I had failed to fully describe the touristy market mob scene that were set up outside the major temples. The merchants were aggressive and span the range spectrum, including ten year olds like Jackie's BFF, whom I took on his word that he was in school but on summer break. They peddled scarves and trinkets and George Orwell's book Burmese Days, which I almost bought for two bucks. ""Four thousand Kyat!" a woman shouted while waving a bundle of necklaces in front of me. "four bucks, lucky money!"
"There's no lucky money. Money is money," I replied. I took a legitimate look at all the wares but they were mostly crap - nothing gets made here anyway in an ancient capital and modern day tourist town. We'd be better off shopping in Inle Lake where there was established culture. I did buy a bamboo box for my mom, shaving nearly half the starting price down. I later learned I didn't bargain nearly hard enough. The starting bids and bartering strategies I had developed in China needed some tweaking here, and it wasn't uncommon to buy a product at a tenth of the starting price.
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| From South Sudan to central Myanmar |
One man outside the Dhammanyangyi Temple was very different. He approached us with a book full of money and asked us where we were from, and instantly we put our guard up. He'd have to go through a stubborn wall to get at our Hong Kong but US but kinda Hong Kong before that origins. But the man then opened us his book and showed us all these bills he had collected from all sorts of currencies - there were British pounds, Japanese yen, a US $2 bill, Indian rupees, Russian ruples, South African Rand. Then there was currency from Mozambique, Rhodesia (former Zimbabwe), Mongolia, South Sudan, Afghanistan and Japanese occupied Burma. I couldn't figure out which bill I was most impressed by. Even more amazingly, he had nothing from Hong Kong. I had already switched to a trip-specific wallet, but Jackie donated a plastic 10HKD bill for his cause. The man didn't try to sell us anything - we had come across an honest good-natured collector.
After the donkey cart trip to our hotel at the tip of New Bagan
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| You're not supposed to climb like this |
, an instant nap and a dive in the pool, I set out for my first bike ride in months. Our hotel rented us two bikes for 1500 Kyat each. "What time do we need to return them?" "Ten." "Ten? What if we're late?" "Actually, no matter. Put here when you get back." My fears of a tourist industry out to milk foreigners for all they were worth we're unfounded. This bike rate would have only gone an hour on Capital Bikeshare. With my camera bumping around loosely in my lower pocket, I jumped on and took those glorious first pedals after months of absence from two wheeled transit. The reddish dirt was soft and hard to ride on, but the dirt roads were better packed and featured only the occasional car or motorcycle. Riding in the temperate heat, so far away from the urbanity that has enveloped my entire life in Asia, without another tourist in sight, was an incredibly liberating feeling. We pulled off the side of the road at the first semi-large stupa we saw, checking out small golden Buddhist statues behind locked doors in complete isolation. We passed by the Bagan Archaeological Museum after closing hours, and another medium sized temple with a small tourist market assembled in front. We were on the road towards Shwesandaw Temple which we heard was the place to go for sunset when we came across another cool looking temple, with a tall round golden spire. We swerved off the road again and dropped off our bikes at the edge of a large empty courtyard. It was a bit eerie standing there alone, with neatly lined square tiles with small square planted saplings strewn across. A large cocktail party could be held here, in the shadow of the grand temple. I glanced back at our abandoned bikes and wondered if we should keep a closer eye on them. A second thought about our isolation and the kindness of the people in this country persuaded me not to.
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| Maybe Obama was here? |
We walked pass a landscaped sign in Burmese, or perhaps Pali, presumably describing the temple. Inside we were surprised to discover a father, mother and young son, purveying over a table with a dozen drawings laid out on the floor. I immediately felt bad for them, thinking that there couldn't be nearly enough traffic here for this family to make money. The father spoke English well and unlocked a door to the rooftop, and told us that when Obama had come to Bagan in November, he had gone to three temples. The other two were the big ones (Ananda was one of them), but this was the third. I've done my googling but I can't verify this fact, nor can I even remember the name of this wayside temple, but at the time it felt very cool walking up the same stairs that the President himself might have walked up. The setting sun gave the stones on the rooftop a very reddish hue, and I currently long for the undisturbed view I saw there. We saw Shwesandaw in the distance, visibly swarming with tourists. I thought for a moment about staying here for sunset - the view was nice and the peace great. But we were in the mood for company and weren't scared by the crowd. I might have done some illegal climbing on the walls, which is sheepishly one of my favorite ruins activity, and I wondered what it'd be like growing up as a kid in these parts, climbing temples instead of trees. The temple I was sitting on was quite marvelous - in any other part of the world, it'd never be this empty. But here in the ocean of temples, it is just a small fish.
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| Tourists swarming the temple |
We ventured back down to the family custodians of this temple, and I had to swallow hard while rebuffing the father's attempts to sell pictures. Our bike ride towards Shwesandaw saw more and more traffic until we arrived in a large bay of parked buses and bikes and horse drawn carriages. A pair of massive Korean buses with correspondingly massive amount of Korean tourists caught my eye. We left our bikes in a pile of other unguarded rentals and ventured past a bustling marketplace. This temple was tall, and the staircase went straight up the middle of the sides like Chichen Itza in Mexico, not swirling up the interior like in previous temples. They got steeper towards the higher levels, and at one point I got stuck behind some struggling elderly French tourists and had time to snap this photo.
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| French tourists are le tired |
We ran into Chris and Tara at the top podium, which was a lovely semisurprise. The sunset itself was a semidisappointment as the hazy orange orb disappeared behind clouds and buses and no one was quite sure when it really set. The international mass of tourists grumbled and descended down the temple steps, carefully, and in the hubbub of souvenir sales and motors starting, we made plans to venture to Be Kind To Animals The Moon. This ungrammatical capitalized word group is the most popular restaurant as recommended by the Lonely Planet, and we had been captivated by the guidebook's restaurant review and the bizarre name. We definitely had the name right, the drivers knew where we were talking about. Chris and Tara took a horse carriage, and we followed behind on our bikes to downtown Bagan. Turns out there really isn't a downtown Bagan - there is no quaint village square , green or main street like I had imagined, or even a tourist friendly congregation of restaurants and bars. There weren't even many public lights. There was one strip with a handful of restaurants and an art gallery, and this strip apparently had the name Be Kind to Animals. The Moon was the name of our restaurant, standing front and center in the little strip, with a sign saying Recommended by Your Guide (Lonely Planet). Be Kind to Animals Yar Pyi stood on the other side of the the dusty dirt road, with a sign saying "Lonely Planet might not talk about us (yet) but lovely people do! Check out their testimonials! The Yar Pyi family say we are the most delicious." That sign did its accomplished goal and tugged at my heart strings. The economic implications of making it into the Lonely Planet, a black box of a process that seemed as likely to be fair as it was to be arbitrary, struck me. But we had talked about the Moon so much that we couldn't change our minds, and off we went to the mainstream tourist restaurant and not the hipster family owned one. The restaurant was vegetarian, which was fine because I never found good meat in Myanmar period, and interesting dishes like banana pancakes with syrup (more like a crepe), pumpkin curry and chapati made for perhaps the best dinner of our trip.
It was well into the night though when we finished, and a long ride home on unfamiliar roads in total darkness was now unavoidable. Not gonna lie, I was hoping there'd be another horse cabbie we could follow as it was a little daunting at the start to imagine biking on very unfamiliar roads in a very isolated very foreign place. But the directions were simple, there were only a few main roads and our inn was off one of them. As we passed by silent dark temples dimly and eerily lit by sparsely spaced out streetlights, I wondered if this was the environment with which tomb raiders broke into the temples and stole valuables. I had always wondered when the pyramids of Egypt had been robbed - did the same phenomenon occur here? We turned onto our main road and spent a long time on it - much longer than I remembered going out on, and for a second I wondered if we were terribly terribly lost. Would we have to sleep on the side of the road? Were there Burmese pythons around? My legs were getting tired and my brain was racing towards more and more terrifying consequences. When the Kaday Aung Inn sign appeared, I'm not sure I'd ever been happier to see a sign the meaning of which I had no idea.
We left Bagan early the next morning on a bus, having spent approximately 24 hours in this wondrous place. A lot of people have expressed surprise at the short duration of our stay and we could have easily spent another two days there, but to be honest at the time I didn't feel any regret leaving so quickly. We'd seen a lot of temples and I wasn't super excited to see a few hundred more. There were probably a lot of unique ones I missed out on and more Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider jokes to meet. Certainly Bagan was one of the most unique places I've ever visited, with the same ancient abandoned architecture as Machu Picchu without as much the geographic remoteness, a bit like the Great Wall but the ruins fell less organized and more organic spread out.
Up next: the characters you meet on the road to Inle Lake...
