Inle Lake - We Visit A Home

The next village we visit on Inle Lake is a fishing village, and actually in the lake, rather than along the waters edge like the last two. The streets of this village are waterways with rows of stilt houses on either side.


Some have little floating gardens, and hedges, others have pots with plants in them on a platform. All have small landing jetties for their boats. It is from one of these jetties that we are greeted by a mother and young daughter. They wave as we go by, and the driver takes the boat over to them and we start to speak to them through our guide. We are invited into their house and we readily accept. We go up the steps from the jetty into the usual two room affair with no furniture other than two old wicker chairs kept for important guests, which in this case turns out to be us. Everyone else sleeps, sits and eats on the floor. Is this why everyone takes their shoes off when entering a house, because basically you are walking on their dining table?

We learn that the parents have 14 children, presumably a result of living in the middle of a lake where there is little in the way of evening entertainment.


The parents sleep in one room and all the children sleep in the other, which is their main living room. No one leaves home until they get married. There is a small kitchen off the back, and a bamboo bridge to a separate “privy”. The privy has a modern style toilet, but no plumbing. It just sits over a hole in the floor and empties into the lake. There are 16 people living in this house, using this toilet, and it is just one of hundreds of similar houses. Suddenly we are not so hungry for fresh fish from the lake.

Inle Lake - A Day

We have heard that Inle lake is severely over fished, with catches getting smaller and smaller and as we set out to explore the lake it is immediately obvious why. The lake is covered with small boats each with a man fishing. They are in boats very similar to ours but a little shorter and without an engine.


Some drive fish towards nets by beating the water with long poles. Others stand on the small platform at the front, and wrap their leg around a long oar. Using a combined twisting of their body and circling motion of their leg they can propel the boat, and make girls hearts flutter on the dance floor. On the boat it leaves both hands free to fish, which they do with a fishing line, a net, or a huge cone shaped bamboo “beehive”.


These are the famous fishermen of Inle Lake and it is fascinating to watch them. Many of them are friendly and come along side our boat so that we can take pictures and exchange smiles of greeting.


We pay our first visit to a village where we meet the Pao tribe. The women wear all black with a colourful headdress, which actually looks like a small blanket folded neatly on top of their head, which must come in handy as it gets quite cold at night. You can tell which village they come from by the colour of this blanket. We go to see one of their markets, which is a desultory affair, with desperately poor looking women trying to sell tiny amounts of vegetables or spices.


Many of the women are smoking large fat cigars. We are not sure what is in the cigars, but they certainly seem happier than their immediate surroundings would warrant.


From here we go along the lake to the next village to see the Paduang tribe, famous for their long necked women.


The women wear gold coloured metal coils around their necks and calves. It gives the women very long necks, but apparently doesn’t actually stretch the neck, rather it pushes down the collar bone. They can take the coils off, but have to be extremely careful for three weeks until their collar bone recovers its original position. The origin of this is to protect from tigers, which always attack either the legs or the neck. There are only a handful of these women left, not because all the others have been killed by tigers, but because the majority of the tribe crossed the border to Thailand where they can make much more money from the tourist industry.

Inle Lake - Transportation

We are to spend the next two days on Inle Lake exploring all the villages and the life of the locals. The lake is about 15 miles long and anything from a few hundred yards to a mile or so wide. 125,000 people inhabit its shores, mainly living in small villages built on stilts above the water.


The houses are simple two room affairs built of bamboo and reeds. They last ten years before they fall apart, and then the entire village gets together to build a replacement. The people either fish or farm, and their method of doing both is part of the reason we have come here.

Our hotel has a jetty leading out to a small inlet and it is here we find our transport for the next two days. The boat is shaped like a dugout canoe, only much longer. It must be twenty five feet long and little more than 2ft 6 wide. It has an extremely shallow draught, because the lake itself is often a little more than a couple of feet deep. The front rises up out of the water, and the back end has what looks like an old lawn mower engine sitting on a platform with an eight foot metal rod running directly from it to a small propeller. In this way the driver can make sure the propeller just skims the surface of the water and doesn’t hit the bottom or get caught in weeds.
There are three wooden arm chairs for the tourists. Each chair comes with a rather worn cushion, and an umbrella. We are told the boat is extremely unstable because of its shallow draft, so we must step directly into the middle of the boat, and not on to the sides.


Once we take our seats, the driver starts the engine which coughs and sputters a few times and then lets out a high pitch wine. The boat shoots forward like a bat out of hell. The smallest turn causes it to lean to one side in the most alarming fashion. Conversation with the person behind you is almost impossible because of, one, the noise of the engine, and two, the act of turning round causes the boat to wobble. Strangely enough, just as an ocean going liner attracts a flock of seagulls following it, so does this small rocket boat.