.
Mark and I are ready to go, all clean and fresh. We won’t stay that way, so we wanted it recorded that we started that way. Note the cold-weather wear – I’m wearing my down vest for the first time since Siberia and I needed it.
Our short ride passed through endless fields of sugar cane. At a distance, the fronds on top made it look as though they were covered in frost, which wasn’t too implausible given the temperature.
Here are six of us at our breakfast wine tasting. From left it’s Alison & Robin (London), Mark & me, Barbara (Melbourne), and Marlene (Seoul). Lisa, also kind of from Melbourne, was taking the picture.
Mark and Barbara, who’s going to become our new BFF, on the boat
Our guide Chan giving us instructions
Fishermen on Inle Lake. You can see his leg wrapped around the oar while he’s using his arms to do whatever fishermen do.
Here they are using long bamboo poles to slap the water – over and over and over again – to scare the fish into their nets. It has to be backbreaking work. However, I can attest that the local fish is great!