Inle Lake is a shallow lake in the Shan hills of eastern Myanmar, at 880 metres, where the Intha people row their boats standing on one leg, live in villages on stilts over the water, and farm garden beds that float. The leg-rowing is the picture: a fisherman stands at the stern of a narrow wooden boat, hooks one leg around the oar and rows with it, hands free to work the tall conical net that he lowers into the shallows, a technique developed so that he can see over the reeds, and at first light the boats are out across the water in silhouette. The gardens are the surprise. Long beds of matted water hyacinth and mud, staked to the lake bottom with bamboo, float in rows down the narrow channels, and farmers tend tomatoes, beans and flowers on them from canoes, moving between the rows on the water; the lake grows much of the region's vegetables on land that rises and falls with it.
The villages are reached only by boat, houses of wood and woven bamboo on stilts with the water beneath the floor, and inside the working sheds are silversmiths at their fires, cheroot-rollers, and weavers pulling thread from lotus stems, snapping a stem so that fine sticky threads stretch from the break, rolling them together by hand and weaving them into cloth that only Inle makes. The lake's holiest place is the Phaung Daw Oo pagoda, where golden stupas rise from the water and five ancient Buddha images sit so heavily gilded by pilgrims that they have lost their shape; around the October full moon four of them ride a golden royal barge clockwise around the lake for eighteen days, towed by teams of leg-rowers pulling in unison, the largest festival in the region. Long-tail boats run the length of the lake in a day from the town of Nyaungshwe, past the markets that rotate between the villages. Inle is a lake that people have made into a village, a farm and a road, and they row it on one leg.