Inle Lake

Inle Lake is a sort of tenth scale Titicaca and one of Burma’s principal tourist attractions. 

Inle fisherman posing for us tourists

Many of the hotels, all built on wooden piers, were apparently built back before the 1962 military coup.  They are now dusting off the cobwebs for a new round of tourism.   I have to say that it is very picturesque but it is also very isolated.  Our hotel, although well appointed, with a pleasant bar and even a sort of coffee shop, a shop that sold ‘sort of coffee’, was not exactly a hub of exciting nightlife.  Maybe there is one that is among the dozens of almost identical establishments that dot the shoreline? 

Tour groups from a variety of European countries and Japan turned up around mid-morning and were off again the next morning early. 

Hotel - part raised part id the bar, room, night over the lake, Wendy WiFi

We spent a couple of nights, hired a boatman on the intervening day and got around to the local ‘manufacturing villages’ a larger farming village and a couple of restaurants.  

The farmers mainly grow vine fruit like tomatoes on trellises on mounds in the lake, picking and tending from boats.  

The manufacturing villages are not really so. They are tourist traps, similar to tourist traps all over the world. “The bus will stop here for a break.  There are free toilets and you can watch the local crafts people making wigwams for goose’s bridles.  You will get an excellent price on the genuine article, not like those cheap fakes you may see in the local markets.”   Women on looms, men at the jeweller’s bench or here in Inle on a forge, busily making one or two items that could conceivably be among those displayed in the show room.  But actually these are recently shipped from the real forge, from the NC milling machines or from a digital loom in the real factory.

A couple of times they didn’t even bother to start weaving and on another occasion later in our trip the young girl managed to add three entire threads to her fabric and had given up and gone back to chatting when we walked back that way. 

But it is often quite interesting to see how things used to be done by hand.  For example the blacksmith’s forge had an interesting bellows that consisted of two 6” dia tubes pumped with plungers on long sticks like two bike pumps.  One in each hand - one down then the other.  It would have been a trivial matter to fix a beam to create a more practical device.  As it stood it was not as good as an old blacksmith’s bellows.

Loom, traditional weaving, cheroot making, forging steel

Three guys with sledge hammers then hammered out a piece of red hot steel.  But they had it nowhere near hot enough for high carbon steel and hardly made an impression, except to demonstrate practiced timing, like bell ringers, and a lot of wasted energy.

I loved watching the complex looms.  When you watch the pattern repetition in the depression of the foot treadles selecting the warp, and the operator shuttle selection, you can see how Jacquard came up with the idea of programming the sequence to generate any given pattern, first demonstrated in 1801.  In retrospect it seems obvious.  He became the father of automation and digital programming and the inspiration for the later piano roll and punch cards.  I’m afraid I kept several women weaving for way over the usual three minute demonstration time.  I had no interest in the showroom that kept Wendy occupied for 20 minutes.

The show room contained about three hundred years’ worth of fabric, had it all come from their looms, running 24/7.  But you don’t need a sweat-shop-worker when a 1000 watt motor and an automated loom will do ten times more in half the time with fewer mistakes.  The skilled worker, and one or two are truly skilled, can now have a good life amusing tourists and taking long breaks between groups.

Inle Lake boasts a large shore-side temple, a monastery, with young and old monks and smitten Europeans and, needless to say, numerous pagodas. 

Among the most interesting objects are ball of gold to which men may apply more gold leaf.  Women may not approach.

Great balls of gold - Women may not approach. Would you let strange women near your balls?

From a building adjoining the temple there came an unusual cacophony.  Shoes off, up the stairs.  It was a kind of pop concert.  A well-dressed local woman, some kind of celebrity, had the microphone.  The performers and audience all sat on the floor,  men and women in separate clusters, like preschool.  It’s rude to stand when others are sitting.  We sat.  There was traditional accompaniment.  Unfortunately the soundman had no concept of top-end distortion - just loudness.  The audience didn’t seem to mind.  I just wanted to fix it but got out instead.

Wendy went to the adjoining markets. I took more photos.  Bored in hell.

I went and sat by a large bell, in the shade of its little gazebo. But then a wizened old bloke, with a huge toothless grin, came along and started demonstrating the bell to me by softly striking it with a large lump of wood. He seemed to mean well, apparently assuming that I didn’t understand the function of a bell and would find it interesting. I think he wanted me to applaud him for his genius at each gong.  But by that stage my amusement quotient was perilously close to zero and to me demonstrating what else could be done with a large lump of wood. I kept smiling unnaturally, insanity approaching.

I was quite enraptured by the motorised boats.  They are long and narrow and are all fitted with the same, distinctive, combined steering and propulsion system, that uses the boat propeller as a water pump to cool the engine.  It’s very clever. 

15-20HP single cylinder diesel motor, combined steering, propulsion and cooling system,
boat at full throttle 15+ knots, boats in line past pagodas

The mechanism allows the boats to raise the propeller to avoid chopping up the water hyacinth that clogs the channels and is a real menace in the lake.  They can move along at a very good speed, often throwing up a mighty mist of spray behind but generating little bow wave as they are flat bottomed and plane.

They all use a version of the standard agricultural single cylinder, four stroke, diesel engine seen everywhere, from vehicles to pumps and generators.  I googled the motor back at the hotel.   They are typically 15-20 HP made in China by several companies.  I did not see a single boat of any age or build that did not use this same mechanical configuration. I was impressed that the local boat builders have achieved this level of standardisation.  Someone clever in the background.

We were dubious about the roadworthiness of the car back.  It’s a long way back to the Airport at HeHo over some demanding hairpins.   And it seemed to struggle to get up the first hill.  But somehow we made it.

The road passes some impressive Victorian railway engineering.   It’s the old Rangoon to Mandalay railway built during the British-Indian period.  The railway was partly pulled up by the Japanese as they withdrew during WW2 but was restored in 1948 as the first great project after Independence.   It’s narrow gauge like the section of ‘death railway’ we travelled on in Thailand.  Full width carriages balance on metre wide track.  It’s a bit like a fat man on a tightrope and feels quite unstable.  So top speed is limited.  But they still manage to average 25mph from Yangon to Mandalay.