Bagan

Trip Start May 01, 2007
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174
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Trip End Jun 17, 2008


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Where I stayed
May Ka Lar Hotel

Flag of Myanmar  ,
Friday, April 4, 2008

My visit to Bagan began with an 11 hour bus ride during which the driver went 7 hours without stopping to let people off to go to the bathroom or eat.  At one point the bus pulled off to the side of the road to retie cargo on the roof and several guys, me included, crawled out over the tops of the seats to escape the bus and relieve ourselves.  I, uh, had more urgent matters than to just take a pee, so I ducked behind some shrubberies a little further away from the road.  When I stood up and just about had my pants zipped, the bus started to pull away.  I came running across the heat blasted dust through the shrubberies as one passenger inside and all the passengers on the roof screamed to get the driver to stop.

The one passenger inside who yelled to get the bus to stop to let me back in was an American, the only other tourist on the bus.  When we finally did stop for lunch she ordered chicken curry
Myanmar beer
Myanmar beer
.  Her amusing assessment of the meat: "That might be chicken, but not any part that I can eat."  And later I laughed hard again during a conversation about India's passion for cricket, "That's because cricket is India's only sport.  Unless Bollywood counts as an athletic event."

Bagan really did impress me.  I worry that after seeing some of the 2400 temples and pagodas spread across miles of desert in Bagan that Burning Man will seem like a finger painting exposition.  My second night there we took the advice of the delightful May Ka Lar guest house staff and hired a horse cart to a less popular temple where we could climb up and watch the sunset.  A few other tourists did stop by briefly but for hours we had the entire temple to ourselves.  Imagine yourself at sunset on top of a temple straight out of Indiana Jones staring out across a desert plane with a thousand temples in every direction each turning from brown to bright orange to pink to grey as the day turns to night.  Then imagine yourself climbing down and riding a horse cart back for an hour back to civilization.
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Comments

lunallena
lunallena on

maybe not fingerpaint....
but definitely not as mindblowing. The photos I just looked up were amazing...WOW! When will you post yours?

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