Myanmar Part Dos

We are way past due for a blog update... so here goes. (I also went back and added in pictures to the last post on Bagan.)

The second half of our week in Myanmar was fantastic - and soo much better than the first half where we were "chundering everywhere."

After Bagan we flew to Heho, and then drove a couple of hours to Inle Lake - a very wide, very shallow lake filled with floating gardens (tomatoes!) and hundreds of tiny wooden fishing boats. We spent the day cruising around in 2 long wooden boats, with 5 of us in each. We visited a floating silk factory where old Burmese women were using large wooden looms to weave silk into scarves and other textiles (very pretty!), a floating cigar factory, a delicious restaurant which also doubled as a Burmese cat breeding house (random) but happened to have the most delicious banana cake in the whole world, and a floating monastery. Our hotel was comprised of lots of little huts on stilts over the water, connected by wooden bridges. Everyone was in really good spirits as it was the first day we were finally all getting well again from food poisoning, and was so nice to be out cruising around on the water and out of the dust and the heat.

The next day we boated the 45 minute journey up the lake into the village, and then rented bikes to wander through the countryside. We found a winery on top of a mountain, which was a beautiful lunch spot (although the wine was actually pretty terrible.)



Inle lake fisherman



Local floating cigar factory.
They were using sticky rice to seal up the cigars - resourceful.



One of hundreds of floating tomato gardens



More fishermen on Inle Lake



The little huts of our hotel on Inle Lake



Outside the winery post-biking

Our final day in Myanmar was spent back in Yangon. Most of us checked out a local tea house and wandered around a jewelry market (Myanmar has a large precious stones industry - particularly jade and rubies. I think I read that 90% of the world's rubies originate here.) We ate dinner at an Indian restaurant which was recommended by Aaron's guide book and was pretty delicious, despite the fact that the lights went out 3 different times during dinner. (Rolling black-outs will do that I guess.) As lame as it sounds, after our ordeal earlier in the week, we pretty much only stuck to restaurants in the guidebook. In Laos we will be more adventurous!