Our last day in Myanmar. Today we flew from Inle Lake to Yangon and are back to our grand old colonial hotel, the Yuzana, and have been upgraded to a huge suite! For dinner we went to a beautiful old colonial home which once held the office of Aung San, the father of Nobel Peace prize winner and beloved leader here, Aung San Suu Kyi. So...our impression of Myanmar - an incredibly rich country that has everything - except good governance. It has every kind of t...

Today we got more exercise than we bargained for! We hiked for 7 1/2 hours high up into the hills above Inle Lake to see three Pa-O villages. The hike was not as scenic as our Kalaw trek, except for the great views of the lake on our way down, but the villages were very interesting. The Pa-O are a wealthy hill tribe that was smart enough to be the first of the rebel tribes to sign a peace treaty with the government and was given special concessions because of tha...

Another great day on Inle Lake. We first went to a market which was much larger and more interesting than yesterdays. There were flowers, vegetables, meat (including ears, the tail, the hooves, and many internal parts), and chicken, as well as blacksmiths working, petrol sellers siphoning off gas into jerrycans and bottles, and people making and selling betel nut - a popular item here. There were also many interesting faces as the hill tribe people come down to t...

Inle Lake is a magical place! There are many villages around the lake where people live in houses on stilts and come and go by boat - small, dugout canoes as well as larger boats of over 30 feet, with ancient, hand-cranked to start engines that carry huge loads of both people and cargo. It's amazing what can be done on the water both from homes that are quite grand and those that are very humble. People raise chickens and have pigs on floating platforms around th...

Finally - some exercise - and what great exercise it was! We hiked into the hills around Kalaw to visit three Palaung tribal villages. It was gorgeous hiking through hills which used to grow opium but now grow mostly tea along with oranges and sesame seeds. The rutted and often muddy paths are only passable by motorbikes or ox carts, so the houses are very humble and the Palaung still live much in the way they have for centuries. We had tea in a traditional long ...