Festival

We were in Inle during the three week period of the Phaung Daw Oo festival. Every morning by the one of the big temples on the lake four golden Buddha statues were ferried around the lake on a royal barge. They also had boat races with long boats that had over one hundred people rowing on each boat.

Because of all the warnings about Burma’s government and restrictions, I had signed up for an organized group trip for this country. I wasn’t sure if I could travel here on my own, and it sounded pretty dangerous. It turned out that traveling here is not hard at all.

Traveling in big groups pretty much sucks, so when we got to the festival at 6 am I split off for the day to travel alone. It felt good to spread my wings and do my own thing. Traveling alone is cool because you have the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want, but if you come across a cool experience you don’t have anyone to share it with.

I watched the festival from some super crowded docks. Groups of kids would come up to me, and I would make a face and they would all scream and run away. “Min-gala-ba” means hello in Burmese, and was one of the few words that I knew. When I would say it to the kids they would all laugh and dance around saying “Mingalaba Mingalaba” while laughing. It turns out that “Mingalaba” is a word imposed on the Burmese language by westerners who wanted a formal word for Hello. The only people who use this word are foreigners, so that’s why the kids were laughing and dancing. The literal translation for the informal greeting that the Burmese actually use is “Have you had your rice today?”

There was quite a bit of military at the festival. A bunch of young guys walking around with machine guns on their shoulders. I saw some of the soldiers run into friends and start joking around with them. They have guns, but they don’t seem very scary. There is really no need to govern people in Inle. They are so peaceful it seems silly to bother them.

After the festival ended I caught a boat ride back to the hotel. It started dumping rain. I wanted to get a water taxi into Nyaungshwe, a town on the northern end of the lake. The guy at the front desk said that he had just gotten a call that Nyaungshwe had been flooded from the rain. I went back to the room to figure out what to do. I ended up falling asleep.

I must have crashed out hard, because when I woke up the maid had taken the dirty towels and left some water bottles on my bed side table. It was around noon and the rain had stopped. I called the front desk and the guy excitedly said “Oh yes yes, you go Nyangshwe now.” I love it when a plan comes together.