Inle Lake and a few thoughts on matters such as tourism and turtle-smuggling.

After Yangon I headed for Inle Lake, which came as a welcome change. Inle is very pretty, surrounded by hills and home to several villages right on the water, raised up on stilts and cut through by canals. You know, like Venice, but made of wood. Mainly Intha people live here, fishing and growing crops on marshy floating fields. The Intha are famous for their leg-rowing technique; they stand up and pilot their boats among the paddies and tangles of water hyacinths with one leg wrapped around the oar; this has already become something of a tourist-attraction cliche. In the surrounding hills and villages, Shan, Pa-O, and smaller tribes live, along with the ethnic Burmese, or Bamar.

The town I stayed in, Nyaungshwe, is kind of a backpacker oasis, with all the comforts: cheap but nice guesthouses, fruit shakes and lassis, pizzas. Not what I’m always looking for, but sometimes taste is a relative thing, and Yangon had me feeling wrung out, tired from the heat and all the people and the sense of squalor and alienness and ready for something familiar.

I deeply enjoyed biking around the villages in the cool rainy weather and taking a boat ride on the lake and a canoe ride through the canals, where I visited a spooky nat shrine in the forest; the Burmese still strongly believe in nats, or spirits, and have fully integrated them into the Buddhist cosmology. There’s just something about moving slowly on the water and looking out at the natural world; for moments on the lake, I would feel an almost overwhelming urge to reach out and touch the clouds or the peaks of the mountains or the tops of the trees, to literally brush my fingers across the landscape. It’s like reverting to a infantile state of body consciousness, losing sense of where you end and the world around you begins. The sensation comes and goes quickly, but it’s powerful. I had the same feeling when I was traveling down the Mekong in Laos.

Inle was a nice escape–but Myanmar’s not really the kind of place you escape in for very long. I would come to recognize this more as my travels continued, but even in a tourist haven there’s plenty to remind you of just where you are. For one thing, you can’t miss a sense of desperation in tourist areas of Myanmar. The country gets a fraction of the visitors you’ll see in Thailand, less even than Laos, but in tourist areas a disproportionate percentage of locals seem in on the industry. Granted this is not a high season, but the number of people who will literally follow you down the street for blocks hungry to do anything at all for you–from taking you out in their boat to just carrying your bag–can be disconcerting. (Not to mention how many children seem to be working or begging and not in school.) This happens again and again at the main sites and in the cities. Mandalay, which I’ll get to, can seriously drive you insane.

And then there’s question that’s always lurking around the edges of your experience: so why exactly did you come to Myanmar? Why are you a tourist here? It has been an unforgettable experience. So many things are fascinating: the differences, the exoticism, the antique way of life so many Burmese still have. It is like traveling out of place and out of time. The people are warm and open and interested: I haven’t met anyone I would call jaded or seriously “Westernized” (maybe a couple of hiphop kids). But there is an uneasy recognition that many (not all) of the things that fascinate about Myanmar have to do with its isolation from the world. And that isolation is because of a brutal and repressive regime. There is no reconciliation of these facts, just an uneasy co-habitation in your mind, like two roommates that don’t get along and do everything they can to avoid one another. All I can think to do right now is listen to what people have to say, be a witness to their experience. And I’ve seen a lot and heard a lot of stories, many that I don’t know what to do with yet.

Just going outside of Nyaungshwe for a day will open your eyes a bit more. I went to Taunggyi, a non-touristy town in the hills about an hour away by densely-packed pickup truck. Along the way, I saw lots and lots of soldiers (I’m used to it now but it was more noticeable to me then) and the occasional government billboard that says things like: “Tatmadaw [the Burmese army] and the People Co-operate to Crush All Those Harming the Union.” Taunggyi has the feel of a boomtown, with a giant and very busy market, and some shiny new buildings among the general disrepair, including a Sony store and a multi-level bank with a waterfall in front. (No coincidence, perhaps, that I saw a Coca-Cola Restaurant and a Fuji Guest House, with near-copies of their respective logos.)

Someone has money in places like this. Where does it come from? Top answer: China. They’re invested big-time in Myanmar in both the legal and illegal sectors. (Almost the entire area between Taunggyi and the Chinese border is closed to foreigners. Hm.) I met a man later in my trip who makes smuggling runs to and from China. Not only drugs and gems–though he did smuggle these–he also showed me live turtles and dried armadillo skins that the Chinese buy and use for medicine. (I’d bet the turtles are an endangered species.) Pro or con the US/Europe embargo against Myanmar, one major effect of it has been, as someone said to me, “to hand Myanmar to China on a platter.”

In any case, Taunggyi was an interesting city to walk around in for a day. I had a good meal here–most food has been great in Myanmar: Indian restaurants abound, as well as Chinese and Burmese, and teashops where you can get snacks and drink tea and sit around for hours. Restaurants will usually serve a ridiculous number of small side dishes with any meal you order. In Taunggyi, I ordered simple fried noodles with chicken (passing on the toasted barking deer), and it ended up coming with tea (always), tea-leaf salad, a large platter of vegetables, onions and tomatoes in a spicy chili sauce, and pickled mangos. When I finished, the waiter brought me two bananas, and a dish with pickled ginger and peanuts. And honestly, I’m forgetting some things. Soup too, I think. The total bill was like 900 kyats (~1250 kyats=$1 on the black market.)

Next stop, Mandalay.