98. Inle Lake

You would think that checking out of our floating hotel, spending several hours on the river and climbing up a world record pile of bricks would be enough for one day, but you'd be wrong. We then drove to the Mandalay airport, arrived about an hour before our flight but the place was deserted, I mean lights off deserted. We managed to wake up a couple of people to process us, then waited as tourists trickled in.



We were headed to Inle Lake, in the Shan State, northeastern Burma. In our last world record, we landed at Heho airport, the world's smallest, which is hard to believe because it was quite busy. It's a completely dysfunctional airport, located high in the mountains, and usually fogged in, but it has no navigation equipment so flights are canceled more often than not. If your flight does manage to land (ours did) the airport is on an army basis, and no cars, taxis etc are allowed anywhere near the terminal. So you have to trudge about a mile down a dirt road with your bags to find transportation.



Luggage was dumped in a huge pile on the floor, but a very helpful airport person somehow organized it all, found our luggage and walked us over to meet our guide. Actually he introduced us to a big pool of goodlooking guides, who parted to make way for our guide, a gigantic (in height and weight) transvestite. It was actually hard to tell if he's a transvestite since it's pretty common for men to wear skirts, but he had very long, painted nails, lots of eye makeup and a fan that he used all the time a la Karl Lagerfeld notwithstanding that it's really cold.



His plan was to drive us three hours to Pindaya caves, then explore the caves, then another three hours to the hotel, which would have made about twenty hours of sightseeing that day. To his dismay, we opted for the one hour trip to the hotel instead. (In case you have trouble figuring out the photos, the big skirtwearer on the dock is the guide, and the house below is the hotel.)