Category Archives: Photographs

Inle Lake – Ngape Chaung, the “jumping cat monastery”

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You have to admit, I’ve laid pretty low on the holy sites for the last several posts, a week now, maybe more. So… this is Myanmar, and it’s time for a monastery. And not just any monastery, but the famous home of the jumping cats.

As with all places around Inle Lake, arrival is by boat.

The monastery complex comprises a number of buildings arranged in an attractive tableau.

  

 

The pagoda contains many attractive Buddhas of different styles.

    

 

In addition, the place is inhabited by many contented cats.

   

 

Interestingly, the monks of this monastery have trained the cats to jump through hoops. We didn’t get to see this in person, though we would have loved to. We were told that there have been complaints that training cats is too trivial a pursuit, and not spiritual enough, for serious monks to pursue. And so now the monks no longer demonstrate their cats’ skills. They might still be training them, of course, but not so publicly.

You can watch a video on youtube by clicking here. This is fun. Enjoy!

 

Inle Lake – Floating Tomato Gardens

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Just writing the title of this post makes me smile. Floating tomato gardens! What a concept! And what would they do with the cucumbers? Hang the vines on air hooks?

Maybe not. Maybe that’s why they grow tomatoes on Inle Lake, and not cucumbers.

But tomatoes they do grow, and they grow them in abundance. This region supplies sixty percent of all the tomatoes consumed in Myanmar–a population of 5.5 million people. That’s a lot of tomatoes.

So… The tomatoes are grown in baskets that float in the lake, in long, dense, caged rows. There are problems with this farming technique. The silt that escapes the baskets and the organic waste from the plants are slowly eroding the lake environment, enriching the water so that water hyacinth–lovely, but a devastating weed–is beginning to take over, one of the few plants that can grow in water so organically rich. And then there is the matter of the pesticides… Let’s just say: This is not water you’d want to drink.

Nevertheless, there is an enchanting beauty in these farms.

   

 

Mostly it’s the women who work the tomato gardens, weeding and harvesting. They work from their boats.

 

 

Occasionally, the tomato gardens frame vistas that have breathtaking rural grace and beauty.

 

 

 

 

Inle Lake – the watery village

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I suppose you might think of it as the Venice of Inle Lake. Or at least one of them.

I can’t quite suppress a smile as I write this, but the village does have its fine, gilded place of worship, one of the few structures built on solid ground.

I don’t know the name of this village, but it seems to be something out of a fairy tale. Even the approach seems full of the promise of magic.

All of the village’s main roads and side streets are waterways.

     

 

The houses, too, have a certain fairy-tale quality, reflected on their stilts back into the water.

   

 

But as in so many places in Myanmar, I liked most just watching the people. Perhaps they enjoyed watching us, too.

  

 

Inle Lake – Electricity

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How, you might be wondering, do they get electricity to all those remote, and, well, potentially wet places all around the lake?

Or perhaps you are thinking, especially after the last post, that they don’t use electricity in many of these places. This could be true, especially since the electricity outside the large cities in Myanmar is notoriously unreliable due to shortages.

But in fact, they do bring electricity around the lake, and on towers and structures that are strangely beautiful while at the same time emanating a sense of imminent danger.

From the first time I saw one of these, I knew I had to capture a photographic record of them.

     

Let’s just hope that the storm brewing in the background doesn’t bring…lightning…

 

 

Inle Lake – Boat Building

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Today’s post about boat building on Inle Lake was written by guest blogger and traveling companion Dan Kenney, who has spent many chilly New England spring days working to make a wooden boat seaworthy.

* * *

We visited a small family-run boat-building business where men made the everyday work boats used on the lake. Their outdoor work yard included a roofed-overopen-air section.

The boats are made of solid two-inch thich teak planks and are custom-ordered, with the price based on the length of the boat.

The only tools we saw were a hand plane, a hand auger, a hammer, and a hand saw. The methods and techniques these boat builders used could have been passed on from generation to generation for hundreds of years.

This man is cutting a thin strip of teak from a piece of saved scrap wood. He is preparing to scarf (or splice) it into a larger, long plank in order to make the plank usable for a particular fit. He’s putting in this effort  because teak has become too expensive just to cut a new plank whenever an existing one isn’t quite right.

Next, he planes the piece in order to get an exact fit.

As I supervise, the piece is now drilled. Screws are countersunk to fit it seamlessly into the plank.

The seams of this almost-finished boat are now coated with something, perhaps pitch, to make them waterproof. Below, two boats are almost finished and ready for delivery.

Interestingly, the whole basic frame of the boat is made of only five planks of wood. Because the wood planks are very wide and the boats, shallow, these boats don’t need a lot of planks. Fewer planks mean fewer seams, and fewer seams require less work. If more planks were needed to complete the side of the boat, they would also need ribs to hold these side planks together, but in these boats the sides are each made of just one wide plank.

 

Inle Lake – Cheroot making

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Cheroots are as typical of Myanmar as the longhyi skirt-like garments worn by men and women alike. They look like cigars. Those rolled by folk in the countryside for their own consumption are thick and fat; those rolled in factories for sale are thinner, more uniform, and more elegant.

In the place we visited, the filling of the cheroot had already been prepared. It is comprised of a mixture of tobacco and some other woody substance, perhaps along with other herbs and spices for flavoring. Each factory has its own mix of these ingredients. The Burmese people believe that cheroots are less harmful than cigars because their tobacco content is lower.

As in this factory, the tobacco mixture is then rolled in outer leaves of–not tobacco, and not paper, but–Tha-nut hpet leaves (Cordia dichotoma).

The women in this factory work quickly: rolling, tightening, and cutting the cheroots, each one handmade, perfectly but quickly. It’s a repetitive job, possibly paid as piece-work. I wonder if the occasional tourist-visitor is a welcome diversion.

  

 

 

Inle Lake – The Blacksmith

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Since I’ve gotten on the subject of traditional handicrafts on Inle Lake, I might as well cover a few more. Today: blacksmithing.

I will admit that the entrance to the shop did not bode well.

Then again, maybe it was just an indication that everyone is so busy here that no one has time just to sit around.

In any event, the shop offered for sale knives of all sizes as well as, even, swords. Now, I am a great lover of knives and swords. I am tempted by these wares. The blades are as sharp as the chiles here are hot. Which is to say, very. And the prices are reasonable. I do like a good sharp blade. But the hilts are simple, even crude. And I will have to check a suitcase for the rest of my trip if I buy one of these. I resist.

Then the men set to work. The main blacksmith draws the red-hot blade out of the fire. Yes, it’s ready to be worked. First one, and then two, and finally all three apprentices pound rhythmically on the steel blade as it cools, working against time.

   

The blade cools from almost white-hot to bright red, and finally to a dull mahogany. The work slows. A last blow is struck, and the blacksmith examines the blade. It’s not thin enough yet. He will put it back into the flame, and the process will begin again.

 

 

Inle Lake – Silk and Lotus Weaving

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Inle Lake has become famous for its silk weaving industry. They also weave cotton and an amazingly fine thread extracted from the stalks of lotus blossoms. We visited the Ko Than Hlaing factory and show room.

Silk shuttles glow against an open window.

We look out the window at the building across the street–well, okay, across the narrow canal; it turns out to be another factory, where people are also weaving silk.

 

In this factory, we watch as woman dyes the skeins of silk, her arms permanently stained from her work. A new batch of dye bubbles in a pot nearby. Traditionally, the dyes were all made from natural, local ingredients, but these result in a color that is muted and subtle. We tourists, it turns out, tend to like bright colors; and the factory owner is eager to please. And so now, some of the dyes are not all natural.

 

 

In the factory, women operate the looms.

  

 

This last young woman is weaving silk that has been tie-dyed to produce the traditional pattern that Inle Lake is known for. Here is a diagram of, well, I think it’s a diagram of how to tie the threads so that they will weave up into the right pattern. But I’m not sure.

This man is extracting thread from a lotus stem. The thread is fine, and one stem doesn’t yield very much. Shawls and garments made of lotus are breathtakingly expensive. And they feel wonderful. I regret not buying one.

Sitting on the floor, older men and women thread the dyed silk onto shuttles for weaving.

  

 

 

Inle Lake – traveling to Inpawkhon village

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Our boat met us at the landing of the temple and we headed out across the lake to see a silk-weaving factory in Inpawkhon village.

For an essentially agrarian area, the lake is surprisingly populated, with villages large and small all around. We found ourselves fascinated with the buildings, their groupings into communities, and the activities bustling all around us.

       

 

If anyone has noticed the apparent differences in the weather, practically from one picture to the next— That’s not our different cameras. That’s really how the weather was that day, ranging from clear skies to thunderstorms, from calm to wind, sometimes depending on which direction we faced, and sometimes just because the weather did change dramatically and quickly and constantly.

At last we arrived at Inpawkhon, where we visited the Ko Than Hlaing silk and lotus weaving factory.

But… more on this tomorrow!

 

 

Inle Lake – near Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda

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From the deck of the restaurant where we ate lunch, we could see the splendid temple we would tour shortly.

This pagoda houses five ancient and sacred Buddha images, which are believed to have been brought to Myanmar from the Malay peninsula sometime in the twelfth century. The images are small–only nine to eighteen inches high–and so much gold leaf has been applied to them in this century alone that you can no longer even guess they were once Buddhas. I don’t have a photo, but there is a good image here.

As you might guess, these small statues are uncommonly heavy.

Therefore, it may come as no surprise that when an unexpected storm came up while the Buddhas were being transported on their annual round of the Inle Lake villages and the ceremonial boat capsized, they sank to the bottom of the lake.

The lake is not deep, and four of the five statues were recovered. But search as they may, no one could find the fifth–and largest statue. You can imagine everyone’s surprise when they returned to the temple with the other four statues, and the fifth one was waiting for them there.

Clearly, this one statue didn’t want to travel any more. And so for the last fifty years, only four of the statues make the annual round of the villages.

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After lunch, we took the back way and walked to the pagoda. Dan and I being the kind of tourists that we are, we found the backyards as interesting as the waterfront.

 

 

A canal separated us from the temple. From its bank we watched some young women doing, um, something, involving tin cans and water. Then we crossed the narrow pedestrian bridge.

 

At the temple, groups of people talked or prayed, but we didn’t see anyone applying gold leaf right then.