In which Layla and Roz get on our bikes and don't see jumping cats at the floating monastery

By Layla

After another lovely swim in the Chatrium Hotel pool (and a sneaky partaking of high tea in the club lounge - for we are fancy, don't you know), we bade goodbye to glamour and somewhat shamefacedly asked for a taxi to the Asia Plaza Hotel - an establishment bearing significantly fewer stars, the site of the start of our tour. We checked in to our perfectly adequate if basic room, then met our 16 tour mates for the next two weeks: all British except one American, mostly couples, and nobody who is obviously a kindred spirit. But all pleasant. Except for the Scottish couple who claimed I no longer have a Scottish accent: I was speechless with horror. A man then turned up insisting he wasn't our tour leader, and caused much confusion and angst, including trying to insist that a random fellow bike person was the tour leader, despite her protestations. We extracted ourselves with another four people and went for a walk through the streets of downtown Rangoon (or Yangon, as it's now officially called), past street markets selling everything from fruit to plug converters, and lots of people sitting on the pavements on tiny plastic chairs eating dinner from the numerous stalls, to a tea house, as identified from our trusty Lonely Planet guide. We sampled extremely sweet tea (condensed milk was involved) plus more green tea-ish tea (when you order tea they bring you two types, inexplicably), then Roz and I left the other couples and wandered off for dinner. 

We ended up going to several places, not liking the look of them, going into one place, having suboptimal food, and feeling quite ratty. Then Roz had the inspired idea of the cool bar in the fancy Traders Hotel, where we had G&Ts, bruschetta, potato tapas things, and much cheeriness, which turned the night around and had us strolling back to the hotel feeling cheery, despite the lack of tour leader or organization.

The next day our trip to the airport with our group in a giant bus inexplicably took 4 times longer than our trip from the airport (okay, there was more traffic). Was quite exciting to go past Aung San Suu Kyi's house, where she was kept under house arrest for so long. Of course she isn't there now because she now has a government role and the government relocated to a newly designated capital city, Naypyidaw, a few years ago, leaving Rangoon/Yangon as merely the commercial capital. We lunched in the Green Elephant and the food was very nice... But I couldn't help glancing at my watch. Sure enough we made it to the airport at 1.55 for a 2pm flight. Me being me, I nearly had a heart attack. Luckily it was a very small airport and they gave Roz the boarding passes to distribute, we ran straight in, out, onto the runway, and were soon zooming towards Heho on a plane small enough to have turbulence that made us clutch our armrests in terror. 

We were all delighted upon arrival in Heho to be met by a grinning guide holding an Exodus sign. At last there was order to the chaos! He took us to a nearby cafe for drinks and planning before we set off on the hour-long drive to our base for the next 3 days, Nyaungshwe, bitterly complaining that the scheduled flight time had made it impossible to go on the planned 20km bike ride the itinerary promised. Delightfully though, once we'd checked into the basic-but-adequate Hupin Hotel, we were given our bikes and along with another friendly tour person, we set off for 40 minutes on an idyllic cycle along the canal (which leads to Inle Lake), on a dirt track peopled by locals grinning, saying hello (Mingalaba!) and going about their business, to a backdrop of fields and water. Glorious. We returned, grinning, for an orientation meeting, a cheery group dinner of multiple tasty vegetable items, some Myanmar beer, and a shameful bedtime of 9pm.

This morning we were up bright and early for a speedy pancake-and-omlette breakfast at the hotel before a 7am start. It was perfect weather for cycling at that time and we zoomed happily along a flat back road, alongside locals on bicycles, motorbikes, and only an occasional car. The fields, villages, houses, schools, and temples flashed past. We stopped at a sugar cane farm and watched them extracting and boiling the juice, which was very cool. And then we left our bikes, changed our clothes, strolled through a random village, and boarded 5-seat dugout boats moored in an inlet so filled with lotus leaves that we didn't even realize at first that it was water. But soon enough we were off, onto Inle Lake, one of the biggest tourist draws in Burma.

The 16x6 mile lake seems split into 3 main parts. First there's the open lake, beautiful and blue and populated by fisherman, perched upon their dugouts with old fashioned nets, and a very specific way of rowing that involves wrapping the oar round their ankle rather than using their arms. And incongruous modern tracksuit garb... Photographs were snapped as we zoomed past, the sun sparkling on the water. There are 'floating gardens', areas where vegetation has accumulated on top of the lake and somehow been farmed, eg tomatoes. Then there's the floating villages, more than 20 apparently, made up of houses on stilts. We visited a cotton, lotus, and silk weaving workshop in one of these buildings, where we had tea and read our books after a cursory appreciation... and also had lunch at a nice restaurant (it was actually called 'Nice') in another stilt house - quite fun to go to these buildings whose only access is by water. Indeed the waterways are full of boat traffic, mostly of the wooden dugout narrow boat variety (and some replicas in plastic), with a motor at the back. As we chugged through picturesque villages, seeing local families washing their hair or their clothes in the river, or sitting on their balcony with a cup of tea, I couldn't help but feel sorry for these river-dwellers for the ubiquitous motor attached to these otherwise traditional boats, continually roaring past by their front doors. The tourist traffic was high, but so was local traffic. Happily the water is still clean and blue...

After lunch we went to a temple, which was a little interesting, but we did glance at each other and wonder whether the 'temple fatigue' we'd heard about as afflicting Burma visitors could reasonably commence at essentially temple visit number one. Essentially, there is a lot of gold, and lots of Buddha statues. At this particular floating temple (the fanciest of quite a few we saw on the river) there were four gold lumpy things on a platform in the centre of the temple. It transpired that, as with similar temples, the lumps had originally been Buddhas, but it's tradition for local Buddhists to buy an extremely thin piece of gold paper and paste it on whenever they visit, thus gilding the Buddhas into gold-plated lumpy oblivion. What was even odder was that even though according to our tour guide Buddhist teachings say men and women are equal, this is apparently a men-only activity: signs all around the platform firmly declared: 'Ladies Prohibited'...

We then floated off to another floating building, thus one the very famous cat jumping monastery. Just as it sounds, this monastery is famous for the resident monks having taught cats to jump through hoops. It's all over the travel guides as a must see activity. However, when we got there we found that two months ago the Abbot had died, and when he did, the cats stopped jumping. It was unclear whether this was because they were in mourning, or because nobody else knew how to get them to jump (or perhaps the other monks decided to take the opportunity to stop their monastery being a circus show), but the cats lay sprawled on the linoleum in front of the gold Buddhas and could not have looked less like they had ever had the inclination to jump. Alas. 

A long, sunny, and beautiful cruise down the lake and into an inlet took us all the way back to the hotel, where Roz and I decided that even at this early stage of the tour, it was high time we had a jailbreak. We were told of a vineyard and hopped in a tuk tuk bus type thing and were conveyed up the hill to the Red Mountain Vineyard, where someone (allegedly French) in Burma had clearly decided to dedicate themselves to creating excellent wine. Well, wine anyway. We had a delightful hour at a sunny table at the top of a hill, overlooking vineyards and fields, and sampling five different wines as the sun started to set and we reluctantly took the tuk tuk back into town for the next day's orientation meeting, and an unremarkable group dinner of potato curry (Roz) and pizza (me - the shame) at the Golden Kite restaurant. We promised not to go to bed so early tonight. Ahem...