Trekking in Myanmar from Kalaw to Inle Lake

It was a six-hour van ride to Kalaw, going through small villages and past rice fields and open plains. We saw an elephant by the side of the road (!!!) and rode by hundreds of water buffalo with big humps on their backs. Our guide met us at our B&B early the next morning and we walked out of the town. Nu Nu (our guide) took us to her family’s house first and we were served tea and candy. The first floor of the house, where we were greeted, had a small table with chairs around it and a small cooking area, but otherwise it was empty. Some of the walls were covered in calendars and posters of musicians and models. The second floor had space for sleeping. It didn’t take long to leave the stores and small houses behind, and we spent day one of our trek walking through forests and along dirt roads overlooking the valleys. Far below you could see clusters of houses and men and women working in the fields.   As we walked we shared stories with Nu Nu about her life in Myanmar and ours in the United States. She was fascinated by the idea that we spent nine days backcountry camping in the Grand Canyon.

Around noon we came to a tiny restaurant with covered, round picnic tables outdoors. There were a few other tourists eating and we sat down to a delicious lunch of Indian food. The restaurant overlooked the deep valley, and sat all alone on the side of the dusty road. Chickens wandered over the grass and ran under our feet. It was a 13.5 mile hike, so we continued on and spent most of the afternoon walking, occasionally passing through villages where we were introduced to the local people from various different groups with distinct languages. We spent the night at a homestay, where we slept on mats on a raised platform. There was no door between our room and the family’s — just a curtain hanging in the doorframe. The town we stayed in only had two families, but both families were big, so there were still many houses. We walked from one end to the other in less than five minutes. In the evening, we could hear music coming through speakers at a monastery in a nearby village.

We woke up early the next morning, and left the small town at 7am, before it started to get hot. Day two was even longer – 16 miles – and we left the forests behind for elevated rice fields and rolling hills. Dirt and grass paths had been made in between the squares plots of rice and many other crops (tea leaves, cauliflower, tomatoes, etc.), weaving their way through the fields. We walked up and down the vast landscape, looking back at the checker-board plains.

We ate noodles and vegetables with a fried egg on top for lunch, and napped for an hour-and-a-half in the empty second floor of a square building in a tiny town. The afternoon hike was long and hot, but it finally ended in a small town with cows in pens outside the houses, and people talking on the streets. We passed a Monastery on our way to the homestay (later my mother went back with Nu Nu to talk with the monk there). Dinner was fish and five or six different kinds of vegetables. For dessert the cook made banana flambé in honor of Mommy and Daddy’s 25^th wedding anniversary, and we watched the fruit go up in blue flames at the dinner table. We again slept on mats on the floor of a mostly empty room, and from the balcony in the morning we could see a man sitting in a loft full of hay, sorting it and cutting it down to the right size. He had been working since at least five in the morning.

Our third day of hiking brought us to a bigger dirt road, and then down to Inle Lake. We could still see fields all around us, but little houses and small villages started popping up on the plains. Lunch was served at a restaurant a few minutes from the lake, and we walked along a thin strip of water to a narrow boat, which we boarded. We waved goodbye to Nu Nu, who would take a motorbike back to Kalaw. She has been doing these treks about twice a week for four years, but soon she will stop guiding treks and become a school teacher in her village. She just finished university studying Myanmar history. She was fortunate enough to be one of the few girls in her village to get beyond an elementary school education. After primary school, the nearest school was an hour and a half walk. As a result most girls and some boys stayed home to work in the fields.

The boat we had boarded had four white, wooden seats nailed to the bottom of its floor, one behind the other. The couple that owned the boat took us to a Pagoda with paintings telling a story on the walls, a Monastery with more paintings and cats wandering around (they were supposed to be jumping cats, but we didn’t see that), and a shop where women from a native tribe south of Inle Lake were weaving cloth. The women had heavy metal rings around their necks, arms, and legs, which overtime extend their limbs. As you get older, the number of rings you wear increases.

All of these buildings were on the water, and it was hard to imagine that we were on a lake. It looked and felt like a river with lots of twists and turns. We passed restaurants, more stores, and motored through floating villages. Green plants floated at the waters surface and we passed “floating gardens” with rows and rows of tomatoes and flowers. As it started to drizzle, and the mountains in the distance disappeared behind the thick clouds of fog, we emerged into the open area of Inle Lake, and we finally felt like we were on a lake. Men and women stood at the ends of boats casting fishing lines into the water. They moved their boats by pushing long wooden rods into the water with their legs and feet.

We passed houses on the shore, beautiful pagodas and other buildings with traditional architecture on our way to the small town where we were going to stay for the night. Once we got to land it was only a short ride in a tuk tuk (a motorcycle pulling a small covered cart) to our hotel, where we were welcomed with cold lemonade. The next morning we took a taxi to the airport, passing by fields of sunflowers in bloom.

-Natalia

(Look at the photo section of the blog for more photos!!)