We had one final day in Inle Lake, but had squeezed nearly everything into our huge boat tour on the previous day. The one thing that had bugged me was the feeling we had missed something in the village of Indein. We saw a few temple ruins but nothing as grand as the descriptions made out. We decided to charter a boat back to Indein to see what we missed. I walked down towards the canal to find a captain to take us out there, and found our boat trip guide hanging around on the street. He didn’t have any workfor the day so I explained what we wanted to do. We agreed a price of $18 for the trip there and 3-4hrs waiting time whilst we explored.
So we set back off across the lake. As the canals to Indein are on the south end of the lake the total journey time was around 45 minutes in total. Although, in addition to the locals going about their day we did see a man washing his buffalo so it wasn’t too boring a journey.
We finally arrived at Indein, walked through the village and took a left at the road (rather than the right-turn of the) previous day. Across a small river we finally found the proper site we were looking for – a large temple topped hill with a covered walkway leading up. The walkway was lined with souvenir vendors but to either side there was much more exciting stuff. The sides of the hill were covered in small stupas and temples, numbering in their hundreds. I’m firmly of the belief that ruined old overgrown temples are far cooler than new shiny ones, and this site was perfect for that. Nature had given a good go of reclaiming the stone of the temples with plants and even trees growing all over them.
As we got towards the top of the hill we came across newer stupas and ones which were being ‘restored’. Unfortunately this heavy handed restoration left them quite sterile and not nearly as interesting.
At the very top, the central temple contained many more stupas painted a glorious gold colour. They are also all topped by chimes which rattled peacefully in the wind. From the top we saw another hill further back, even higher and topped with another big golden stupa. The only option was to climb up further!
We reached the top of that hill to an amazing view of the surrounding area – looking down on the hills of Indein and the lake further east. The hill-top was also surrounded by hundreds of dragonflies and butterflies buzzing around us which made it magical. We were the only people anywhere near the hill, as always it was great to escape from the main tourist areas.
On our descent we came down the northern slope of the hill. On that side there was a huge bamboo forest to walk through. At the bottom there were even more ruins to explore, with crumbling animal statues and beautiful carvings in the old stonework.
We returned to the river and had lunch at a shaded table in a riverside restaurant. We left to return to Nyaungshwe, where we had to prepare for the next leg of our journey – a night bus to the temple strewn plains of Bagan.
If you travel to Inle Lake be sure to get to Indein and give it a bit more time than a whistle stop visit too.