It’s not profound to note that communities develop around water, as a requisite of human life and a source of livelihood.

Aptly, we had spent a lot of our trip to SE Asia on the water, including four excursions on the Mekong river, kayaking and sleeping amid limestone islands on Ha Long Bay, rafting in the hill country of Thailand, and scuba-diving/snorkeling on the Gulf of Thailand and Andaman Sea.

But the 150,000 villagers who live on and around Inle Lake, Myanmar, are never far from water. Their villages perch on bamboo stilts hammered into the lake bed, since the water rises regularly in the wet season to lap at the floor boards. It’s a bit like the bayous of the Gulf Coast, but with whole towns rather than isolated buildings perching above the water.

The meeting places and schools are no different. Children spill out of their schools onto bamboo platforms and paddle themselves off or wait for their parents to moor alongside.

The streets are just the parts of the lake between rows of houses. Even more so than Venice, to get anywhere you need a boat, typically tethered below the house. The wealthier have flat-bottom long boats powered by a raucous diesel motor; the poorer apply oars in theirs. The young and the old both must paddle about to get anywhere.

Water is the essence of their life in many ways here. A principal source of livelihood is vegetable farming, all of which is done on the surface of the lake itself. To create these floating gardens, mud is gathered from the lake bottom and then floated on the surface, pinned in place and in cultivated rows by driven bamboo stilts. On the floating mud rows, separated by the lake water, grow tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, gourds and various greens.

We hiked up the mountains ringing the lake to gain perspective on these fields. One village’s “floating” fields extended over a half mile along the lake shore, and perhaps a third of a mile across. We finally figured out that huge portions of the lake that we first took to be land actually were floating fields.

It’s somewhat disconcerting for a visitor not to know whether you are on shore or water. We biked along a levee that began on land and reached into more and more ambiguous terrain as we got deeper into one of the villages. At first, on either side, we passed wood and bamboo homes on stilts, accessible across an irrigation canal by a short plank bridge. On the far side of the houses, though, it was water again as rice paddies sprawled to the apparent edge of the lake and imperceptibly yielded to the growing plants and houses standing in lake water itself.

Not surprisingly, however, a second livelihood for villagers is fishing. Here, they’ve adapted their techniques to the frequent shallowness and clarity of the water. As you tour the lake, a few men slap the surface with poles to drive the skittish fish into nets held taut by others.

Some fishermen work individually with a conical basket made of netting. They paddle slowly and search for fish, then quickly lower the basket onto the lake floor over their prey. Then, using a bamboo stick in the center of the basket, they prod the captive fish into the grasp of the net, so they can raise the basket with the caught fish. Yes, we had to see a demonstration of this to fully get it.

In order to free their hands for these methods, the Inle Lake villagers have evolved an unusual rowing technique. They brace one leg on the inside of the prow of their long boat, wrap the other leg around a long oar and push that oar with the unanchored leg through the water to move forward.

So, here amid the most watery of communities, it’s not surprising that the people meet their religious needs within the water.

One of the holiest sites in Myanmar, in fact, is the Phaung Daw Oo Buddhist pagoda that rises high upon platforms and stilts in the center of the lake, accessible only by boat.

Its sacredness is assured by the presence of five gold Buddha statues cast a thousand years ago. As is the custom with revered statues like these (such as the one we saw in Mandalay), pilgrims come to honor Buddha and pray for some help by applying a small square of gold leaf to the statue.

Just 70 years ago you could still see their shape and some detail of the figure despite the gradual application of leaves by visitors. Now, with easier access to the lake and increasing interest around the world, the Buddhas have been covered with so much gold leaf that they look like bubbled blobs.

And, as is usually the case with holy sites, there is a miraculous legend that enhances the sacredness, this one just under 50 years old plus water-related. During the festival time in January, the Buddha statues are removed from the pagoda, placed on a royal barge, and then propelled around the lake by village oarsmen. In 1965, the barge sank in a sudden storm. Four of the statues were recovered immediately, but the fifth somehow navigated back to the pagoda on its own. In recognition of the statue’s unwillingness to boat about, that one has been left back at the pagoda in festivals since.

That gold-encrusted Buddha might have the option of staying off the water. But all the villagers here must live by gliding or abiding on waterways.

(To see more pictures from Myanmar, CLICK HERE to view the slideshow at the end of the Myanmar itinerary page.) The post Water and the water ways of Inle Lake first appeared on Adventurephiles.

The favorite smoke on the streets of Myanmar is what they call a cheroot. It’s a small hand-wrapped hybrid of a filter cigarette and a cigar, costs about ten cents at almost any food stall, and smokes in about 20 minutes.

Now, we have been known to try a cigar occasionally. And we found out about the local cheroots on our first day in Myanmar, at a street noodle stall in Yangon. There one of the sous-chefs was smoking one, saw us eyeing it and offered another to us.

You should know how difficult, if not impossible it is to find a cigar in SE Asia. People just don’t smoke them in the other countries, so maybe you could find a ridiculously expensive one at a resort hotel or those stinky Dutch Masters cigarillos. Anyway, once we were offered a cheroot, it was hard to refuse. And it was pretty good, like a mild and pleasant Dominican one.

Many days later, we saw them being made, and I am pleased to report that the cheroot is not only much more complicated to make than a cigar, which is usually just a few tobacco leaves rolled up, but all the cheroot’s many components are fully organic. Here is the recipe:

• Prepare chopped tobacco

• Mix in a variety of natural flavorings if you prefer, usually anise or mint

• Roll up 5 tobacco leaves on a stick

• Fill the tobacco leaves with desired quantity of chopped tobacco

• Brush prepared rice paste as glue on the leaves and roll around the chopped tobacco

• Attach a filter made of corn husks spiced with tamarind and pineapple

• Cut the filter to the right size

• Attach a rice paper band

• Light it up.

So, go organic; try a cheroot.

Cheroot market image source: [I, Doron, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons]

(For more pictures from Myanmar, CLICK HERE to view the slideshow at the end of the Myanmar itinerary page.) The post Cheroot, Cheroot, yaddada daddada daddada daddada first appeared on Adventurephiles.

For over three hundred years, roughly from the 9th to the 13th century, the kings and the court based in Bagan turned their power, wealth and spiritual dedication into monuments of brick and stone. Over 4000 payas – temples and pagodas – honoring Buddha once filled an area the size of Manhattan.

Half remain to see today. Tourists and pious pilgrims bustle over the area – by pony cart, oxcart, taxi, bicycle and foot – to see the grandest of these payas, worship the most revered of the Buddha images, or marvel at the spired landscape. It’s the greatest of these and the vast array that should qualify this as a UNESCO World Heritage Site like Angkor. The organization is helping with some restoration, but, till now, for reasons obscure and political, that has not happened.

Yet, what thrilled us most, however, was an extraordinary feature of the major royal temples that many do not notice or pay little attention to: the painted frescoes. Not content with decorative patterns along the vaulted ceilings and walls, unknown artists also applied rich colors to these walls and depicted countless Buddhas, endless forms of devotion, scenes from royal life, tales of the Buddha, native flora, and important legends.

Most notably in the payas called Gubyaukgyi, outside the old town, and Pahto tha Myarone within it, we could enter a special place and wonder at such figure painting and story telling in frescoes that even Italy would be proud of.

Or really just see, dimly by flashlight. For what’s left of the frescoes mostly rests in the gloom of interiors unlit or in pitch dark to avoid more light damage. And so little remains anyway.

In benighted efforts to modernize and clean up the pagodas in the 15th century, many of the temple frescoes were painted over in white paint that apparently cannot be scraped away. The earthquake of 1975 shook a lot of the wall stucco into dust, while it also tumbled many of the brick structures. We can only imagine how beautiful the temples must have been. However difficult to see, you don’t want to miss or pass quickly by what has survived.

Surely, the most magnificent of these temples are impressive, elegant in proportion or simply imposing in their design. Those in the Burmese style offer open, windowed passageways often two levels deep, a bit like a simple maze. Mon style temples feature dark interiors and more of the fresco paintings, preserved best by the dark.

Within many of these are gleaming golden Buddhas dating back as far as a thousand years ago. These are stunning and awe-inspiring works of art, but also powerful spiritual images for the Buddhist visitors. Two of the most notable images stand in the Ananda pagoda, dating from around 1100, whose name has many meanings, including “heaven,” for it was built from Indian models as an image of the celestial world. These two Buddhas, each 31 feet high (or just under 10 meters), also date from over a 1000 years ago. But Ananda’s walls are mostly white, with just remnants of some simple frescoing in places.

We were impressed by the Ananda temple, the image of heaven, and many of the payas here. In a single visit, though, the numerous temples and gold statues eventually blurred into one big Bagan edifice and infinite spires.

But, when we peered at those few frescoed walls that beam out of the darkness, we thought them heavenly.

(To view other pictures from Myanmar, CLICK HERE to view the slideshow at the end of the Myanmar itinerary page.) The post Heaven Sent: the Frescoes of Bagan first appeared on Adventurephiles.

The city of Mandalay was made famous in the West by a Kipling poem and the song made from it.

On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flying fishes play,
And the dawn comes up like thunder
Outta China ‘cross the bay.

That was when the British still occupied the country at the turn of the 20th century, and those flying fishes might have been the now endangered Irawaddy River dolphins. And we’re not here in monsoon season, so there is no thunder to report. Also, little sign of those colonial days has survived, as the British pursued its interests out of Yangon, located nearer to sea access, making Mandalay more of a backwater.

But Mandalay shows traces of a much older empire, when Burma was powerful, and trumpets loudly the country’s devotion to constructing Buddhist shrines, monasteries and nunneries. Not just an obsession with the kings of old, this devotion represents an ongoing, astonishing and even perplexing dedication of national resources.

Mandalay was the last capital of the Burmese kingdom under the last two kings, when it was faltering already. Nearby to the south two other capitals date back a thousand years. Nothing survives of Amarapura to tell the tale of that city. And at the four-time capital Innwa (or Ava to the British), only a trace of the royal buildings remain.

Now it’s home to a modest village of subsistence farmers, who manage to make extra cash off tourists. To see the few sites, you can hire a pony cart, clip-clopping as you might have done 200 years ago, though royal defenders have ceded ground to the pleas of souvenir hawkers of all ages

Amid these paltry remains, you also find two examples of the spiritual devotion we have seen demonstrated in myriad ways throughout the Mandalay area, prayers in wood, cement and gold.

In Ava, one example is the ruin of a 19th century temple built by devotees of Buddha; the other is a massive teakwood structure built by a hermit monk for study and prayer of other monks.

That is the essence of Mandalay: the legacy of the kings, the meager resources of the populace, and the expense they dedicate to religious structures that bring merit for the donors.

Back in the city itself, you do see modernizing. There is just one tall building with perhaps a few on the way. Older two or three story structures offering goods to the wealthy – electronics, mobile phones, fashions – line some of the major bustling streets and new supermarkets are appearing there as well.

But, just a few blocks away from these streets, you are back on mud streets connecting bamboo thatched wood homes, with roaming cattle and debris strewn widely on land and canals. A few blocks beyond this, you are even further back in time, amid subsistence farmland, with hand tilling, ox-drawn carts and endless plots for rice and peanuts.

But the empire is still visible in the center of the city. There squats the Citadel, the enormous moat encircled city of the last rulers before the British removed them in the early 1800s.

The Citadel is two miles square, and its moat still gleams in a shiny channel. Like the palace grounds in Hanoi, it’s mostly off-limits except to the military. But, within one central portion, you can view the last hurrah of the royal grandees. Though the original teakwood buildings were lost in a firestorm during WWII bombing, the current military leadership reproduced dozens of palace buildings, in cement this time. The buildings are empty, the grounds barren, but the scope and decoration of this copy are grand.

Yet you wonder why, in a poor country, the government would devote so much money to a re-creation of past royal grandeur in the traditional gold and red, the colors of prosperity and power. Or why relocate the capital to a new city out of Yangon, Nay-Pyi-Daw, for that matter? Perhaps the idea was to recall the victorious past of strong central rulers and the time of a powerful Burmese military.

But just as impressive in Mandalay are the manifold investments in spiritual structures. Only a few blocks away, a precisely patterned grid of domes and chapels occupy huge rectangular areas. In the oldest, one of the later kings commissioned an enormous effort to record and thereby preserve the holy Buddhist scriptures and key commentaries. His artisans copied each section of the texts from perishable palm leaf onto a marble tablet about 5 foot tall and 3 foot wide.

They placed each of these stele into its own domed chapel, a total of 1774 slabs and domes - reportedly the world’s largest book. Across the street, about a hundred years ago, a hermit monk sponsored a similar array with the core texts, about half the number of stele.

A short distance across town, people flock to worship at one of the three holiest images of Buddha, agleam in a golden chapel. The story goes that the Buddha came to the statue and breathed on it. To pay homage, people buy expensive golden statues and flowers from the adjacent stalls. They also purchase gold leaf pieces about an inch square of varying thicknesses and prices.

They apply these to the image itself so that their prayers will be answered. A hundred years ago, the statue’s body was fairly lean; now the endless application of gold leaf has added a foot or more to the lower body and legs so they appear to be covered with gold balls, while the upper body has gathered numerous gold chains and lockets from special givers. Appropriately, in the entryway, a prominent display shows photos of the long-time leader of the country paying tribute to this Buddha.

You expect excess from the royal family and the ruling class, but monks and commoners? You can see that even more at the ultimate expressions of piety on the Sagaing Hills, the Beverly Hills of payas or holy places, across the Irrawaddy River.

Narrow roads wind up and down the hillsides amid large monasteries and nunneries and payas, over 2000 of them. New ones appear all the time, and the rest are regularly renovated, painted or retouched with gold leaf. More money flows from the well-to-do to support the spiritual activity of the monks and nuns. Why? These hills are considered especially holy and people tell various legends of miracles and wondrous things that occurred here. We heard one tale about one of the many monks who have meditated and prayed in the original limestone caverns. He supposedly entered nirvana while in residence. So some buildings wedged into the hillside offer man-made caverns to satisfy the monastic demand.

Our guide told us that his father had spent thousands of dollars for a paya, an enormous sum for his family. And so different pagodas gather donations based on whether a family had a relative or friend who was a monk there, or tradition for that family, or superstition.

We know that big money in the west can flow into ever larger churches or prayer centers, so that these can function and grow. That is a typical form of devotion. But, here in Mandalay, the average income is only 5 to 10 percent of an American’s. We can afford to add grand houses for the spiritual life.

Here in a very poor country that is trying to advance its material well-being, you keep thinking that spending by the wealthy and all the unwealthy might be best directed somewhat in other ways. Of course, we recognize that too much material gain may not be the right answer either. For, if you believe that creating monasteries and temples is meritorious work, perhaps the trade-off is worthwhile.

(For more pictures from Myanmar, CLICK HERE to view the slideshow at the end of the Myanmar itinerary page.) The post Miracles and wonders in Mandalay first appeared on Adventurephiles.

We really didn’t know what to expect in Yangon and Myanmar. With the American embargo here, and little information, plus the insistence by our travel agent on booking us into deluxe hotels and pre-set meals, we had an impression of a backward country where one might not dare to tread by oneself.

In other parts of SE Asia, however, we had heard very positive comments from other travelers who said things here were progressing rapidly. And then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just come to visit, and that was encouraging. Still, we were a bit uncertain about what we would find.

We can now report, with a day’s impressions, that we found this city of 6 million people much like other large ones in SE Asia. Perhaps in some respects it’s a decade behind the others, but it offers many wonderful things to the traveler.

There are the main sights, of course, which typically means the pagodas, or payas here. There is the big one, Shwedagon, dating from 2600 years ago, adorned with an enormous golden stupa from 600 years ago, and constantly renovated and enhanced with side chapels – a rival in size and scope to the royal palace temple in Bangkok.

There is another gold stupa in the center of town, the distance from which the British colonial overlords set the address system still used today. And then there is the largest Buddha statue we have seen, a reclining image 70 meters (225 feet) long.

And in town, there are dozens of major English-style buildings dating from the late 19th and early 20th century erected during the British occupation, buildings repurposed for other commercial or government use. Plus a host of minor buildings from that time.

That’s the beaten track here. But if you dare to tread outside this narrow track, you find surprising delights.

On the northern edge of the central city is a large lake and park we visited, with a variety of things to enjoy. A simple, but inviting, botanical garden that includes organic vegetable growing for research, and next to which a dozen flower stalls offer gorgeous orchids and flowers. A separate area for children to play. Also, an area for evening and weekend entertainment, filled with many diverse casual restaurants and a supersized, ornate imitation of a royal barge for major parties.

On our first night, as we heard from across the lake, this area featured a raucous beauty contest for Ms. DR, sponsored by DR cosmetics.

On the streets of downtown Yangon, you see a vibrant street life akin to other SE Asian cities, but with much less crowding and noise. There are many high end restaurants downtown, plus the typical inviting local ones that spill onto the street. Unlike other cities in SE Asia, however, the street stalls offer wide ranging cuisines, appealing to local, Chinese, Indian and Thai tastes. We even found two city supermarkets faster than we found them in Hanoi.

Quirky new buildings nestle in among the worn ones and the even older British ones, while larger construction projects appear on many blocks. Better yet, you can actually walk on the sidewalk, as long as you are careful to avoid the gaping holes in the patchwork paving that will drop you into the sewer if you’re not careful.

Unlike other major Asian cities, scooters and cycles are not allowed, therefore don’t park all over the sidewalks. Many of the cars are beaters, especially the taxis, yet newer and luxury cars are surprisingly common. Oddly, most feature a steering wheel on the right side, despite the switch to driving on the right in 1975. It is the job of the passengers to assist the driver in making a left turn.

Throughout the central city, religious institutions of diverse sorts mix amicably, and large donations clearly flow to sustain them.

The grand brick-red Catholic church, St. Mary’s, sits near a large mosque. Near the central Buddhist pagoda, a commodious Baptist church is open to all. There is in Buddhism, the principal religion here, a wide-open acceptance of all. The Shwedagon pagoda, one of their holiest religious sites, is currently lit in red and green at night for the Christmas, and New Year, holidays.

Even the night of our arrival, our first impression was a strong one: a fancy new airport terminal, and an uncrowded and efficient immigration queue, with officials happy to teach us a few words (Thank you = chezubay; Hello = mingalabar). Then, a drive into town along multi-laned, well paved roads, with many cars, but a much more disciplined traffic system. For example, cars entering a roundabout/rotary actually yielded to those already in the rotary.

Our deluxe hotel, though not our usual fare, was one of many ringing the lake, making an ensemble that would be the envy of any city. This hotel, we learned, was where Hillary Clinton stayed during her visit to the leaders here. To serve patrons like us, moreover, a host of fine restaurants nearby offered more high end dining at U.S. prices.

To be fair, however, Yangon may be about a decade behind other large cities here. ATMs are now appearing, but only within the last month or so. Street stalls offer push-button telephones for those who have no service, and you see few cell phones either, though a number of mobile phone stores. Electricity is an off and on thing, and generators are ubiquitous for businesses large and small. With less street lighting, however, there is a welcome dark that settles here, and you can actually see some stars.

Finally, we’re a curiosity to many residents here, since tourism has not quite hit fully, but not as much as you would think. We stopped to take a break for a beer at a very local bottle shop here, and a few people inside the shop came out to stare at us, plus the local crazy guy stopped to caution us about something, but otherwise we just became part of the scene, greeted by young children in smiles when a few passed by.

So we found Yangon very much like and in some ways unlike the other Asian cities on our trip. Getting outside the tourist track showed us how comfortable and accommodating the city could be. And perhaps our very normality in the streets helped those we met in Yangon grow a bit as well.

(For more pictures from Myanmar, CLICK HERE to view the slideshow at the end of the Myanmar itinerary page.) The post First impressions from Myanmar – revealing the city of Yangon first appeared on Adventurephiles.