Inle Lake is one of the few places on Earth where people row standing up, with one leg. Its Intha fishermen — the "sons of the lake" — balance at the stern of a flat wooden skiff, wrap a leg around the oar and drive the boat forward while their hands stay free to work a tall conical net. The stance was born of necessity: reeds and floating weed cover so much of the surface that a seated rower cannot see ahead, so the Intha stood up and taught their legs to paddle. The lake sits at 880 metres in the Shan hills of eastern Myanmar, ringed by blue ridges and rarely more than two metres deep in the dry season. It is the country's second-largest lake and, since 2015, its first UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, holding seventeen kinds of fish found nowhere else on Earth.
Life here is arranged entirely around water. Whole villages stand on stilts above the lake, linked by boat rather than road; between them float long garden beds of matted weed and mud, staked with bamboo, where farmers grow tomatoes from a canoe. You travel by narrow longboat through the morning mist, past workshops where women draw thread from lotus stems — a fibre found almost nowhere else — and silversmiths at their fires, to golden pagodas that rise straight from the water. At the lake's heart stands Phaung Daw Oo, where five small Buddha images have vanished under so many decades of gold leaf that they have lost their shape. The lake is under real strain today, its depth shrinking as silt and invasive water hyacinth spread, yet the leg-rowers still work the shallows at dawn, and at dusk their silhouettes tip against an orange sky while monastery bells carry across the water.