Back in Yangon, I thumbed through my cash, counting my remaining days in Myanmar. The task of cash management is a daily one in a country with complete financial isolation. In Myanmar there are absolutely no ATM’s, no credit cards, no banks to cash your traveler’s cheques. (The international banks scattered like stray cats following Bush's 2003 financial services embargo.) After booking a flight to Calcutta for the following week, I began the multimodal journey north to Inle Lake, beginning with an uneventful seven hour train ride to Taungoo. The next morning I boarded a local bus – a secondhand city bus from Japan, still bearing Japanese safety placards and window ads, and even a subway map of Nagoya. Across the isle was a man with a mole on his chin that sprouted three whiskers twirling all the way to the base of his sternum (otherwise he was beardless as a schoolboy). I pondered what his reaction might have been had I yanked one of them out.
At 3pm I hopped out at Meiktila, a transit town you don’t want to get caught staying the night in. My only option from here was a pickup truck over the mountains towards the lake. It was a 1987 diesel Hilux ("five on the tree") loaded beyond belief and probably on its third engine. The 16 year-old conductor rode the roof the whole way, hiking out to keep us from keeling over as we threaded sweeping curves. With the folks we had picked up, there were now 3 on the roof, 12 in the bed, and I rode shotgun with a monk in the middle. That Toyota was a little beast, and only broke down once in 10 hours. In the States, it would have been scrapped to Mexico years ago, but here it’s an immortal by necessity: foreign auto imports are illegal in Myanmar, as they have been for decades.
At 2am I made my long-awaited disembarkment at Shwenyaung junction. It was totally deserted, and I was totally out of luck. I stood next to a police post: a tarpaulin canopy with bamboo posts and four officers fast asleep inside. One of them awoke, only to confirm the reality I feared, that I’d be spending the night on the side of the road with them. I unfurled my sleeping bag and crashed on a wooden bench, with the strap of my camera pack slung around my neck. At 6am the sun began flirting with the jagged outline of mountains on the horizon, and I surfaced from an anxious sleep to the sight of a taxi driver. ‘Take me to a hotel, will ya?’ I haggled him down to half his starting price before getting out of my bag.
I love this stuff, I thought to myself…
Inle Lake is an unexpected gem tucked into the blistering Shan mountains. My days here were characteristically aimless, cycling a Chinese single-speed, or trolling the lake in a longtail, where entire villages are propped above the water on toothpicks. Fishermen display a remarkable ballet act on their canoes, balancing with one leg on the stern, maneuvering the boat with the other leg coiled around a paddle, and managing nets, baskets, or spears with their hands. The underworld visible below is a tangle of aquatic plants reaching for the expanse of sky, reminiscent of an Amazonian river scene. Fringing the lake, rows of crops float in linear symmetry, pinned to the lake floor with bamboo stakes. All manner of life occurs on the lake, in an inventive symbiosis.
