Bagan and Inle Lake

Trip Start Aug 25, 2009
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Trip End Jun 01, 2010


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Flag of Myanmar  ,
Sunday, January 10, 2010

After taking the bus from Monywa we caught a two hour ferry over to Bagan.  From the dick we took a horse cart(which seems like the main source of transportation)to our hotel.  Bagan is a town surrounded by four thousand Buddhist temples.  The first day we took a horse cart out to the highlight temples.  We visited around 15 temples and I cant even begin to remember the names of them.  All the temples were very cool although some were pretty much the same.  Our favorite part was climbing on top and looking out and seeing temples as far as the eye could see in every direction.  The next day we rented bicycles to go out to the temples so that we would have more freedom.  The bicycles we took may be the crappiest bicycles I have ever ridden.  After ridding out to a few temples spending half the day on top of a particularly shady temple writing post cards we called it quits.  We all came to the conclusion that there were the in the box temple builders and the outside the box temple builders
bagan skyline
bagan skyline
.  If you were in the box you built the classic round spire shaped temple and if you were out of the box(or a little kookoo) you built ones of any shape and size( we saw box temples, chess piece temples and even one that looked like a Mayan temple!).  Today we are doing homework and tomorrow we are all squeezing into a jeep for 10 hours to get to Inle Lake.
(A few days later.)
Well I have to say the jeep ride was fun! All though we were in there for more like 14 hours.  When we arrived at Inle Lake we checked in to the Mingalar Hotel.  It may be the best hotel we have stayed at in Myanmar.  The staff is really nice and they have an incredible breakfast!  The breakfast includes as many omelets as you want, banana pancakes, toast and tea or coffee.  Also around every corner the staff is going to offer you free “welcome” lemonade.  it’s a pretty sweet deal. Our second day here we went on a boat tour of the lake.  We went to a floating market that wasn’t actually floating and that was absolutely swarming with tourists.  We went to a silver smiths workshop, floating farms and a monastery where the monks teach cats how to jump.  Our favorite part was the floating farms, they grow a lot of tomatoes, flowers and cauliflower.  It is incredible how all of it floats on water hyacinths.  The next day the owner of our hotel invited us to trek out to a monastery in the mountains to visit his old master
bagan skyline2
bagan skyline2
.  Once we got there we did a short meditation with his master for about fifteen minutes.  The meditation was very interesting but after a while it started to hurt pretty bad.  I really enjoyed it though, I think I will do it more often.  After lunch we hiked up the mountain a little farther to some caves.  After that we hiked back down and took a boat to our hotel. The day after that we sat around and did homework.  The next day we rented bikes and biked out to some hot springs.  In the end we didn’t go to the hot springs because they were pretty crappy and pretty expensive for Myanmar.  Instead we climbed to some pagodas, watched a volley ball game and just rode our bikes around. Yesterday we did more homework and hung out at the hotel.  We’ve been pretty lazy about homework so were really cracking down.  Today were doing homework to.
Bagan hotels Slideshow

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