Friday, 20 February 2015

Bagan - Myanmar

There isn't a direct bus from the golden rock to Bagan so we had to get one from there to Bago and then swap buses  and get one to Bagan.  As we approached Bagan at 4am a government official boarded our small mini bus to ensure that we all paid the $20 entrance fee into Bagan.  The town of Bagan has over 4000 temples and so this is the fee to see them all.  As we arrived at 4am we were not able to check in to our accommodation until later in the day.  The man running the guesthouse kindly let us sleep on some reclining chairs until the morning.  We only had one day in Bagan and so we needed to make the most of our day.  After a few hours kip we headed out in search of somewhere for breakfast.  

We weren't able to check in to our room until after midday and so decided to hire an E-bike and try to make our way around as many of the temples as possible.  We decided to only rent one bike and take it in turns to ride it.  Kay went first and I was in hysterics on the back as she was so terrible at steering! I think it was nervous laughter though as I was genuinely thinking we were going to crash. Luckily the first pagoda on the map was close by and so we made it to there in one piece and went for a look around.  It was then my turn on the bike and thankfully, even though I haven't ridden a bike for well over ten years I managed to get the hang of it a bit better than Kay did.  We spent the morning riding round to quite a few pagodas. We were shown secret passageways to the roofs where you could see the 4000 pagodas. Although they are very impressive, I think the fact that there are so many in such a small place is what makes it so amazing! Being shown these secret passageways obviously came at a price, and the price was being given the hard sale on whatever thing it is this person makes for a living. I bought some beautiful sand paintings from one man. They thankfully roll up quite small as there is not a lot of space in my bag now for souvenirs.  

We went for a lovely meal at a vegetarian place for lunch and when they gave us our bill they came with a plate of 'sweets'.  We have absolutely no idea what they were but they were so delicious that we ate the whole bowl! Oops! After lunch we were almost ran off the road by a young local who wanted to show us a pagoda where, if you went to the roof you could not only see all the temples, but also the river that runs through Bagan.  He claimed he wanted no money to show us this, he said he was training to be a tour guide and just wanted to practice his English. Oh, he also sold sand paintings and told us he would show us them if we liked, no obligation to buy one obviously....yeah right! We kindly told him that unfortunately we had already bought some that morning and so would definitely not be buying. Luckily for us, even knowing this he still wanted to show us the pagoda. While riding there we met some other westerners, I think from America, who were just about to enter the pagoda, and so he started the hard sale with them too.  All five of us climbed to the top, and to his credit, the view was spectacular. Afterwards he was trying to sell some sand paintings to the Americans, but he was asking so much for them, and they were almost considering buying one, so we felt we had to tell them that we'd bought two for less than half he was asking for one! If looks could kill! He was not very happy that we just ruined his sale but we didn't want them to get ripped off.  It also turned out they didn't have  as much money left as they thought they had.  

After riding around more pagodas for the afternoon we headed back to the village in search of a post office so we could buy some stamps for the postcards we had bought at one of the pagodas in the morning. We eventually managed to find it but, they had ran out of stamps! That's now in India and Myanmar that we've been to a post office to be told that they are clean out of stamps. We needed to change some of our American dollars into Burmese Kyat so we went to look for a bank, but they had all shut at 4pm.  Mission unaccomplished, we went back to the accommodation to get ready for dinner.  I spoke to some girls there who gave us a good recommendation of an Indian which did a cheap unlimited thali. Missing Indian food, and not loving Burmese food, we decided to give it a shot.  It wasn't up to our high expectations with regards to indian food but the chapattis were delicious and free flowing.  We booked a bus to Mandalay for the following day and had an early night since we'd barely slept the night before.   


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