64 Boating New Zealand
brushed past on either side. Then, as the
brown waters of the paddy field open up, he
winds up the revs and drops the prop to do it
all again.
There don’t seem to be any collision
regulations in existence – just a reliance
on Buddhist fatalism and other skippers’
judgements. At one stage a lay’ – or small
boat – bursts through the reeds lining a
side channel packed with smiling villagers.
Aung San altered slightly to starboard, the
lady skipper on the other boat went hard-a-
starboard and the two boats whisked past
each other with about 150mm clearance and a
flurry of big smiles and shy waves.
In some areas large beds of grass and
weed are anchored by bamboo stakes driven
through them into the lake floor and used togrow vegetables and water hyacinths.
These floating gardens are tended daily
by villagers.
Average lake depth is 1.52m, though
some areas reach 3.7m deep and flood to
5.2m during the heavy monsoon rains. It
measures 22.4km long by 10.2km wide
and the Lawpitha Hydropower plant at
its southern end supplies much of central
Myanmar with electricity.
What I’ve come to call our ‘teak
torpedo’ powered though channels
between houses with metres to spare, our
exhaust note racketing back at us. Children
waved from the balconies of their spidery
homes mounted on slender wooden stilts,
or waved from jetties and canoes.
Forget the five-knot rule, I think. IfABOVE A fun way
to observe life on
the lake.
BELOW Taking
precious Buddha
tokens on a tour
of the pagodas
around the lake.