Sunday, October 15, 2006
It’s an early morning here in Nyaungshwe, the little tourist town at the northern end of Inle Lake. Chanting monks and barking dogs woke me up early and I’ve been sitting outside in the faint morning chill, watching the town come to life and listening to the profusion of local birdlife chirping away.
It’s our last day in Nyaungshwe; we fly back to work in Yangon this afternoon. It’s been a wonderful few days here, and I’ve enjoyed Inle tremendously, more than I had anticipated. It’s a magical place in terms both of scenic wonder and friendly people. The smiles on people’s faces are genuine, despite the influx of loud, camera-toting tourists. The way of life of so many lake-dwellers is distinctive, living a semi-aquatic existence in houses built on stilts, growing tomatoes in floating gardens which bob atop rafts of buoyant lake vegetation, weaving silk and rolling cheroots in Dickensian workshops and gathering, along with the tribal people living in the surrounding hills, in markets bursting with colour, noise and distinctive headgear.
We spent two nights out at the Golden Island cottages, paying through the nose for food and accommodation but enjoying the peace and quiet and lake views. We went out one day on a boat trip, as all tourists here do, visiting a market which was especially well-thronged since it was the morning after an all-night festival and thousands of people from mountain villages had spent the night making merry and offering vast amounts of food and gifts to the local monastery. The main focus were four Buddha images which had just finished making a week-long triumphal procession around the lake on huge ceremonial barges and had now returned to their home monastery. As happens all over the country, pilgrims dip into their meagre savings to buy 500-kyat pieces of gold leaf (about 40 US cents) and stick them to the images. So much has been applied over the years that the Buddhas are now just shapeless golden blobs. Only the menfolk can touch the statues, so the women and children sit in the temple watching a scrum of men approaching the blobs with outstretched fingers holding tiny sheets of precious metal. The atmosphere is tremendously festive, with picnics happening in every corner, flasks of rice wine and huge cheroots making the rounds and kids running riot. Not being a religious person myself, it didn’t seem a terribly religious affair, just an excuse for a good party, but maybe that’s the genius of organized religion: making merry-making holy.
The market outside was a photographer’s paradise, with half a dozen ethnic groups gathered to buy and sell, see and be seen. Every village that appeared in its own overcrowded long-tail boat wore the same outfits, colour-coding themselves for easy identification. You could see distinct differences in faces and statures between the groups, but it was in the women’s headdresses that the tribes distinguished themselves the most. My personal favourite was the boatload of women who showed up dressed to the nines sporting orange teatowels wrapped around their heads.
We spent the rest of the day touring various villages, seeing lotus thread and silk being woven by women who toiled for 8 long hours in some of Blake’s dark satanic mills for 1000 kyat (80 cents) a day, making the mill owner very wealthy. It always irritates me in Burma that when you pay over the odds for handicraft work simply because you’re a foreigner, it’s not the average working Aung Kyaw Zaw who benefits; the mill owner or shop owner makes a tidy profit and the worker sees precisely none of the extra cash that you fork over. It’s the sort of Dickensian sweatshop exploitation that launched Karl Marx, and I found myself converting to Marxism as I asked questions about wages, costs and profits at each place.
The cheroot factory was little better. Burmese are addicted to small green cheroots which they buy for 20 kyat each. They consist of a small amount of tobacco rolled in a huge green leaf from a tree which grows around Inle Lake. A workforce consisting, as in the silk mills, entirely of women rolls 1000 cheroots a day for 1000 kyat a day, meaning that labour costs make up one twentieth of the final price of the cheroots. Since everything is rolled by hand and nicotine is absorbed through the skin, I’d be interested to know the rate of skin cancer among the workers.
Several of the souvenir shops along our way had an extra attraction: the long-necked women of the Padaung. Living just to the south of Inle, some women of the tribe wear long coils of a copper-gold alloy which stretch their necks (or, to be more precise, lower their shoulders to make their necks appear longer). In the shop we went into, three Padaung women, one matron and two teenaged girls, worked away at their looms while curious tourists circled them as though they were giraffes in a zoo, clicking away with their cameras. Apparently the women are hired as seasonal workers for a tiny salary, food, housing and the opportunity to sell some of their weaving. It smacks a great deal of a human zoo, and yet they come of their own free will since, as I was told, “there is no business in their home village. They come here or they go to Thailand to make some money.”
Despite the monetary squeeze on the workers, the average Inle Lake dweller seems enormously happy, and the smiles and waves of welcome as we put-putted by in our boat were warm enough to melt the Grinch’s heart. Perhaps it’s their vibrant culture, perhaps it’s religious faith, or perhaps it’s living in the magical light that seems to bathe Inle all day long. At any rate, it made for wonderful pictures, particularly of submerged pagodas near sunset in the last village.
We moved back into Nyaungshwe village at the end of the second day, wading through knee-deep floodwaters to do so; the incredible rains which inundated northern Burma in the wake of a Vietnamese typhoon caused tremendous flooding across the north, and made the countryside resemble one huge lake as seen from our airplane. The river leading through Nyaungshwe into Inle Lake had burst its banks and was still flowing through half the town, including our chosen guesthouse. It took a bit of hiking and wading to find a dry hotel to stay in.
Joanne wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed in bed while I took to my heels, riding a rental bike to the end of the road and then hiking into the surrounding hills. It was great to escape from the noise of engines and into the sound of birdsong as I climbed higher, past cheroot-leaf plantations and recent landslides to a small village perched 500 metres above and 200 years behind Nyaungshwe. I love walking in the hills, and this was perfect: alone, with no map or real idea of where I wanted to go, just drinking in the sights and smells and stretching out my deskbound legs.
Yesterday we rented another boat and headed to Indein, site of another all-night festival which had just ended, and of a remarkable hillside of stupas. Hundreds, maybe thousands of small stupas ascend a steep slope, crumbling picturesquely with the mountains behind and the lake in front. Most are whitewashed and look less abandoned than do the Bagan ruins, but they still have an air of delightful decay to them. With menacing storm clouds gathering behind, we had a perfect backdrop for photography.
So now it’s time for a return to the city, refreshed and excited about Burma. Until next time, I remain
Your Faithful Correspondent
Graydon
posted by xuanzang @ 7:28 AM
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