Today was our big day on Inle Lake. We left Nyaung Shwe in the morning and made it by boat down to Ywama Village, one of the many swimming communities (i.e. made of stilt houses) in the lake.

Similar to the Kalaw area, the communities around Inle Lake run a five-day rotating market – and today the market was held in Ywama and the market was our first stop.

We left the boats close to Aung Mingalar Pagoda and made our way to the market. This was clearly a tourist affair – goods on offer were mostly souvenirs, with only a few booths and vendors thrown in that would actually cater for the needs of the locals. The market was busy nevertheless and there was loads to watch and see.

We did pass through the market and had an extensive walk around the village following a system of bridges to a local silversmith, where the process from silver ore to a finished piece of jewelry was explained and shown to us (of course followed by a shopping opportunity).

It now was back to the boats again and on to the Royal Barge Museum, to see the barges used by the locals to transport Buddha images across the lake during the yearly Phaung Daw U Festival. We continued to the Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda on the other side of canal to see the actual Buddha images, that are being transported during the festival. The interesting bit here is, that so much gold leaf has been applied to these Buddha images, that they actually look like golden pieces of rock, the original Buddha shape cannot be seen anymore.

From the temple it was on to the next industry on the lake – lotus weaving. Once more we were introduced into the process and then shown the steps involved (from the harvest of the lotus and the thread production to the actual weaving).

It was time for a late lunch after another shopping opportunity.

We were now at the Southern end of the lake – and a long way back was ahead of us. We had two further stops along the way – one at a blacksmith (still operating like in medieval times) and the other one at the local wharf at Nampan village.

Before leaving the lake and making it into the canal for Nyaung Shwe, we – of course – also had the opportunity to take some of those classic Inle Lake fishermen photos. Obviously the only thing, those fisherman actually catch, is tourist money … their job is not catching fish – but posing for tourists … Real fishermen still exist, but they are more involved with the fishing process and tend to stay away from the tourist routes.