Adept Sons of Innlay Lake

The Innthas or “Sons of the Lake” as they call themselves are dwellers on the huge Innlay Lake situated in the southeast quadrant of Myanmar. These people are born and bred and spend their entire lives on the lake. They live in houses built on stilts in the water and earn their living by engaging in activities related to the lake.

If you should happen to visit the scenic Innlaly Lake, whose blue waters mirror the dark green mountains surrounding it, you are sooner or later bound to come upon the boats of fishermen who wrest a living from it. These fishing boats may be encountered singly or in small clusters.

All the fishing equipment used by the Innlay fishermen such as fishing nets, fishing baskets, rattan fish traps, two pronged harpoons and fish hooks are made by the Innlay fishermen themselves.In order to enable their boats to glide easily over the shores and sandbanks of the lake surface, the fishermen have constructed their boats so that they are flat-bottomed and of shallow drag.To witness these fishermen stand upright in these boats and send them shooting ahead by propelling them by one leg entwined around a long stemmed paddle while their hands are busy casting fishing nets is wondrous to behold.

The fishermen are adept at using their legs to steady the boats, leaving their hands free to deal with the conical shaped rattan fishing net. This net is a distinctive piece of fishing equipment peculiar to the Innlay region. It is in reality a rattan finishing net with a narrow upper end and a wide lower end or floor that is concave and in inclined towards an aperture in the centre.

The fishermen keeps lowering the conical net into the lake bed until he feels a fish entrapped inside, whereupon he lowers another net into the rattan net to enmesh the fish after which he harpoons it and lands his catch.

If the fish caught is one of the Nga-hpein: carp species (Cyprinus carpo) for which Innlay Lake is famous, it is scaled and cleaned, the gutted and its backbone and entrails removed. The meat is then cut into slices and replaced within its original skin, made fast with bamboo strips, fried in boiling oil, garnished with lightly fried tomatoes, onions and ginger and served piping hot.

A visitor who sits down to a dinner featuring an Innlay carp dish as its centrepiece is in for a repast that he will not easily forget.