The plan today was to go to Innlay Lake and to be honest I didn’t know why I was supposed to care about it. I don’t really study the itinerary too much on the tours that I take, so if there is something that we are going to do that I’ve never heard of, then chances are I’m going to be surprised, mostly surprised for the good, and Innlay Lake was one of those surprises. We were going to take a boat along the canals for a few miles until the canal opens up into the lake. That was the plan, and that was about all I knew what to expect. First, the boats we took were thin, flat bottom boats with propellers that stick very far behind the boat. It’s hard to explain, but if you’ve ever seen them you know what I’m describing. 

As for the day’s itinerary, I think that there were just too many places that we went to actually walk you through each one. I guess I could spend the time, but I haven’t really been in the writing mood since I’ve been on this trip, as I’m sure you may be able to tell by the grammatical errors that I’ve been making. I think though it would be good to give a little bit of a background to the lake and city. First the lake is pretty large, just off the top of my head, I’d say that it was about twenty miles long and ten miles across at its widest, but it seems to be very shallow, almost like a swamp. Everywhere you look there are small islands of grass popping out of the water, this has a way of almost making it look a little bit like a swamp. Also, nearly everywhere you look there are fishermen net fishing from shallow boats, and although that in itself is very picturesque, the fishermen have developed a rather strange way to move through the water as they’re laying their nets. They hook a leg around an oar and without using their arms they row themselves around. It really looks strange, but they’ve been doing it so long, and it has become so “famous” that they even have races with this style of rowing.

It took us maybe about an hour to get to our first destination, a lotus thread weaving workshop. Again, it was the journey not the destination that I liked the most. The city that contained all of the day’s destinations is called, Maing Thout (I think), but what makes it so interesting is that it is on stilts. The houses are on stilts, the markets too, in fact nearly everything in the city was on stilts with each building being connected to others through bridges. If you’ve seen the movie Waterworld, then you’ve got an idea of what this town/city looked like.  The farms that they grew mostly tomatoes weren’t on stilts, but they had to harvest from boats, because the plants were in effect growing out of the water.

As I  mentioned at the beginning of this post we went to too many places to write specifically about each, but I’ll load lots of images of the interesting things on today’s sightseeing.