First picture is of ‘our lady’ (Aung San Suu Kyi) and her father, (General Aung San) on a fan, but they are the most revered people in Myanmar, the fan is not a cheap keepsake, but a reverently lent heirloom.
First place i went for a coffee, the place next door had a gold stupa on top of a tin roof, in the middle of town.
Dad and Hayden, i thought you would love these cars, especially the truck on the third photo, looks like it is powered by a tractor! Next to horses, these are the most common vehicles!
Views around Lake Inle
and a video of a ride down the river from the 'town'
So we decided to do a tour around the famous Lake Inle. Inle Lake is a freshwater lake located in the Shan State. It is the second largest lake in Myanmar with an estimated surface area of 44.9 square miles (116 km2), and one of the highest at an altitude of 2,900 feet (880 m). During the dry season, the average water depth is 7 feet (2.1 m), with the deepest point being 12 feet (3.7 m), but during the rainy season this can increase by 5 feet (1.5 m).
The video has a shot of traditional fisherman who row with their legs…..
We saw silver making
and floating markets (which are houses and markets on stilts)
We watched traditional umbrellas being made with great skill and little resource. To be honest the rest of the videos are in honour of my Mum, the weaving, silk looming etc is amazing, yet i bet Mum or one of her friends could probably do this......maybe
And we saw ‘long necked women’ famous for their weaving.
These are the ‘floating villages’
And then we saw silk making
watch the feet on the second video at it is pretty amazing how a lady use bamboo levers to change cottons
this is how they make Lotus stem weaving, they only make scarves from this, or special Buddhist Monk Robes, but never anything else!
And cigar making….. 
Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda - The pagoda houses five small gilded images of Buddha, which have been covered in gold leaf to the point that their original forms cannot be seen. The gold-leaf application to such excess is relatively recent. Old photographs hanging on the monastery walls show some of the images in a more pristine form. It is reported that some gold has been removed on occasion to reduce its mass. Although the monastery is open to all for veneration, only men are permitted to place gold leaf on the images. Another part of the ritual for pilgrims is to place a small robe or thingan around the images, and to take the robe back to their houses and place it on their own altar as a token of respect for the Buddha and his teachings
Annually, during the Burmese month of Thadingyut (from September to October), an 18-day festival is held, during which four of the Buddha images are placed on a replica of a royal barge designed as a Hamsa bird and taken throughout Inlay Lake. One image always remains at the temple. The elaborately decorated barge is towed by several boats of leg-rowers rowing in unison, and other accompanying boats, making an impressive procession on the water. The barge is towed from village to village along the shores of the lake in clockwise fashion, and the four images reside at the main monastery in each village for the night. Sometime in the 1960s during a particularly windy day, when the waves were high on the lake, the barge carrying the images capsized, and the images tumbled into the lake. It was said that they could not recover one image, but that when they went back to the monastery, the missing image was miraculously sitting in its place.
Ngaphechaung Monastery or Jumping Cats Monastery which is located in Inle Lake, is an attractive wooden monastery built at the end of the 1850s. This is an exciting destination thanks to not only its collection of Buddhas but also many cats living here, BUT THEY DON’T JUMP ANYMORE!!! I was so looking forward to this part of the tour and nobody informed me that the cats have not jumped in years, i feel most sorry for the vendors outside the monastery who are trying to sell statues of jumping cats, but all the tourists are so let down, they buy nothing!
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