Talk sixteen.
Nyaung Shwe, 12th December
- If not for that weak Internet connection, we would’ve been delighted with this hotel, wouldn’t we?
- And with those beds for two and a half persons each. If not more.
- How nice it was to find the room with flowers spread all over the beds and the towels arranged in fanciful accordion foldings.
- For the first time in my life I saw a rubber hot-water bottle! In a funny cloth bag.
- It was meant for the cold nights. Too bad they would distribute them far too early in the evening, so they’d get cold by the time we went to bed.
- The temperature difference between day and night is really surprising.
- Our fleece jumpers and woollen caps turned out to be very useful. On the lake the wind was strong and icy.
- A barley thirty-minute Air KBZ flight with a meal on board (!), took us from Nyaung Oo to Heho. Then an over an hour taxi ride to Nyaung Shwe was not too nice. In the noon heat with no air-conditioning.
- Obviously, the taxi driver was not as pretty as the flight attendant.
- Did you see it? Everybody wanted to have a photo with him! And he looked pleased with that.
- Why didn’t you take one? Or more.
- I just didn’t.
- On the way to our destination – Nyaung Shwe by the Inle Lake – the view of the road under construction was quite shocking for me.
- The asphalt was being made in big metal drums from burned tyres!
- There were very many people on the construction site and the women were carrying coarse gravel by hand in a sort of metal containers, from prisms on the side onto the road!
- The people were covered with a thick layer of dust and above it all there was a burning sun which was hard to see through the hovering dust.
- Eventually, after that tiring ride we arrived at our hotel with a nice name - Amazing Nyaung Shwe.
- The name of the hotel corresponds to the reality. The town offers tourists everything they may need. The people have jobs, look happy, and one might think they are not subject to the dictatorship.
- They are. It was confirmed by some short conversations we managed to have. Despite language difficulties.
- Our guide and captain of the boat on the lake, Mr Thun Thun was not able to say very much in English.
- Somehow I managed to distract from him information about the people and their life on the Inle Lake.
- You aren’t going to tell now what you learned from him, are you?
- I could. But it would be horrible boring without showing the photos. That’s why I’d refer the readers to the Internet where they could see updated pictures from the Inle Lake[1] and its vicinities.
- The Inle Lake provides hundreds of thousands inhabitants of inner Myanmar for their existence.
- Attractive when photographed but extremely hard work of all people living on the lake or around it, left me impressed. The people have no access to contemporary technologies. Wrong. Technologies is too big for a word. They work using nineteenth century methods.
- How come it is happening in the twenty first century?
- Exactly. This backwardness in the economic development has many reasons. The latest one is a total isolation of Myanmar from the rest of the world on request of the military junta and the embargo imposed by the western countries.
- Mr Thun Thun told us that over a hundred thousand people live on the water in stilt houses.
- On the lake there are four big villages and a dozen of smaller ones surrounding the others. The villages on the water live according to principles as any others. They have one more difficulty in life – beneath them there’s inexhaustible water.
- Those people work very hard, but they must have some sort of entertainment, mustn’t they?
- The only real entertainment of theirs, which the inhabitants of the Inle Lake know, are annual great Buddhist festivals on the water. They last a couple of weeks each.
- We weren’t lucky enough to see any of them.
- But we did go to a big market place by the lake, where we got after a several-hour motorboat trip through narrow canals passing by floating gardens.
- Those weren’t floating gardens, those were floating fields.
- The soil for the fields comes from the bottom of the lake – a kind of mud.
- Taking it up to the surface looked like a slavery job.
- The people seemed to be resigned to their fate.
- They have no choice, do they?.
- I don’t fully understand how they manage to get rid of the waste stuff. It seems that all kinds of excrements, event those from their pigs kept in stilt cages, come down right to the water.
- Right next to all that, they wash, bathe, and the children play in the water.
- Yet the water looks clean and doesn’t stink.
- You should’ve asked Mr Thun Thun.
- His English was far too weak for such a conversation. But Mr Thun Thun was skillful in his manoeuvring the boat, so that we could take spectacular photos.
- We were disturbing them at work.
- We’ve been already talking about it. Tourist are ruthless. They must have their pictures and souvenirs …
- I admit you took beautiful photos of the fishermen’s…
- … who use one leg for … paddling. The fishermen are known for practicing a distinctive rowing style which involves standing at the stern on one leg and wrapping the other leg around the oar.
- They have to have their hands free to be able to throw fishing nets or pull them out.
- Watching the fishermen at work in an esthetic experience, because apart from the colours and originality of their outfits, their movement remind of a ballet on the water.
- You bought such an outfit for yourself, didn’t you?
- Not exactly. I only bought a men’s sarong which is called here a longyi. This is a cylindrically sawn piece of cloth which is about two metres long. It is worn around the waist, running to the feet. It is held in place by folding the cloth over, without a knot.
- To go with that, everybody but absolutely everybody wears flip-flops. They never seem to lose them, which surprises me.
- In this climate they don’t need any other shoes.
- In this climate everything happens in the open air.
- Almost open. There’s always something hanging above their heads. Even at my barber’s.
- That hut somehow reminded of a barber’s shop, anyway.
- You didn’t take the courage to have your hair cut at that place, did you?
- But I had a lot of fun watching him working on your scalp.
- It must’ve been my conversation with him. He spoke no word in English but was very keen on asking me many questions .
- What did he want to know?
- Whether I had a wife.
- Funny. I wonder what you told him.
- At first, I said I didn’t have a wife. Then he asked who you were, pointing at you with his finger.
- How inquisitive!
- Like any barber. I said: husband. Silent for a moment, then he said with a laughter: No. No. Son?
- Did you explaine him that little difference?
- No. I left him in suspense.
- That’s why he cut your hair quite severely, ha, ha.
[1] Lake Inle
