Our Trip to Indain Was Not In Vain

After the visit to Taung-To, we took the hour boat ride back to the resort, where we had lunch and were entertained by a number of traditional dance performances.  The dancers wore many different beautiful costumes, and we were even entertained by some mythical animals.  Definitely check the photos for some of the costumes.

Most of the group joined in the last dance, but some dancing impaired people, such as myself, preferred to take photos.  Poor Lynne apparently felt her lunch was in danger of reappearing, so she headed back to her bungalow.  The good news is, she was able to rejoin us later in the afternoon.  A couple people felt a little choppy at the time.  I had a sore throat/cough/slight head cold, but powered through it, even when Rich falsely accused me of giving it to him (just because I had the symptoms first and he caught the same thing doesn’t mean. . .well, I suppose it does.  Never mind).

From there, we took one last roundtrip on the boat to our last visit to pagodas – the famed ruined Stupas of Indain.  It was stupendous.  First, we cruised up the visually stunning Indain River to the town of Indain, where we successfully fought off the street vendors.  The river had a pretty good flow going, so we enjoyed the trip up river, along with the views of the fields, the nearby towns, the footbridges over the river, the mountains, and the scenes of men fishing or loading riverbed mud into bags.

The ruined pagodas look like something out of an Indiana Jones movie (btw, Harrison Ford, that’s not a hint – no need to make any more).  They were wrecked, falling apart, and yet quite impressive to look at.  We walked around the grounds, quite blown away by the brick Stupas with their carvings (some headless, some intact).  We headed back to the resort for our seventh, and last, long boat ride on Inle Lake (we took a few short rides too).  Riding with the river flow, we sped down the Indain back to Inle Lake -- it was the best boat ride of the trip.

We spent an hour at an orphanage (went via bus), where we did Q&A with the whole orphanage (mostly on their own from the civil war – given how many were seventh and eighth graders, clearly it was particularly brutal probably eight to ten years ago.  We donated enough rice and potatoes for the orphanage to eat for three days on the rice, and two weeks on the potatoes (and there was more rice).  Ye Ye, if my recall on those lengths of time are wrong, send me an email with the right lengths and I will fix.

We had a very nice private dinner in the resort’s garden, a last group dinner together before heading back to reality (or what passes for it these days).