Inlay Lake and Thaunggyi Hot Air Balloons

The second part of our trip to Myanmar was centered around Inlay Lake and the Thaunggyi Hot Air Balloon Festival. After arriving in Heho, we had about a 1 hour ride to get to the lake. On the way we stopped at a delightful little umbrella shop, which makes not only the umbrellas from bamboo and paper, but also makes the paper from the bark of Mulberry trees.

Inlay Lake itself is the second largest lake in Myanmar, with many villages on it's edge, and even on the lake itself. It is also a large agricultural region as there are floating gardens on the lake. Many acres of tomatoes are grown there and the tomato salad is delicious. We took longtail boats to reach our resort, after a delicious lunch, somewhere on the lake. The resort itself was back between the floating gardens, and isolated from the main part of the lake. This was especially nice because the last several hundred meters they didn't allow any motors on the boats, only legrowing.

We saw fishermen several times, using regular nets, plus these net traps, which they put big end down on the bottom of the lake vertically and then poked inside with a sharp stick to scare the fish into the net.
We also saw them collecting lake grass from the bottom of the lake, which they use as fertilizer for the floating gardens. They would wind the plants around the poles like spaghetti, and pull it from the bottom into the boat. One morning we visited a local market, and our guide Ti showed the ladies how to apply Tanaka ( a mixture of sandalwood paste ) to their faces.

From there we walked up to a temple, and saw the local sights along the way.

I bought some really good peanut brittle here:

We also visited some weavers on the lake, there was a whole village of them. Some were spinning, others dyeing, and others weaving.


Away from the peaceful, relaxing lake, we visited Thaunggy, a local town on the hillside, for their balloon festival. I can only describe it as one of the most insane, chatotic, and thrilling events I've been to. The event has two parts, daytime when they launch large paper hot air balloons in a competition, and nighttime when the balloons are more traditional round, but have fireworks attached to them. We didn't stay for the nighttime as we heard it is a bit of a drunken revelry, and rather unsafe compared to the daytime. During the daytime, in a field about the size of 2-3 football fields, surrounded by food, gambling and other booths, plus a carnival with rides, they launch balloons and are judged on them. The balloons have to look realistic, fly well, and the teams have to work well together. Sometimes they fly really well, like this canary (btw if you click on the picture to enlarge it you will see the 1/2 meter long wick and flames to keep the balloon flying).

There were all sorts of shapes, leopards, cows, tapirs, elephants...
They would dance and sing while the team was sending up the balloon, and even more so if it went up successfully. There were thousands of people on and around the field, and sometimes there were several balloons going up at the same time. Once in a while they weren't so successful.

This tapir didn't make it that far...
Some others went up fairly far before catching on fire, and one came flaming down on some of the food booths. We had to constantly be looking over our shoulders to make sure that nothing dangerous would land on us while we were watching the one in front of us being prepared for flight. These guys were getting ready to put a flaming torch under their balloon to fill it up prior to lighting the wick and sending it off. If you can imagine how crazy this all was, just imagine adding dark, drunkenness, and fireworks (ie rockets etc) being launched from unmanned balloons and you will understand why we didn't stay for the night.

Only too soon we had to leave again after 3 delightful days on the lake.

Here's the final sunset from our hotel veranda.

Myanmar part 1

Looking at my last post, it's been way too long. I planned, and started writing a post about our move to the Philippines, but that will have to wait.

Early November we, Cindy and I, went to Myanmar with Eyes on Asia. It was a great trip for the two of us because it was designed for photographers, so no-one got upset if you moved a little slowly to take some pictures. There were eight of us all in all, just a nice size. Two from the Maldives, one from Singapore, one from Switzerland living in Singapore, one from Germany living in Singapore, one from Australia, and the two of us. Cindy and I flew a day early to Singapore, and then left early the next morning to join the group. Two of the others were on the plane as well. The rest were already waiting in Yangon.

So after a lunch at Sharkeys, highly recommended, we set off for two pagodas. The first I don't remember the name, I should have written it down. It was a bit more relaxed than the big one , and there were interesting activities going on around it. One room had about 8 weavers working, and people spinning as well.

The second pagoda we went to was Shwedagon, the main pagoda in Yangon. We stayed there for a couple of hours, and took pictures in the late afternoon and early evening light.

We only stayed in Yangon one night, as we were headed to Bagan (or) the next morning for 3 days of photography amidst over two thousand temples. We spent the night at the Savoy hotel, which was a nice, older, more of a 'boutique hotel'.

It seemed to be our fate to get up early many times during this trip, this was the 2nd of 3 mornings in a row we had to get up at 5:15. We caught an early flight to Bagan. I found it interesting that we had to show our passports when going from one city to another within the country, not as identification to get on the plane, but to internal immigration control officers. I will admit that I had been a bit apprehensive about going to this country, but all in all, this was the only thing we saw which was in any way indicative of the political situation in the country.

In Bagan, we of course visited many temples, taking horse carts, and busses around to get to them. The horse carts were nicer in a way because we were able to go on roads the busses couldn't and we went at a slower pace and could stop and get off when we wanted to. We were two persons to a cart, and at a couple of times we ran into a whole lot of other carts. Tourism is increasing. We went early mornings two days, one on a balloon ride, and the other to see the monks going around town.
Here are a few photos from our balloon trip.

Getting the balloons full of hot air and ready to go. The basket could hold 12 plus the captain.


Taking off in the pre-dawn light.


View of another balloon after sunrise, about 3/4ths of the way into our one hour ride. I was surprised at how warm I was in the basket, but then since that flame was only a few feet above us when it was on, we would get warm.


Another view of one of the balloons, and many of the temples in the distance. As I mentioned already, there are over 2000 of them. There certainly isn't time to see them all. Some are in very good shape, others damaged by earthquakes, weather etc.
Many of them are over 2000 years old as well.

I'm not necessarily keeping our days in order. We visited the Shwezigon pagoda in Bagan, where I caught this group of musicians as they strode around the temple.

We took pictures of temples at sunset (here you see Muha, the master of Silhouettes).



And this was our guide. He was very helpful as he knew a lot about the history and culture of the place, as well as having been a photographer himself, he understood what we wanted and where the light would be good etc. He just didn't like to be in the photos.

One day we went to see the young monks go around town, I felt a bit like one of the paparazzi, but it was fun none the less. Cindy managed to lose us as we had to move fast to keep up with the monks, but fortunately she found us again not too much later.


There are many more photos on my flickr

We also visited a 100 year old photo studio, and since lacquer-ware comes from this area, also a factory.


I'd love to go back and visit the wonderful people again. Everyone was very warm, friendly, and open-hearted. This must be the result of the Buddhist influence on the people.




Unfortunately at the end of three days it was time to move on to our next location. Inlay Lake. But more about that next time.

Lalbagh

Sunday morning, early around 6am, before it was fully light, I went to Lalbagh for a early morning walk. It was beautifully quiet there, and I enjoyed it along with a few (hundred) other people, who were also taking advantage of the quiet scenic spot for various activities.

I had thought it would be a nice quiet spot for some early morning photos, and some nice light exercise (a gentle stroll). It seems many others also were there for exercise. Either done by themselves, or groups, or even in classes, like this martial arts class.

Others came for more quiet activities, such as meditating on the sunrise
or reading the newspaper. I wonder how many years this couple has been coming to this spot every Sunday morning for a relaxing breath of fresh air and perusal of the week's news.

And then there were couples like this one. I could not help but wonder whether they are husband and wife, or if he is her brother chaperoning her to a meeting with friends, or potential husband. I didn't manage to catch him on camera, but he seemed to be more interested in his phone than in being there with her.

I just wish I lived closer to the park. It would be so lovely to be able to just walk over and enjoy the light morning air without having to arrange for a driver so early in the morning, or having to hunt for half an hour for a Rickshaw. They really don't start operating much till 7 on sundays. By then the park is already getting warm and very busy.

Philippines- El Nido

Well, I got to add another country to the list I have visited. I went for a business trip to Manila. I had no idea what to expect when I arrived in Manila. I knew it is a country between the first and third world. It has a significant poor population, but also has some very wealthy--just like India. But somehow it was different from India. First off the infrastructure seems to be much better, at least in Manila. Secondly, it looks a lot like the US (not strange as it was a US colony for a while). The cars are 'huge' and the roads nicely paved. The other thing I noticed, at least in Makati, is all of the security forces carrying significant weaponry.

Cindy went on the trip with me, just to kind of scope the place out. We didn't actually see that much of Manila, or the surrounds. I did see our new office building there, and enjoyed the widely available decaf coffee (not just at the hundreds of Starbucks, but elsewhere as well).

After the business trip, Cindy and I went to El Nido for the weekend. Absolutely beautiful. The sky was blue, the ocean blue-green, and clear as a bell. We visited Snake Island where we climbed the long climb to the top, all of five minutes, and had this view. It is named snake island due to the undulating sandbar which is visible at low tide and looks like a long snake. No snakes on the island as far as we could tell.

We also saw a couple of caves, one of which we got to go inside. It was used as a hiding spot during the 2nd world war. Now it only houses some birds and bats. There's a tree whose roots grow right through the rock.

The snorkeling (and diving I presume) is superb. Here these Jack fish are being fed by the resort, as they are every morning for the benefit of the guests. I swam with them the next morning before the feeding as I had missed the sunrise cruise. They are about a meter long, and very fast. In the same area I saw probably two dozen different kinds of fish and sea creatures, including sea urchins, coral, sea stars, and lots of colorful fish. No pictures as my camera isn't waterproof.

We also went kayaking in a lagoon, snorkeling in the same lagoon, and went on a sunset cruise.

I'm ready to go back...