Travel Diary - Inle lake part 2

After haggling at the market we jumped on the boat to continue our tour of inle lake.

The next stop was a local weavery where  they weaved fabric from lotusflower stems. They had a big lotusflower field right outside the weavery where they grew and collected lotus flowers for the fabric.

After collecting a bunch of flowers a girl cut the stems into pieces, pulled out the thin strings from inside the stem and rolled them together to make a thread.

Then another woman took the thread and used a spinning wheel to put the thread on spools, knitting together thread stumps when necessary.

Finally, they had spools of lotus flower thread and could start weaving lotus fabric - an airy fabric that is rough to the touch and looks similar to linnen.

They also made silk fabric and sold them all in their little shop.

Then we continued our tour to the next place - a local pagoda. At first we were going to go inside but after seeing that they charged you for both entry and for having a camera we decided not to - we had already seen a few pagodas after all.

So instead we just walked around the premise for a while before going to our next stop.

The next stop was a monastery where a few monks and cats lived and the story of buddha was painted on the walls. As usual they had golden buddha statues, but this seemed to have recieved a lot of donations because they had a big golden buddha on an altar covered with sparkling jewels. A very pretty sight.

It was pretty dark in there though so we didn't get such a good picture of it.

After the monastery we swung by the floating lotusgarden on our way back to the hostel and finally just collapsed on our beds. It was only a little past lunch-time but after a long ride with the nightbus, an early morning and the eventful tour we were ready to drop with fatigue, and so we both fell asleep.

//Wayu & Robert