"This is Burma, and it will be quite unlike any land you know about..."
-Rudyard Kipling
I had made a quick weekend trip to Rangoon (now Yangon) earlier in the year, but didn't have enough time to visit the world famous Bagan temples. Before moving from Singapore to India for good, I picked Burma (now Myanmar) for my last trip, with just enough time to visit Mandalay, considered the country's cultural capital, and Bagan. I'd be spending Diwali away from family, in the company of a few thousand Buddhist temples.
After writing a goodbye email to colleagues in Singapore, I headed to the airport for my flight to Yangon and took the overnight VIP bus to Mandalay. VIP in Burma meant a 2x1 configuration with 45 degree reclining seats. The new 4 lane highway wasn't as smooth as could possibly be, but it had cut down travel time from Yangon to Mandalay from 12 to 8 hours.
I took a local Jeep from the Mandalay highway bus station to the center of town and en route saw hundreds of monks, mainly children and teenagers , doing their morning rounds for alms. I decided to walk from the city center to the hotel. It was a fair distance anyways and my decision to walk seemed much worse as beyond a point, the regular grid of north-south and east-West streets broke down and I was moving about in circles with the locals too having no clue where the newly opened hotel was. One of the local shopkeepers saw me struggle and was kind enough to drop me to the hotel, called a Little Bit of Mandalay Tavern.
I hadn't made much of a plan of what to do in Mandalay, and the staff only spoke enough English to give me the names of places to visit. Wi-Fi in Myanmar is typically available only in public areas . While I was doing research in the lobby area, I saw one guy enjoying his breakfast and I asked him if he had any tips for me for sightseeing. He gave me the phone number of one Jojo, a local who had taken him around on his motorbike the day before. I called Jojo and he was over in ten minutes, with a spare helmet for me, and off we went.
The first stop of the day was the Mahumuni Pagoda, where devotees - males only allowed - were covering the 3 meter tall Buddha idol with gold leaf. It has been claimed that the size of the idol has increased significantly due to accumulated gold leaf offerings.
We then headed out of the city to visit Inwa, the capital of the Burmese after Bagan but before Mandalay. It was an island and a 5 minute ferry ride got the tourists across. A majority of the visitors took a guided horse-cart ride to explore the place. A French couple I befriended on the boat were more keen to walk around and I decided to join them. The woman worked for a new French news channel whose aim was to be an alternative to BBC and CNN. I had a good time hearing about her views on the distortion of news, French welfare state and her next proposed assignment in Syria.
We walked through first the main roads and then with some local help on directions, through some paddy fields to reach Bagaya monastery. It was one of the rare monasteries in the area made of teakwood and the pastoral setting was quite charming, but I couldn't figure how this was no. 1 on Tripadvisor for attractions in Mandalay.
I split from the French couple as they didn't want to pay the monastery entrance fee. I had some trouble finding the next place, Maha Aung Mye Bong Zan, a temple whose style reminded me of Borobudur, though this one was smaller, had fewer levels and had a rectangular rather than a square shape. A local, aiming to be a licensed tour guide, offered me a ride there in exchange for the opportunity to practice his English skills with me.
Once back in Mandalay, Jojo and I headed to the Mandalay palace, a shoddy wood and tin recreation of the original palace destroyed during WWII. The original palace wall though was intact and was surrounded by a beautiful moat and the promenade running alongside the moat was the perfect place for a run in town. Sans the palace itself which was accessible to tourists, the rest of the area within the walls was occupied by the Army.
Next stop was Kuthgodaw Pagoda, which housed the "largest book in the world": the complex housed a few hundred small stupas, each of which contained a stone tablet inscribed with parts of Buddhist scripture, with all the tablets put together forming a coherent piece of religious literature.
Towards sundown, I climbed up Mandalay Hill: vehicles could go upto the very top, but since Jojo dropped me at the base, I assumed a drive uphill wasn't part of the deal. In any case I was happy to get some light cardiovascular exercise. Every couple of hundred steps there was a temple, and right behind it the ascent continued. At the top one got a 360 degree view of the Irrawaddy river, surrounding hills, and Mandalay city.
For dinner, I had fried noodles at a local joint at the base of Mandalay Hill. With my recent trips to Indonesia and Laos, I was a little fed up of having fried rice and fried noodles all the time, and promised myself alternative cuisines the next couple of days.
I had Jojo pick me up the next morning and drop me to the highway bus station for my trip to Bagan. If you look at a map of Burma, you would guess that a Mandalay-Bagan trip would take less than half the time of a Mandalay-Yangon trip, but due to many stops and the convoluted road system, the run times were even. The landscape towards Bagan was a little more arid - explaining to an extent how these temples have withstood the passage of time - and dominated by palmyra trees, but broadly it was quite a boring trip, probably better done by an overnight bus.
The other two foreigners on the bus had booked the same hotel as me, so we shared a cab from the Highway bus station. They were from Manchester, looked in their 30s and unlike backpackers who stuck to cheaper-to-visit countries, had Tokyo, Singapore, and 3 weeks each in Australia and New Zealand as well on their 6-month itinerary.
I rented a cycle from the hotel and headed west towards Old Bagan. One way to describe my experience as I rode along would be to say that a 1000 year old temple is to Bagan what a modern shopping mall is to Singapore: you are never out of sight of one. Thousands of small and large temples and pagodas share the flat terrain with nothing but farmland and thus there is nothing ugly except the electric poles to tarnish the view. It was getting close to sunset, so I'd have to wait till the next day to see them from inside. I continued south, passing through more temple complexes followed by the village of Myinkaba with it's lacquerware shops, followed by even more temple complexes to reach the village of New Bagan. My destination was Lawkananda pagoda, perched atop a small hill adjacent to the Irrawaddy river. I watched the local boats ply across the river as the sun disappeared behind the hills on the opposite bank.
I had endured another fried noodle lunch earlier in the day, but for dinner it would be puri bhaji and lassi at a local restaurant in New Bagan. It had become quite dark by then: I looked up to see the moon, only to realize that it was Diwali and it would be a no moon night. The ride back was a very slow one, relying on the headlights of passing cars to ensure I didn't end up in a large pothole. A few of the temples were lit up at night and it made a magnificent sight.
As tired as I was from the previous days' walking and biking, I woke up before the alarm went of, in keen anticipation of witnessing one of the best sunrises anywhere in the world. It was another ride in the dark as I headed to Shwe-San-Dow pagoda and climbed it's few dozen extremely steep steps. Sunrise was a little while away, but it was time to gaze at the gorgeous night sky and bring out my stargazing app, Starwalk. A few hundred stars were comfortably visible: the only night sky I ever saw that beat this one was in the Peruvian Altiplanos.
There were a couple of hundred people at the pagoda by the time the sun broke over the horizon: this was one of the few pagodas where one could climb up, and it was located close to the other major ones, affording the perfect view of the buildings all around as the red bricks were bathed in the glow of dawn. As the sun went up, so did the balloons and it was a mesmerizing morning, to say the least.
I rode back to the hotel after sunrise for a sumptuous buffet breakfast of lentil soup, juice and fruit, tomatoes and fries, toast and coffee. I mixed some of the soup with rice to make a strange dal-chawal breakfast. I slept off for a couple of hours, then checked out of the hotel and headed out for a closer look at the temples.
Right across the hotel was the 11th century Shwezigone Pagoda, considered the prototype of the modern Myanmar Pagodas. I saw it as a smaller version of the incomparable Shwedagon in Yangon, with it's numerous small shrines surrounding the main stupa, and there being a separate Buddha shrine for each day of the week.
Pretty close by was the Gubyaukgyi temple built in the 13th century and modeled after the Mahabodhi temple in Gaya and having Jataka paintings on its walls. By now I had seen the major Buddhist temples in Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and now Myanmar, but a visit to arguably the most important of them all, the Mahabodhi in Gaya, remains pending even though it's in my proverbial backyard. It's a bit of a shame, reflecting partly of me and partly on the little regard India places on it's greatest treasures.
Taking a peek into some smaller temples along the way, I reached the most famous of them all, the Ananda temple, representing the pinnacle of the early style temple architecture.
Thereafter I entered the walled city of Old Bagan through the Tharabhara gate, guarded by shrines of a brother-sister pair of 'nats' (spirits). Inside the wall was the That-byin-nyu temple, the highest in Bagan at 66 meters, and the smaller Shwegugyi, both having classical elements and decorated with stucco carvings.
Right behind the Thatbyinnyu was the Nathlaung kyaung, a small temple dedicated to the Indian trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. Just outside the northern gate of Old Bagan was the Mahabodhi pagoda, whose pyramidal spire, inspired by the Mahabodhi in Gaya, was one of a kind amongst the Bagan temples.
I visited some other smaller temples, and the last stop of the day was the Dhamma-yan-gyi Pahto, a large temple built like a stepped pyramid. The short cut I used to get there took me through the narrowest of tracks through paddy fields and at times I had to walk the bike through rough terrain.
The architects of Bagan seemed to have incorporated various styles from across the world. The Dhamma-yan-gyi Pahto reminded me of the pyramids in Giza and Chichen Itza. Some old style temples were like miniatures of the giant egg shaped stupa in Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka. The spires of the smaller temples were akin to those I saw in Pattadakal in Karnataka. The bigger temples had significant classical elements incorporated in their design.
Most people spend 2-3 days in Bagan to look at the temples in depth, but the day and a half that I spent gave me a very good glimpse of them. No temple by itself was a world class piece of architecture, but if there was one place where number equals beauty, Bagan would be it. It's appeal lies in riding among the temples as they glow in the morning or evening sun rather than studying any particular one of them in depth, as the carvings or paintings in themselves are neither intricate nor well preserved.
By 4:30 pm I headed back to the hotel, took a shower and had an early pasta dinner before being picked up at the hotel for the overnight bus to Yangon. I reached Yangon bus terminal in the morning at 5:00 am with 14 hours to spend before my connecting flight to Singapore. I had seen even the lesser known sights in Yangon during my earlier trip and didn't want to go into the crowded city center again. Thus I killed time by walking the 4-5 km to the airport instead of cabbing it, then writing this blog and reading "The Devotion of Suspect X".
Having backpacked a lot during the year, I had got used to long waits at airports and bus stations. It was only in 2014, at 34, that I started traveling alone due to Jyoti and I working in different cities. It's probably not for everyone, but I would highly recommend it. One almost gets forced to befriend others along the way, and ends up having more engaging conversations than when traveling with others, especially in groups. One is forced to read books or just laze around mulling about random things as there is no wi-fi or the phone battery runs out or both, as is about to happen to me soon. A small backpack, less money than one thinks and an open attitude is all that's needed to have the time of your life.
