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.
Burmese Days
The title of this entry is my tribute to George Orwell, who lived in Burma for a while and wrote a book with the same title. I’ve rediscovered his writings on our voyage with a new appreciation.
With the doctor’s OK we took a flight to Yangon to start our time in Myanmar, formally known as Burma. We were originally going to stay here for 2 weeks but had to shorten our trip to 9 days because of our unintended longer stay in Bangkok. In our limited time we decided to visit Myanmar’s ‘Big Four’: Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan, and the Inle Lake area.
Myanmar, nestled between India/Bangladesh on one side and China/Thailand/Laos on the other, is one of those countries that is quite isolated from the international community. It is ruled, quite brutally in many instances, by a repressive military junta. Many western countries have enforced full economic sanctions against Myanmar because of this regime, and there is an active debate among travellers on whether to even visit this country since some of your money will inevitably end up in the governments’ dirty hands. However, everyone we spoke to who had been to Myanmar had nothing but amazing things to say about the land and its people. Their collective advice was to visit the country but to avoid giving as much money as possible to the government, ie don’t stay in government hotels or take government transport etc. So Di and I followed their recommendations to go, and our only regret is that we had too little time here.
Yangon is the capital of this large country (about the size of France) and is home to 5 million people. Yangon’s landmark is the Shwedagon Paya, the most sacred of all Buddhist sites in the country and on the top of every citizen’s pilgrimage list. At the centre of the grounds was a huge golden domed stupa (picture above), purportedly enshrining some hairs of the Buddha. The stupa was surrounded by a myriad of other temples and buildings, all filled with different Buddha statues. Though the site itself from an architectural standpoint was pretty interesting, what made the afternoon we spent here more worthwhile was the people watching. Unlike the famous Buddhist temples in Bangkok where tourists far outnumber the devout, I counted 7 of us foreigners among the hundreds of local worshippers, monks and nuns. Though many were praying and chanting, the atmosphere was very casual with families running around and smiling faces more plentiful than solemn ones. The picture above may make the place look rather ominous with the cloudy weather, but really the mood there was the exact opposite. When Buddha-statue-overload started to kick in, we headed to the Bogyoke Aung Sang Market to check out Myanmar’s famous jewellery stores and their world renowned jade and ruby collections. When we arrived it was actually quite intimidating, as there were hundreds of shops and the jewellery section was overwhelming. We were hoping to learn why Myanmar’s jades and ‘pigeon’s blood’ rubies were so famous but we weren’t willing to listen to the hard sell (which was what this market seemed to be about) so we just walked through and glanced at the gems. Luckily for my wallet Di didn’t buy. As an aside companies like Tiffany & Co, Cartier and Bulgari have stopped buying Myanmar’s gems (though their rubies are supposed to be the best in the world) as profits help fund the suppressive military regime. There are counterpoints by others who say that bans and sanctions only repress economic development which hurts the average Burmese citizen more than the government.
After Yangon we went to Mandalay, Myanmar’s other big city. When we checked in to our hotel I tried to pay with our US 20 dollar bills. We were warned by other travellers that there is a pretty strict policy here where you have to pay in USD and the bills have to be in really good condition, ie no stains, tears, or even creases. This is supposedly because the Myanmar bank only takes good quality bills from locals and if the bank doesn’t want them they’re SOL. Getting bills rejected is a pretty big problem for travellers because there are no banks in this country for you to take out money and no one accepts credit cards. Knowing about this beforehand, I actually performed the ridiculous job of ironing all my American money at our guest house in Bangkok the night before we came to Myanmar. Anyways, the lady at this check in counter was just being ridiculous and she rejected the first four 20s that I gave her. We were trying to convince her that they were fine but she wasn’t having it. I got severely frustrated because if people were going to reject all of our bills for the next week then we would have had to leave Myanmar much earlier than we wanted to. So I looked at Di, shook my head and said “this is soooo stupid”. All of a sudden the lady’s cold and businesslike demeanour (thankfully she was the only one who was like this during our whole time here) turned defensive and aggressive as she yelled back at me “I NO STUPID”. Great, she thought I said she was stupid. For the next 5 minutes Di tried to pacify the situation by trying to explain that I was talking about the Myanmar banks and not about her, much to the amusement of everyone watching in the lobby. Eventually she accepted 2 of our bills, but she gave us change with a stain (if you could call it that, it was about 2mmx2mm) slightly larger than one of the bills she rejected from me. I was kinda pissed at this point, so I took my rejected bill to show her how unfair she was being by giving us ‘dirty’ change. She was also pissed, and just kept saying ‘NO’ and ‘YOU TAKE CHANGE’. Di eventually calmed me down and took the change as she joked she didn’t want to go back to our room later on to see a snake lying in our bed. Thankfully for the rest of our trip owners of other hotels happily took our USD. And you might ask “what about the local currency, is it subjected to the same scrutiny?” Well since you need local currency (called Kyats) to pay for meals and taxis and stuff, I was able to find out. A ton of bills here looked like they were first run over by a stampede of elephants on the filthy streets of India before being handled by Freddy Kreuger, who then left Elm Street to give them to Di’s 18 month old niece to scotch-tape back together. When I was given these as change I tried returning them to the proprietors, but they all said that they would work at other stores and they told me not to worry with a big smile. To my surprise, these Kyat bills were gladly accepted everywhere.
Anyways, in Mandalay we first went to check out the Mahamuni Paya which houses a Buddha where male worshippers apply gold leaf with lacquer to its surface. Currently the 4m tall bronze Buddha has a 15 cm thick golden shell comprised of this gold leaf which has been applied over the years. That stat was amazing to me considering how thin each little square sheet of gold being applied was. We then went to the ancient cities of Sagaing, Inwa, and Amarapura just outside of Mandalay. We climbed a hill in Sagaing that was covered in over 500 Buddhist stupas and which offered great views of the Ayeyarwady river. We took a boat across said river to Inwa where life was quieter and ancient temples were empty and inviting. Our highlight though was hanging out on the U Bein Bridge in Amarapura. The foot bridge, at a length of 1.2 kms, is the world’s longest teakwood bridge, requiring over 1000 teak posts to hold it up. We lingered there for over 2 hours while waiting for the sun to set. During that time we watched fishermen around us and conversed with monks walking by. The exercise in patience awarded us with one of the most spectacular sunsets we have ever seen. Unfortunately we were short on time and had to leave to Bagan the next day, or we would have returned to watch the sunset again.
When we got back to the hotel that night thankfully the woman I had a disagreement with was off (and our bed was snake-free!). I’ve learnt my lesson and have decided to never use the emotionally charged word ‘stupid’ in front of someone with a weak command of the English language again.
fromwonderintowonder 
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