Women Planting Rice in Inle Lake Myanmar

One of the things I was eager to see in Myanmar, especially given the time of year, was the planting of flooded rice fields. While they're often easy to spot from the windows of a bus or taxi when going from town to town, actually finding one near a city can be more of a challenge.

So, I jumped on a bike which cost me 1,500 KYAT ($1.20) for the day, and biked and biked and biked until I was a few KM outside of the city, where I came upon this field full of lovely women hard at work planting rice in a rice paddy.

How fast can they plant rice? As you can see, in this case, very quickly. But it's also clearly brutally hard backbreaking work.