Inle Lake - a night market and a winery

We arrived at Nyaungshwe, the 'gateway to Inle Lake', in good time for a small group of us to head out to the local night market. It is really more of an evening market, and is quite small, but the quality is good and the prices are very cheap.  We wandered our way along the street, looking at all of the foodstalls, before deciding on the very first one.

The guy here was friendly and helpful, and once we had settled ourselves somewhat gingerly onto the tiny low chairs, we soon tucked into a small feast of tempura vegetables, fried tofu, tea leaf salad, Shan noodle soup (non spicy for us), and a palata, which is basically a kind of pancake - a banana one in this case. All were very tasty.

We went back another time and tried the place at the other end, which some preferred, but we still liked the first one best.

If you aren't sure about street food - though to be honest if it is a popular stall and the food is served hot, then it is one of the best ways to eat - then I can vouch for a somewhat dubiously named place called Beyond Taste. We went there for a group meal, and whilst obviously more expensive than street food, it was still decent value and the food was good. The drinks were cheap too.

We also decided to try out the somewhat unlikely idea of Burmese wine, with a trip to Red Mountain, one of the two local wineries. You can do a quick tour of the process, and then you can sit out in the garden and either try a tasting flight, or just buy by the glass or bottle. It was a great place to sit and watch the sun set. As for the wine, some weren't too great, but we found a couple that were most enjoyable.

Thanakha and jaggery en route to Kalaw

From the moment we crossed the border into Myanmar, we noticed that many of the women had painted circles or stripes of what looked like clay onto their cheeks - or sometimes even a more elaborate leaf pattern. We asked Myo about this and he explained that it is a form of sun block that women use and also put on their children.

It is called thanakha. You buy a small log of wood from the thanakha tree and grind it on a stone slab called a kyauk pyin, with a tiny bit of water, to make a thin paste that you apply to your skin. It is a very old tradition, and it supposed to be excellent as both moisturiser and sunscreen. Women are considered more beautiful for wearing it - indeed Myo is certainly that any future bride of his would wear the thanakha.

Well on our drive from Bagan to Kalaw, we stopped off at a roadside place where we got to try this for ourselves, and soon all of the women in the group had thanakha leaves painted on our cheeks.

That wasn't the only thing we could try here either. They were also tapping the palm trees for their sap, which they do by climbing up the tree, making a small cut and leaving a pot tied under it to collect the sap that drips out. From that sap, they make drinks and sweets.

The sweet is called jaggery, and is very rich tasting and crumbly, and popular across Myanmar with adults, children and we tourists too. It is made by simply boiling the sap. Here, they were making it plain, or mixed with either shredded coconut or jujube date paste.

And then there are the drinks. The first is palm wine, or toddy, which is made by fermenting the sap. It is quite low in alcohol, so when they want something stronger, they can distill the toddy.

The other drink we tried was a mix of jaggery, water and sticky rice, which is fermented for four days - they had a pot bubbling away while we were there and the smell was fairly pungent. They all tasted OK, but I won't be rushing to get any.

They were very hospitable at this stop, as we were all offered tea and green tea leaf salad too.

And we got to feed the ox that was pulling the grinding stone to extract the peanut oil from the peanuts. The ox gets the leftover dried out peanut, which it seems to rather like, so it's a win win situation.

After that it was back on the road to Kalaw, with a quick stop for lunch. As we reached our destination, which is another of these British hill stations, we were stopped by the tourist police, and we all had to get off again to have another group photo taken.

Then it was on to the Thein Taung Paya monastery where we were doing our last night of camping. There was a great view of Kalaw from the monastery, so every so often other visitors would appear and be quite surprised to find us camping there.

One particular pair of male Chinese tourists were especially fascinated by our dinner preparations, and seemed to think it perfectly acceptable to shove their huge cameras right in the faces of Nic and the others in the cook group, without even saying hello. It made me glad that I am more considerate of people when taking my own photos, even if it means I can't always get the picture that I'd like