One of the most frequent fixtures in our pictures is Shwe Myintzu Pagoda, the lake's most recognizable landmark, which was built in 1868 following the request of U Thawbita, a revered yet rarely seen monk who spent most of his time meditating deep in the forests west of Indawgyi.

In an effort to bring Buddhism to the lake, he asked villagers to help him build a stupa on the island in the middle of Indawgyi, and five months later the structure was completed. Now connected to the shore by a concrete walkway and electric lines, it used to be only reachable by boat or the natural land bridge. Like so many things around the lake, it is modernizing with the times.

Getting to the Pagoda

As most visitors to Indawgyi stay in Lon Ton Village, the pagoda is still relatively far away. The two best options on getting there are either by kayak or bicycle. Although it takes more time to kayak, it is a lovely experience and a great way to see all the small villages along the coast. Round trip is roughly 4 hours.

By bicycle, it is much quicker and only takes about 2.5 hours round trip, but you will need to take a water taxi from the shore during the rainy season. There are no major hills so it is a very easy and pleasant ride.

You can also take a motorbike if you are looking to make it a quick trip. It only takes 20 minutes from Lon Ton Village and is a good option if you are trying to see as many villages as possible along the way.

Experience Indawgyi

Any option you choose is a great way to experience the pagoda and the lovely villages around Indawgyi. It is truly beautiful, but remember that it is also sacred. Be sure to behave and dress appropriately and follow all decorum. This is the best way to make friends with the locals who can tell you a lot more about the interesting history of the pagoda and give you some other great local tips.

History of Shwe Myintzu: Burmese Text

အင္းေတာ္ႀကီးအိုင္၏အထင္ကရျဖစ္ေသာ ေရႊျမဥၨဴဘုရားကို ၁၈၆၈ခုႏွစ္တြင္ တည္ထားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ၾကည္ညိဳေလးစားရေသာ ဘုန္းႀကီးတစ္ပါးျဖစ္ေသာ ဦးေသာပိတ၏ၫႊန္ၾကားမႈေၾကာင့္ တည္ထားခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။အင္းေတာ္ႀကီး၌ဗုဒၶဘာသာထြန္းကားေစရန္အလို႔ငွာ ရြာသူရြာသားမ်ားအား အိုင္အလယ္တြင္ ေစတီတစ္ဆူေဆာက္လုပ္ရန္ အကူအညီေတာင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ငါးလအၾကာ၌ ေစတီတည္ေဆာက္ျခင္းၿပီးစီးခဲ့ပါတယ္။အရင္တုန္းကေတာ့ ဘုရားဖူးရန္ ေလွ,သဘာဝအေလ်ာက္ျဖစ္ေပၚေနေသာ သဲတံတား စသည္တို႔ျဖင့္သာ သြားရပါတယ္။ယခုအခါ ကြန္ကရစ္လမ္းျဖင့္ သြားေရာက္ဖူးေျမာ္နိင္ၿပီး လွ်ပ္စစ္မီးတို႔ပါ ရရွိေနပါၿပီ။အိုင္ပတ္လည္ရွိအရာအားလံုးမွာ အခ်ိန္ႏွင့္အလိုက္ ေခတ္မီဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးတိုးတက္ေနပါၿပီ။