Inle Lake, 2nd stop of the Burmese trip

As roads are not a selling point of Myanmar, this is by plane that we reach Inle lake, north of the country. As soon as we land I realise that we are nearly at 1000m height, it's cold here! Ok by cold I mean below 25!

1h taxi and we reach our hotel, a lovely place which does an amasing lime juice.

We have just under 2 days there and one of them must be spent on the lake. So by 7.30am the day after, we are following our young driver to its boat. He is joined by a friend/colleague who thinks he speaks English and talks a lot, unfortunately, I make a maximum of 2 words out per sentence. Our drivers/guides/translators are also genius mechanics, we thought we weren't going to make it back home quite a few times: like when we ended up in a garden because they couldn't make a turn or when we were left on the river with no control when they couldn't get the engine started... All good fun!

 

Anyway, the day on the lake was great, cold and grey but great. We saw plenty of art craft, lovely houses, markets and obviously a few pagodas!

Thinking about it, I actually think it was the best day of the trip. The second day is made of a suite of indoors activities as it keeps on raining. We start with the covered (by plastic sheets) market, followed by a private puppet show (R managed to get the owner to run it out of hours just for us!), then we have a Burmese massage (a combination of Javanese and Thai massage for the experts) and finally coffee followed by samosa and red beans rolls followed by pancakes! Food was consumed at 3 different outlets. As they say in the lonely planet, if you do not want too much of your money to go to the military power, but to go to the people, spread your expenses.

By having starter in a restaurant, main course in another and coffee in a third, I think we are doing great! :-)