Myanmar trip - part 2

Day 2
We went for the boat ride. It's one of the must-do thing here in Inle Lake. The Lake is much bigger than I thought. We took almost whole day to explore it. Weather was cloudy with occasional drizzle turning to slight rain throughout the day. However, we still managed to get sunburnt.

We had our breakfast in Four Sisters. The breakfast was nice, banana pancake, toasts and even fried eggs with tea/coffee. But there was so much and I did not want to waste the food. So we shared some of the food instead.

First we went to Nam Pan market. It's about half an hour of boat ride but it felt very long. On our way, we saw how the locals live by the lake. Most of the houses is built on stilts, and they will have canoes as their transport. We could also see the fishermen fishing and their famous leg rowers. I guess they use their leg instead of hands because it's more practical to do so since the lake is so huge.

The market though it's not the floating market, is interesting. Lots of Pa O people, one of the ethnic group of Myanmar doing their daily marketing and selling what they have got. Though there were also many stalls selling souvenirs for tourists, they were not those hard sell people. They only asked you to take a look and would still smile even if you did not buy in the end. There were many locals having their breakfast in coffeshop like stalls, and some fried stuff like you tiao were being sold too. In the end, I didn't buy anything much except the you tiao.

Next we went to the silk weaving factory. It was just a few houses that had the equipment to make the cloth. I had some difficulty in understanding what the person was trying to explain. However, roughly I could catch the gist of it. The job was definitely labour intensive. Especially the threads that were made of lotus fibres, that was why although the cloth made out of lotus fibres were rougher, but cost more.
Again, I was not too much of a shopping person, so I only bought a silk tissue holder.

Afterwhich we went on to see how the local cigars were made. It was a simple process with few tools. But I did not think I can do it properly unless with lots of practices. However, the ladies there did it leisurely while chit chatting. Seemed like a relaxing job. The lady boss even gave us some tea and roasted soya beans(taste nice) despite we did not buy anything from them. She even helped Jas and me put the traditional Myanmese sunblock that were from a block of tree. Its bark was grounded into fine powder and mixed with water. It certainly was effectively as in the end, CH got the most sunburnt face, whereas I got it on my nose where I did not put the "sunblock".

We had our lunch in one of the restaurants, then visited a monastery nearby. It was one of the more holy shrines. It was there where I met some real friendly myanmese ladies who were still students. Though they spoke very little english, they seemed keen to interact with tourists and perhaps wanted to learn some english. They even wanted to invite me to their village. From my boatman, they were speaking different dialects and came from a village far from here, so I was unable to go with them for a visit. Even he did not really understand what they were saying. I thought they were disappointed when I could not go. They asked for my address and I gave them(no harm), may be they would write to me some day?

We went to see the paper umbrella manufacturing, silver and gold jewellery making
and the ancient stupas. The ancient stupas must have look great and magnificient in the past, but now, much restoration works needed to be done. Here I lost CH and Jas as I stopped to look around and in the end went another direction. I came back to where the boat was and together with the boatman waited for them. Got to know the boatman more, though I could not remember his name. He came from a big family too and worked for the four sisters actually. The motored boat was not his as he could not afford. He studied a little, so could speak some english.

Afterwhich, we went to visit the jumping cat monastery. We did not get to see the act of these jumping cats, maybe because it was getting late. Most of the stalls were closing too. However the scenery of the floating tomatoes fields are beautiful as the water here was calm, and the sky view was reflected on the water surface.

This was the last visit of the day, we proceeded back to Nyaugshwe and stopped over for a while on the lake to view the sunset. The sunset was nice but would be better if it had been redder.

We thanked him for his service and paid a little tip to him. We had our dinner over at Four Sisters Inn. They made curry chicken for us this time and we had mangoes for fruits. The curry chicken taste was great but oily and to me, not spicy enough. Mangoes were very sweet and I enjoyed it.