Reflections on Myanmar, Part 1

So last Christmas we spent a wonderful month in Myanmar as a family. It is an intriguing, amazing place to visit. There are so many things to see across such a vast country. Myanmar has only been open to the outside world for the last 4 years or so but I was amazed at how tourist friendly it actually was. Even with a family of 5, our children are 15, 13 and 11 it was still safe and easy.

We flew into Yangon and spent our first couple of nights there. The highlight here was visiting the beautiful Shwedagon pagoda in central Yangon. Myanmar is predominantly a Buddhist country and their religion is central to the culture and lifestyle of the people. There is something mysterious but intriguing about how the culture operates. Anyway back to Shwedagon, WOW. That is the word I used a lot about Myanmar but particularly here. The architecture is amazing and everything is golden. I think they use a lot of actual gold leaf throughout the whole structure. It is also massive covering something like 114 acres so you can spend hours just wondering around and watching how the people interact. Oh and it was really hot and really shiny (because of all the gold).

Mum it's so bright!

View from our Hotel

After our brief stay in Yangon we caught a very glamorous first class overnight bus to the beautiful Inlay Lake. We had pre arranged certain parts of our trip so it was great to have a mini bus waiting to pick us up at 5 am and take us on a longboat ride to our chosen accommodation. We stayed on the lake in the traditional way at Shwe Inn Tha hotel another excellent experience. Many people live, work and play around Inlay Lake. There is alot of fishing, growing of fruit and vegetables, tourism and all sorts of money making schemes. The hotel we stayed in was stilted wooden buildings, certainly not glamorous but had everything you needed and had a huge novelty factor.  

View from our Bungalow.

Our Hotel

We did alot of day trips from our hotel so we caught longboats and toured around the lake visiting restaurants, pagodas, shops and various cottage industries. Being an art teacher I suppose the cottage industries were of a lot of interest to me. Places such as the lotus weaving factories and silversmiths. We also saw some of the long necked women (from the Karen tribe) weaving in a factory. Interesting but odd because it feels very manufactured. However I did talk to a girl working there and she explained that this was a normal practice that her family had always done and they get used to it.

Just a note on the lotus weaving factory, that was so interesting. They actually have people who extract the threads from the lotus stem and then wind them together to create the lotus strands which are then woven together. This explains why buying a scarf was so expensive because it is so labour intensive. Well worth a visit to the Lotus factories.

Lotus plants in the background.

Inlay has many different villages such as Nampan, Maing Thauk, Ywama and Idein

dotted around the lake and sits within a beautiful mountain range so there is beautiful scenery wherever you look. At Maing Thauk we visited an old monastery which was mystical and peaceful however it did have a thriving market in the back as most of these places do. 

Of course if you want to escape off the lake you can ride bikes and visit some of the markets and pagodas around the lake. We even managed to gate crash what we believe was a wedding where they were giving offerings to their God although this cannot be confirmed as they don't speak English and we didn't speak Myanmar. There really is so much to see and do at Inlay that we were busy every day. 

Anyway, Just a snippet of the beginnings of our trip,

Til Next Time,

Kat