TOUR WATCH
Racing Club de Blackheath in MYANMAR 2016
Day 5 Wednesday 26/10/16 - Inle Lake
Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat baby
There was a standard Racing Club commotion before we set off on the hour-long flight to Lake Inle. The boarding cards were distributed in the departure-lounge, but it turned out that there weren’t enough for our group, so Bastard Lindsay asked for another one, which they nonchalantly handed over without question.
Once seated on the flight, however, the airline became vexed by the fact that there were more people on the flight than had paid to travel, which triggered a less than orderly procedure which entailed counting the boarding cards over and over again, and generally acting as if they’d just found somebody in the toilets wearing a suicide-vest. Bastard Hoff and Cato walked up and down the aisle about five times each, but were unable to resolve the situation even with offers of additional money. It turned out to be an administrative oversight by the airline, (at least that was Cato’s conclusion, y’naa), and we took off about half an hour late.
Another smooth transition onto the coach at Heho airport, and we were headed towards Nyaung Shwe, the main town for Lake Inle, in Shan state. It was a huge lake, encircled by green rolling hills. But for the frenetic activity and ramshackle buildings in the settlements around the lake, it looked, from a distance, much like Switzerland might look if some lively people lived there. On closer inspection, of course, the towns were a hot mess, and you weren’t a whole lot less likely to lose your children down a pothole here than you were in Yangon. It was still very warm here, but a bit less humid.
We were taken to a jetty, where a group of boats were bobbing in wait, looking a little like Venetian gondolas, but with a powerful engine at the back. There were four grand-looking chairs affixed to each gondola, so we took our places, four bastards to a boat, lined up in single file. “I’ll take the chair at the back, in case the engine breaks down”, said Bastard Vigne, sagely. The engines were fired up, and took on quite a lick, as we headed out in a posse along the narrow tributary towards the huge expanse of the lake. The bows rose up out of the water as we took on speed. With the spray in our faces, surrounded by beautiful scenery and fascinating activity, it was as much fun as can be had with your clothes on.
We passed our hotel along the side of the tributary: the Hotel Thanakha, another swanky-looking establishment with a bamboo-stilted terrace jutting out over the water, where you could sit with a Myanmar beer and watch the boats go by. Once out onto the lake, we were soaked by a sudden and powerful squall, and belatedly discovered that there was an umbrella by the side of each seat.
Incidentally, my advice to prospective tourists to Myanmar, if you’re travelling at the end of the rainy season (as we did) is to take an umbrella, rather than a cagoule. I took both, but when I tried the cagoule, it acted like tin-foil, and I felt like I was being cooked in it. So don’t take a raincoat. It’s about as useful, at this time of year, as Anne Frank’s drum-kit.
This was a lake that worked for a living. The local Shan people fished it, farmed it, swam in it, and washed in it, but there was a looming elephant in the room: what else did they do in it? There were large cultivated areas on the surface of the water, from which they somehow grew crops like tomatoes. The boats without engines were rowed with a paddle wrapped around the leg, so that the occupant could see his way to navigate through the crops and reeds. This is called ‘leg-rowing’, funnily enough.
After half an hour we were still only halfway across the lake, right out into the wide expanses of water where even the crops didn’t reach. It was very pleasant. I had hoped to see Bastard Jones’s boat doing some little pirouettes in the middle of the lake, but I was to be disappointed.
Another half-hour later, we reached the far end, where entire villages were clustered on bamboo stilts above the surface of the water, and nobody could go anywhere without a boat. It was fascinating to travel through the waterways, laid out like streets, but the elephant in the room was starting to loom larger. I had been hoping to see some ancient but sophisticated drainage system beneath the stilts, but felt a growing suspicion that there wasn’t much separating the lake from the output of the smallest room in the house.
Later, after we had enjoyed a very pleasant lunch in a bamboo-stilted restaurant, I saw a little boy swimming in front of his house, while his Mum washed clothes in the same water nearby. Next door, a young girl was crouched over the edge of her own house, washing dishes (if crouching were an Olympic activity, the Burmese would win gold every time). It was becoming clear that that there was little separation of activity, and that you would need to have developed a cast-iron stomach by the time you were four, in order to survive this environment.
On my return, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it says that the Japanese are investing in the area, and are beginning to install a kind of septic-tank system, but it also alludes delicately to the fact that the system isn’t being installed a moment too soon. (I think I saw a sign, in fact, advertising the Japanese investment). There seemed little sign of western investment at all:, throughout Burma. No Maccy D’s, no KFC, and I didn’t see a single advert with Jessica Ennis’s face on it. Perhaps because of the sanctions imposed on the previous military regime, much of the investment is coming from China, India and Japan. The adverts are written in grammatically correct English, but say very un-English and un-American things. I saw one thqt said: “We are shedding blood, sweat and tears to provide you with excellent service.” Nothing wrong with the English, you just couldn’t imagine a western company saying it. (They say snappier, more meaningless things like “Connecting the world”. It’s quite hard to find a company that isn’t connecting the sodding world).
On the question of whether the word ‘Burma’ is insulting to the locals (as opposed to ‘Myanmar’), our first tour-guide Victor had said that he preferred it, and frequently used it (though he pronounced it as “Barmah”). But then Victor was well within the tradition of non-politically correct Racing Club tour guides, so I don’t know what any of the ethnic minorities think of it, as it became apparent that the words ‘Burma’ and ‘Burmese’ very clearly denote ethnicity. I don’t know, for example, what the Muslim Rohingya think of it, residing on the west coast, and currently getting a very hard time from the Burmese army. The only thing Cato had to say about them was that “they are trying to sneak into our country from Bangladesh, y’naa”, so I’m not sure he’s going to win this year’s award for political-correctness, either.
The Shan people who populate the area around Lake Inle have different ethnic origins from the Burmese who populate the Irrawaddy plains, but I think they are now largely regarded as ‘integrated’. The ‘Shan are linguistically and ethnically related to the ‘Thai’ people, and to the people who live just over the border in China, who are called the ‘Dai’, so this is the best area to buy a Thai-Dai teeshirt. Boom-Tish. (What?...this is Day 5, and I’m running out of material).
The people who live on the lake itself are called the “Intha”, but they too come from around the Thai border, and are related to the Shan. After the meal, they showed us around a kind of textile factory, where women sat looming and weaving, and whatever else goes into it, seated at various bits of nineteenth-century apparatus. (I don’t even know what looming is, but it sounds right). The wooden machines were ingenious, if a little obsolete, and the operating skills of the women impressive. Most impressive was the woman who cracked open Lotus plants and extracted some very fine thread from the stem, before reeling it onto a bobbin (if that’s the right word).
After touring around the various stilted buildings housing all this weaving-related activity, we were shown into a gift-shop, where nothing that was being made on the 19th-century apparatus was for sale. Bastard Foster surreptitiously showed me a photo demonstrating why he thought this was. It was a picture of an abandoned crate, lying at the back of the textile-making complex, and clearly denoting that it had contained imported textiles. The WaGs were undeterred, and Mrs Weir bought a comely little top that will have all the more sentimental value for knowing that it wasn’t made at the little textile factory on stilts at Lake Inle.
The Intha boatmen took us back, tired, spray-splashed, and happy, and we disembarked onto the terrace at the back of the swanky hotel. We later had dinner on the same terrace, and couldn’t hear any of the dinner-table conversation, because the boats kept roaring past at full speed.
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