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Temples
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Bagan is home to the largest area of Buddhist temples, pagodas, stupas and ruins in the world - many dating to the 11th and 12th centuries. Today, there are over 2000 of them but of course there was more in the places heyday. The plain the temples are on is shared by the Burmese people going about their everyday lives, in the shadows of some pretty impressive monuments.
The preferred method of transport to get around to see the temples in a horse and cart, which you can hire for about $10 for the day. Our driver basically stalked us, camped outside our hotel, so we gave in and chose him as our guide. We had decided to boycott the hotels in the book and stayed at a local hotel, which was a pretty sweet deal, and nice and cool with air-con, when we had electricity!
The first temple we visited we were able to climb up a secret staircase to get to the top, and the view was breathtaking, 360 degrees of temples of all shapes and sizes....wow! Resigned to the fact that we weren't going to be able to see them all, we took in the main ones, and they were just as impressive on the inside as there were murals/frescos on the ceilings and walls which were fairly well preserved. Each temple came with the souvenir sellers selling their "original" paintings....sure...they were the same at every place! Words can't really explain the place - you are going to have to look at the pics. It was truly an impressive place that we would highly recommend seeing.
The whole not being able to control where we were taken too go to Matt and we ended the tour a bit early having a bit better appreciation for the place and realizing we could tackle the rest of it on our own the next day on bikes. Biking meant we could go at our own pace and see some of the smaller places which was nice. Lastly, we headed to a particularly well placed temple we could climb to watch the sunset. It was a little distracting with the kids trying to sell us postcards, but all in all well worth it. We headed back to town on the pitch black road with no street lights. We had nice weather while we were in Bagan, but the rain in the north came down the river flooded part of the town. But all was good. We were able to book a cheap flight from Yangoon to Chiang Mai, so we took a bus back down to the capital (after much tooing and froing about whether we should just fly or not).
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