Hello, again, Blogonauts!

Well, after Mt. Popa, we were back in the air again, winging our way to the east. This time it was to my last destination in Myanmar: Inle Lake, a high-altitude basin that serves as home for a number of local tribes.

(I'm not being condescending; "tribes" is what they are called. Rural Myanmar is highly ethnically sensitive, and each group maintains its own manner of dress and customs, and as one of Zoë's teachers said it, "They would rather marry someone from China than someone from the next valley.")

The tribes around Inle Lake share the bounty the lake provides in the form of fish (which are apparently plentiful), "farmland" (of sorts ... more on that in a moment), and foreigners (with varying amounts of money to spend).

Zoë's 8th graders (along with faculty chaperones) were just about to rendezvous with her in Nyaung Shwe, the tourist gateway to Inle Lake. While she and I had spent the Chinese New Year holiday visiting Mandalay and Bagan, the students had enjoyed a 4-day weekend.

But on this Monday, school was in session again, and they were beginning a 5-day field trip to Inle Lake.

For her own reasons, Zoë had chosen to skip the 10-hour, overnight bus ride with 50 nauseated 13-year-olds, in favor instead of having a quiet dinner with me and a good night's rest.

And alas, the next morning she and I parted company. She had devoted several days to flying around the country to show me its highlights. Now she had real work to do, and I had been handed an itinerary and a reservation to spend 24 hours on the lake itself, on my own.

We (i.e., Zoë) had negotiated with Sou-Sou, an English-speaking lake boatman, to take me around the lake solo the next morning. The boats in question are really 30-40-foot canoes equipped with a deafening diesel engine and a ridiculously long drive shaft that the boatman uses as both propeller and rudder.

The boats can seat up to 5 foreigners, because we are accommodated with wooden armchairs. It can seat uncountable numbers of Myanmar people, because they are willing to sit on the boat's floor, on the packed bundles, and on one another.

So at precisely 8 AM on Monday I loaded my luggage and myself onto a tri-shaw, a three-wheeled bicycle-with-sidecar vehicle. It was pedaled by a driver who, for a buck (1000 kyat), was willing to cart me across town to the boat docks.

My driver was amiable, although we spoke equal amounts of each others' language, and I'm sure his tuberculosis was only mildly acting up that morning.

When we arrived at Sou-Sou's dock, he loaded my luggage into the boat, covered it top and bottom with a plastic tarp, settled me in my armchair, and rowed the boat backward out onto the river that led to the lake.

Then the engine started, and any hope for conversation faded.

The first stop was my hotel: Paradise Resort. Each room here is modeled on the locals' homes: a reed-walled stilt house. Granted, these rooms came with indoor plumbing, including hot-and-cold running water, and mosquito netting over the beds. But the effect is charming. The cottages are joined together via boardwalks, which also connect you with the lobby, bar, and restaurant.

And that's it. There are no roads or bridges. The only way in, or out, is via boat.

So after checking in, I was back in the boat with Sou-Sou. Zoë's agenda set our course for the highlights without succumbing to the lowlights that come with the standard boatman's tour.

We started with the village of Indein, where there was a weekly market underway and more permanent pagoda.

The market offered a few souvenir stalls, but most of it was devoted to food and dry goods for the locals. After winding through the various stalls or vegetable laden tarps, I headed uphill to the pagoda, where I found both a well-tended facility and a large cluster of cock-eyed stupas that had been allowed to fall into disrepair. The resulting display looked as if it was the setting for Alice in Wonderland.

After a long look around, I headed back to meet Sou-Sou, and we next visited a lotus weaving shop. Lotus plants yield a rather fragile thread akin to spider's silk. These can be harvested and twisted into threads and yarns, and thus can be turned into fabrics: Primarily, it is used for monks' robes.

Next we visited a blacksmith shop, where the chief attraction is watching the team of smiths hammer together on the same hot metal implement. While I visited, they were making a cleaver.

We went next to Hpaung Daw U Pagoda, the location of the famous blob Buddhas. The persistent application of gold leaf to these rather diminutive Buddha images have left them mere caricatures of the originals. Yet they are highly revered, and each year they are placed on a special barge that carries them around the lake for everyone to see.

Sou-Sou then took me touring through a couple of stilt-house villages and alongside some of the floating farms. Inle Lake is relatively shallow, and the upper leaves of the lake's weeds can cluster into mats. These matted leaves can serve as platforms that can support a bit of weight, and the local farmers have cut the mats into rows. They then coat the remaining rows with enough soil to plant seeds, yet not enough to sink the whole project. Plans then can grow atop the resulting botanical barge. (There is a naturally occurring similar floating island on Sadawga Lake in Whitingham, VT.)

Watching the rows of tomatoes rise and fall with the passing of a boat's wake is an unusual sight. Unfortunately, some of the write-ups indicate that the increasing numbers of floating farms are beginning to diminish the lake's size.

Finally we visited Nga Phe Kyaung Monastery. It is the oldest monastery on the lake, and a lovely wooden structure. It was once famous for having trained cats to jump through hoops. Unfortunately, the monks reportedly trained the cats to jump by hitting them with sticks, and the current abbot of the monastery has decided this is neither a practice nor a reputation he wants to uphold. The cats are still there, and they're playful, but they no longer jump.

Whew! Time to head back to Paradise for dinner and night beneath the mosquito net. For the next day, I was headed off to Thailand.

Blog to you later!