The Temples of Bagan and The Waters of Inle Lake

After Mandalay, we took a very short flight covering 190km south to Bagan.  Bagan is officially known as the “Bagan Archaeological Zone” consisting of approximately 2000 temples.  The ambitious Bagan kings built about 4400 temples on the riverside plain over a 230 year period in this area, but some were lost to erosion, earthquakes, and neglect over the years.  Bagan includes three main areas, Nyaung U, Old Bagan, and New Bagan.  Nyaung U is the biggest town housing most guest houses for independent travellers and a supposedly vibrant restaurant street.  Old Bagan is within the old city walls in the core of the archaeological zone.  There’s no one living in Old Bagan now except for tourists occupying the high end hotels in the area.  New Bagan is where the inhabitants of Old Bagan were relocated to in 1990 by the government.  It has some restaurants and middle range accommodations.  Needless to say, with the way we roll on this trip, we settled in Nyaung U and paid $20 a night for our accommodation.  That’s a $20 crisp new bill without Eug commenting on how stupid the banks here are when he paid the owner.  There are three ways to experience the multitude of temples scattered throughout Bagan, either by taxi, bicycle, or horse carriage.  Because we only had one full day here to cover 30km, a bicycle would be too slow and a taxi wouldn’t be able to get into the less accessible sites, so we settled on the romantic horse carriage option.  We shared the horse carriage with a German girl whose boyfriend got sick a few days earlier from eating something that upset his stomach leaving him in the hotel.  It was a shame for him but we ended up having an amazing day visiting the sights.  The temples themselves were pretty cool, some Indian-ish, one was all white like a castle, one was shaped like the pyramids.  But what we couldn’t stop raving about was the landscape of the archaeological zone viewed from atop of the temples.  As Lonely Planet put it, “imagine all the medieval cathedrals of Europe sitting on Manhattan island”, but replace the cathedrals with temples or payas, as they call them in Myanmar, all around the archaeological zone.  Whenever we could hike to the top of a tall paya, we would take our time to soak up the incredible landscape of endless temples stretching all the way out to the horizon.  We were able to catch the sunset from the top of one of them as well.  The views were utterly stunning.

The next day we flew to Heho from Bagan.  Heho was an hour away from our guest house in Nyaungshwe, a town on the shores of Inle Lake which was our next discovery point.  By our guest house we ran into four Singaporean travellers we had seen before in Mandalay and Bagan.  It turned out that they were also travelling independently and had planned the exact same itinerary as us for the 9 days in Myanmar.  In addition, one of the girls was recently transferred to Hong Kong and she worked together with one of our friends there.  Talk about a small world!  They were going to bike around Inle that afternoon, and since we didn’t have any plans for the day we decided to join them.  Our Asian bicycle entourage biked through the country side roads of Inle passing through many small villages.  The narrow cement road we rode on was surrounded by vast plots of farmland on both sides.  Almost all the villagers who noticed us going by smiled and waved madly at us to say hi.  The children always gave a curious look at first followed by the cutest innocent smile.  The playful naughty ones would run up to us while reaching out their small palms to give us high fives as we rode by.  The purity of their welcoming gestures left us feeling warm and fuzzy all over.  About half way through our ride, we needed to hop on a boat to take us across the lake to continue our journey home.  The size of the boat was about half that of a dragon boat we see back at home on false creek.  I couldn’t believe our boatman (a 60 year old grandpa) was able fit all 6 of us and our 6 bikes plus himself onto his boat.  We meandered through blocks of houses sitting on stilts on the water.  It was very interesting to see the local people in these houses washing clothes, eating meals, or just chatting away and hanging out with their neighbours having a good time.  By the time we reached the other side of the lake it was already approaching sunset.  Since Eug and I were still traumatized from the unpleasant memory of riding bikes in the dark, we tried our best to keep on pedaling so we could get back to Nyaungshwe before night fell.  We all made it back just a bit after sunset.  What a relief!  Our travel companions were saying how fit we were because we didn’t stop cycling, little did they know we just wanted ‘safety first’.  The next day the 6 of us hired a boat to go around Inle Lake, one of Myanmar’s treasures.  Inle Lake is 22km long and 11km wide.  It is home to 17 villages on stilts inhabited by the Intha people.  We started off the day with a visit to a market.  The boat ride there took about an hour and it was peaceful.  We passed by a few fishermen along the way (picture above).  The hardworking Intha people are known for propelling their flat bottom boats by standing at the rear of the boat on one leg while wrapping their other leg around the oar to row the boat.  I eventually fell asleep for a bit on the comfortable boat ride and Eug just daydreamed.  It was one of those perfect quiet moments where you could just relax and enjoy the scenery without having to worry about anything.  The market had the usual tourist souvenir stands but also a lot of local produce where the locals go and shop.  We spent much of our time wandering around the fruits and vegetable stands to people watch.  Too bad there weren’t a lot of tourists there, because we learned that watching the tourists with the locals can be pretty fun and entertaining too.  We were taken to several shops on stilts along the way to see how the local lotus and silk scarves were weaved and how tobacco, paper (like the ones in the Papyrus store), silver jewellery, etc were made.  It’s incredible to see how everything was fabricated using the most basic tools; there’s definitely no modern machinery involved here.  However the highlight of the day long boat trip for us was really the dazzling scenery.  Almost every picture we took possessed a post card quality because of the clean black water reflecting everything above it.  It’s no wonder that Louis Vuitton did a beautiful advertising campaign with its photo shots all taken on Inle.  A simple wooden house on stilts with some grass on the side sitting on the placid clear water reflecting a mirror image of itself against the blue sky was all it took to make the day perfect.  It was a photographer’s dream and we were spoiled by seeing tons of that.

I remembered feeling like “ugh, can we get out of here already?” upon arriving in Yangon, eating not-so-good street food and sleeping in smelly bed sheets.  It was dirty (though not as dirty as India) and ghetto and I was tired of travelling in developing countries again after having a taste of luxury that a clean and modern city like Bangkok offered.  Eug then told me to give it a chance since that was only our first day in Myanmar.  I’m glad he gave me that advice because having spent the last few days in Bagan and Inle, I actually wished we had more time in Myanmar!  Most travellers we met allocated 3 weeks to a month in Myanmar and we were only able to spend a short 9 days here.  It’s a huge country with a lot more to see and we agreed this is somewhere we will definitely return in the future for a more thorough visit.  Hopefully by that time the military regime will have changed and the citizens will have a better quality of life.  Just in case, we’ll make sure we bring all virgin bills next time.