Burma – Samkar

It takes a three hour boat ride to reach Samkar from the Inle Lake.

My boatman and I left way before sunrise and had crosse Lake Inle to the south when the sun raised above the mountain. Due to the humidity of the lake clouds were lying like cotton on the lower mountains.
The passage between the two lakes is quite narrow. The morning mist was only gradually lifting. I wondered how the boatman was finding his way.
We arrived just in time for the morning market. It was one of the five day markets, I visited already in Aungban and Indein. This one was the most remote one. Only to tourist boats arrived after me.
Unique to this market was that a lot of the families from the surrounding villages came by boat and left also this way with all their purchases. Of course not all of them.

In order to load their bags onto the boats they used oxcarts which would go into the shallow water.
Samkar was once the seat of a dynasty of Shan-princes. But the glory is long gone. Most visitors come because of the crumbling ruins. Some of the pagodas are standing in the water.

Next to the Tharkong Pagoda above is a small sake factory with a restaurant. They distill the sake from a mixture of rice and wheat. First batch has around 15 % of alcohol. With the second and third turn it is “enriched” to 45%. They are proud to export it to Thailand. I would simply say, it is a liquor hard to sell somewhere else..

On the way back I could appreciate the landscape and the riverside which had been covered in mist in the morning. It was a nice day on the lake.