Reflections on Aesthetics and Tourism at Inle Lake

So far, this country is ludicrously picturesque. In Yangon, I marvelled at the crumbling colonial architecture and Shwedagon Paya (by the way, just yesterday the New York Times ran an article about efforts to preserve and restore Yangon's architecture). The last two days I've been on and around Inle Lake, where it feels less like I'm visiting a real place and more like I've been immersed in some sort of virtual reality tourism documentary. The flat, placid lake merges almost imperceptibly into wetlands, which merge almost imperceptibly into dry land, and many of the surrounding villages are perched on slender stilts over the water. The local ways of life feel like they were designed for a tourism brochure (and they do now indeed feature in countless such brochures), from the floating gardens, where waterborne horticulturalists tend trellised vegetables that, like their homes, are raised on stilts above the water, to the Inchon fishermen, who perch on one leg on the sterns of their long, flat dugout canoes, holding large cone-shaped nets with both hands, and paddling the boat by wrapping the other leg around a long paddle.

Yesterday I had my tour of Inle Lake: along with two other couples, I got in one of these canoes that had been fitted with a primitive outboard motor, and spent the day touring the lake and the surrounding villages. The wetlands extend several miles in from the lake itself on most sides, and we chugged up channels of water cut through the swamp till we arrived at one stilt-raised village after another. If we'd had a mounted gun on the boat I could swear we were participating in a reenactment of Apocalypse Now. 

The tour took in the lively market town of Inthein, behind which were some crumbling ancient stupas that gave me a foretaste of what awaits in Bagan (as far as I can tell, "stupa," "zedi," and "pagoda" are used interchangeably here to describe the bell-shaped religious structures--I'll stick to "stupa" from here on in, as it's familiar in English, and unlike "pagoda," it doesn't mean something confusingly different as well); a couple monasteries, including the massive and stilt-raised Nga Hpe Kyaung monastery, with an impressive collection of artful Buddha statues; and a number of workshops of traditional handicrafts: silversmithing, silk weaving, and cheroot cigar manufacture, packed with crushed star anise rather than tobacco. Our guide also chugged us slowly through some floating gardens and slowed to a crawl as we passed some of the Inchon fishermen, so that we could get some great photos. The fact that each chug of the motor gave the whole boat a gentle kick is only a partial excuse for the fact that I didn't get a single outstanding photo on this day of obscene photo ops. I encourage you to look up images on Google. 

Let me return to that word "obscene." The whole experience was a bit uncomfortable. It doesn't take a poetic soul to find it unseemly to click away at fishermen like they're animals in a zoo (it takes only a slightly more poetic soul to find it unseemly to click away at animals in a zoo like they're animals in a zoo). But even the workshop visits made me uncomfortable. And this despite the fact that they were excellently curated: an English-speaking guide would lead us through the workshop, leading us through the manufacturing process, invite us to interact with the craftspeople, and gently steer us toward the workshop's sales centre without any heavy pressure to buy. Just the sort of experience that inclines one to buy, since one has made a more personal connection to the crafts one is buying (and buy I did). But you have to be economically retarded not to realize that there's a complex system of kickbacks involved here, where our guide gets a share for taking us to just these workshops, the hotel gets a kickback from the guide for setting up the tour, and so on. Nothing wrong or corrupt with any of that. But, despite (or maybe because of) how pleasantly arranged the whole thing was, the whole experience felt incredibly packaged. 

And I think what made me uncomfortable about all this had very little to do with how staged my experience was, but rather with the effect my presence was having on the local economy and way of life. Until very recently, tourism was a very minor part of Myanmar's economy. I'm part of the first wave of mass tourism in this country. And while tourism can be an economic boon to a region, it also has all sorts of adverse effects, from setting up a skewed economy, where the English-speaking, hotel-owning gatekeepers control a flow of money that trickles unevenly down, setting up new and not always healthy hierarchies of wealth and power, to commodifying traditional ways of life, to the point where the locals themselves no longer know whether they're fishing that way because it's the best way to catch fish or because the tourists want to see them doing it. 

And these reflections tie back in to my remarks above about how picturesque Inle Lake is. I'm sure the Inchon fishermen don't go about their daily rounds thinking, "gosh, how wonderfully picturesque my way of life is." More likely, they're thinking, "gosh, I hope I catch some fish so that I can feed myself and my family." It takes an outsider to find a way of life picturesque (I didn't find it picturesque to be racing across Christ Church's main quad to get to my tutorial on time, but the tourists photographing me did--and perhaps regretted that I wasn't wearing a tweed three-piece and an academic gown). Beauty in some sense is in the eye of the beholder, and it takes a visitor like me to find Inle Lake beautiful in this particular way. But the presence of me and people like me is also not-so-slowly transforming the beauty of the lake into a display: we want to gaze upon the authentic living article, but our gaze risks turning it to stone. I don't want to deny that the locals can also respond aesthetically to their surroundings and way of life, but they certainly don't find it exotic. And maybe the lesson here is that certain forms of aesthetic response are inherently morally corrupt. I'm in some sense wrong--aesthetically, morally--to find Inle Lake beautiful in the way that I do. I said the whole place feels like a virtual reality tourism documentary, and that kind of response turns it into one: I'm seeing the place theatrically, and that way of looking at it turns it into a theatrical make-believe. 

On the other hand, I can't easily wish myself and my fellow tourists away. It's not just that, despite what I said, Inle Lake is very beautiful and worth visiting. It's also that the locals now depend on us. I'm staying in the gateway town on Nyaungshwe, which is under heavy construction of new hotels and restaurants and the like. A lot of people have bet their livelihoods that tourism in this area will only grow, and the local economy--all the way down to the quaint fishermen and floating gardeners--will suffer a great deal if the money pump dries up. 

All of these musings are familiar to anyone who's done much travelling in the developing world and thought at all about the impact of their presence. But it's hitting me more here because, I'm interested to find, Myanmar is much more on the "beaten path" of tourism than Iran or Ethiopia, which were my last two destinations. Iran in particular has an economy and prosperity that depends not at all on the presence of tourists and it was accordingly very easy there to get to know locals and see sights without feeling like it was turning into--like I was turning it into--a show. And it's fine and good for me to say that I prefer to be off the beaten path of tourism. But all that means for the most part is that I'm part of a vanguard that's making the path a little more beaten. 

All that said, I had a much less uncomfortable, if more low-key day on my first day here. I rented a bike and did some cycling around the northern part of the lake, which involved dropping in on some hilltop stupas as well as a forest monastery about a half an hour inland from the village of Maing Thauk. Forest monasteries tend to be much more remote, so this was a fairly tame affair, but it was also incredibly pleasant and peaceful. The two monks I encountered seemed genuinely happy to see me, even though the cynical part of me realizes that here I really am part of an advance guard that will gradually turn these monks into tourist attractions. Here, as at a couple of other points on my trip, I was amused to realize that my limited exposure to Pali gives me a common language with Burmese Buddhists, I guess like a Chinese scholar with limited exposure to Latin showing up in the Vatican. My knowledge of Pali doesn't exactly allow for small talk, but I was at least able to surprise and delight the monk by telling him that I take refuge in the Triple Gem of the Buddha, the dhamma, and the sangha. He then offered me a cigarette. 

And then at the end of that day I got some "authentic" theatricality. There's a small traditional puppet theatre in Nyaungshwe, where I and four other tourists saw a delightful series of short performances by a third-generation marionette artist. He explained that his was a dying art form--the young people today aren't interested in puppetry and prefer movies and TV--so that it's only really kept alive by tourists. So I might be turning the Inchon fishermen into performers, but at least I'm helping the real performer stay afloat as well. Although I suppose it's Western influence more broadly that's turned Myanmar youth away from puppetry in the first place.

I now have a quiet half day ahead of me before leaving this afternoon on a night bus that should get me to Hsipaw at 4 in the morning. Why it can't leave in the evening and get me to Hsipaw at a reasonable hour, I don't know. At least I got two good nights of sleep the last two nights. But the main consequence of that is that I only yesterday started to feel just how sleep deprived I'd been.