Pictures from January 2008 Myanmar Trip

Sue and I spent two weeks in Myanmar with five other people. We traveled both north and south of Yangon. Perhaps the most interesting single place we saw as Bagan, and after that might be Inle lake. There are so many very different places to see. This trip is described in my blog at www.opportunityfoundation.org/ofblog.

I took thousands of pictures on this and a previous trip. Selecting the few pictures here was difficult. It seems I left out almost everything.
 

There are hundreds of monuments like this at Bagan.
 

At Bagan. Boys coming home after school carrying lunch containers.
 

Girls selling laquerware. This is made by hand near Bagan in a long process requiring many steps. The two item types shown were $3 and $1. They apply Tanaka paste on their cheeks both for decoration and as a sun block.
 

There is nothing else like the sun setting on the monuments in Bagan.
 

Just a road in a village in Myanmar. Somewhere around Mandalay.
 

Boatman on Inle Lake. He came over to visit right after this picture. The lake is shallow here. The net cage will sit on the bottom, trapping the fish.
 

Everything is on the water at Inle Lake. These are kids going home after school.
 

I took many pictures of the endless variety of foot bridges across the main "streets" at Inle Lake towns.
 

Boat landing on a river feeding into Inle Lake. You can see the nose of our boat at the right.
 

Children in an Inle Lake village. They learn to swim before they learn to walk here.
 

Nga Phe Kyaung monestary on Inle Lake. Known for its Jumping Cats. Sorry, no cat photos, my camera battery ran out just after this.
 

Many children cannot afford to go even to the public schools. This 13 year old girl works making Burmese cigars at a factory built over Inle Lake.
 

From the bridge. Women washing clothes and themselves. We stopped here for a half hour while they repaired the bridge. We let some big trucks go over to try it out before we did.
 

Kids by the roadside. I can't remember why we were stopped here.
 

One of the entry promenades to the Shwe Dagon temple in Yangon. Our guide, Shine, is in black.
 

Employees at a village cotton yarn factory.
 

Young monks at a small monestary we drove by.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of stupas near Inle Lake. In another twenty years these will fall down from the bushes and trees growing into them.
 

Monks lined up before the noon meal at a monestary across the river from Mandalay.