After our two-day trek and a lovely lunch, we were transported to our Hotel on Inle Lake by long boat. Through "floating gardens", stilt houses and life on the lake, we reached Thanakha Inle Hotel half an hour later. "Thanakha" is a Myanmar traditional yellowish-white cosmetic paste made by grinding the bark of a tree with a small amount of water on a circular slate slab. It is applied to the face, sometimes in attractive designs, for protection against the sun and cosmetic beauty.

We spent the late afternoon on the roof top with a well-deserved beer, a few games of pool, a bite to eat and an early night. We thought our 4 nights here would be relaxing, but it was not meant to be!

We were ready to get going to explore on our first full day and our long boat pulled up at the hotel Jetty ready to take us off for a full day of discovery on the lake. Inle Lake sits at 800m in the Shan hills. There are 70,000 Intha people residing around the lake living in simple houses of wood and woven bamboo on stilts. Fishing is big and you see many participating in a distinctive rowing style which involves standing on one leg and wrapping the other leg around the oar - not something we were willing to try. The fishermen need to stand to see the fish above the reeds.

All over the lake are floating garden beds anchored by bamboo poles and mostly used to grow tomatoes. They are made by collecting weeds from the deeper parts of the lake and are incredibly fertile.

An hour later we arrived at the Heritage House Hotel with two reasons for visiting. Firstly, we had a tour of their onsite breeding centre for Burmese cats which are nearly extinct. They have 35 cats of two colours, brown and 2 blue. One was particularly friendly and jumped immediately on to Heather's back. We also had a tour of the hotel which is a vocational training centre for students all over Myanmar to learn the hospitality trade and they also had a very impressive vegetable garden.

Our second reason was to have lunch with great views across the lake and hills beyond. The restaurant specialises in the food of the Inthar community with vegetables from their own garden. A relaxing couple of hours.

We were soon on the move again and visited various traditional crafts - Silversmithing, cheroot making (where Heather tried one of their hand-rolled cheroots and after two "puffs", decided she felt sick and just reinforced how glad she was that she had given up smoking). The most fascinating trade was weaving, but specifically from lotus plant fibres where we saw how they got the thread from the stem of the lotus flower plant and how they treated the fibre to make it ready for weaving - amazing. But the products were prohibitively expensive.

We started our return trip to time it with the sunset and where you can get the iconic photo of the fishermen - it's very touristy but so worth it. Two fishermen indicated that they would follow us until our boat stopped at the perfect position. They proceeded to perform a slow-motion, over-the-water ballet with conical baskets and oars for props - all while balanced on the bows of their boats. We took a lot of photos!

Day two was an early start as Heather wanted to visit a local travelling market, rotating through 5 different sites and hence called the 5-day market. It was a nice trip out on to the lake again but the market was not really any different to other markets we had seen. Heather wanted to buy flip flops but clearly the ladies here have much smaller feet as nothing in a size 5!

When we returned, our two mountain bikes we had arranged to hire were eager to get going, so off we set through the countryside along a very bumpy road and following the mountains. We eventually reached a local village where we needed to get a boat to cross the lake. Someone on a motorbike appeared out of nowhere and said "boat"? We said yes and followed him to his stilt house where he put both bikes on his long boat and laid out a carpet for us to sit on and off we went.

We arrived at the same spot we were at this morning for the market and walked our bikes along the rickety, wooden bridge before continuing our cycle through cane plantations, fields of sunflowers, small villages until we reached the turnoff for Red Mountain Estate winery - this was our treat after a long day! The road up was extremely steep and we had parked our bikes at the bottom and walked up. We were rewarded with a magnificent view of Inle and the vineyards and also did a little bit of wine tasting. The wines were OK, but good enough for us to drink whilst taking in the views.

We cycled back through the local town, stopped off for a quick happy hour beer and back to our hotel for dinner and another early night, we were still tired from our trekking and not really stopped for two days since arriving here. Tomorrow we were planning to do nothing.