Inle Lake – Beautiful, 3 days of timeout

6th Oct. Three days pure nature – so beautiful. The Inle Lake is located in the Shan State. It is a beautiful highland lake. The lake is 22km long and 10km across, and inhabited by many different ethnic nationals of the area, but the people who live here call themselves “Intha”.

The Intha´s are well-known for their leg rowing. With this technic the fisherman can use both hands for the net and the fishes. Furthermore they work as farmers and produce handicraft products, like weaving products, boat builder, Gold & Silversmiths, cheroot Cigars etc.

After i arrived in my beautiful Hotel “Inle Resort & Spa” I used a bicycle and started my first tour. The area around the lake is beautiful to ride a bike. My first stop was a nice, long bridge, where I saw the first plantation with Tomatoes on floating gardens, which is amazing. On the way to my next place, a small Winery, I found a private school, which is build in an amazing architecture, fantastic buildings with nature materials. In the small nice Winery called “Wine Yard Mountain” I enjoyed a glass of wine, inle tomato salad and a beautiful sunset. (PS. This blog has some more pictues, if you click on it, you can see them one by one)

Next morning I got up at 5 o´clock because I had booked a boat for a day trip on the lake 🙂 Normally the boat tours starts later, but I had luck.. it was the last day of the Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda Festival. The Paung Daw Oo Pagoda Festival is Myanmar’s largest festival. It’s celebrated over 18 days in September and October each year. Paung Daw Oo Pagoda is the most famous pagoda of Inle Lake and houses five small sacred Buddha figures.

Once a year four of the figures are transported around the lake on golden barge. The barge is towed around 14 villages on the lake by long canoes manned by Inle leg rowers, spending one or two nights in each village’s monastery.

After we saw these nice long canoes and the Buddha figures, we started the tour. We visited a lot of handicraft shops and the Shwe Inn-Dein Pagoda. Which is not one single Pagoda, it is a beautiful pagoda field, with very old and renovated pagoden. Integrated in this are is also a nice market with a lot handicraft products from the Inle lake. To stay the whole day on the water was amazing.

On the last day, before I flew back to Yangon I took a TucTuc to one of the most beautiful closter, the Shwe-yan-byei-Closter. It is an old wooden closter with oval windows and a very special atmosphere. Close to this Kloster is a Pagoda with amazing wall pictures. All the small buddha figures in the wall are for people who had donated for this Pagoda