Bagan

I arrived in Bagan early this morning. This region is really the focus of my trip, I've wanted to see the thousands of thousand year old temples and pagodas since I saw photos of them several years ago. Bagan has never been an easy place to get to. The first couple times I tried to get a tourist visa for Myanmar, there was just too much red tape, and most of the time they weren't granting visas at all. It's much better now, a visa is relatively easy to obtain, and there are frequent international flights into Myanmar now. This all means that tourism in the area is going to boom soon and it seems like now is the time to visit before it gets as overloaded with group tours as Angkor Wat in Cambodia. That's not to say that there isn't any tourism here. On the flight in this morning, we arrived just after sunrise and in addition to seeing temples and pagodas dotting the landscape, I also counted 11 hot air balloons doing their sunrise flight!

Though I arrived fairly early at my hotel, I couldn't get into my room to unpack and set my camera up until about 1030. I also couldn't get a guide arranged for today, but the hotel has bicycle rentals for $1 per day, so I decided to go out on my own just with a DSLR to catch some afternoon light. Below are a few imaged from this little expedition. Everything was within about a 15 minute ride from the hotel. I have a guide and driver scheduled for tomorrow morning at 0730 so I will start shooting RED footage then and go to some of the bigger sites farther away.

Though the land around the temples and pagodas is farmed and cultivated, the temples are not abandoned. Every one I saw today was still an active temple even though most of them are over a thousand years old.


















The Irrawaddy river flows from t he Himalayas to the Andaman sea. It is still the main route for commerce through the center of Myanmar.


Sunset on the Irrawaddy River which flows along the edge of Bagan. Some of the sites are built on the banks of the river.


A fisherman on the river at dusk.

Burma Bound

I arrived yesterday in Yangon, Myanmar after a week of being “Shutdown in Bangkok”. It didn’t have anything to do with the current Shutdown Bangkok political protests. That was no bother at all, really more like a huge street party with a few political speeches that nobody was paying much attention to. No, my problems were more of the “acquiring visa” kind. The Myanmar embassy wasn’t the main problem, it was the Indonesian embassy that took a day longer than planned to do my 1 year visa. When that happened, I couldn’t get my passport to the Myanmar embassy in time for a visa before my scheduled Friday departure, and at that point pretty much everything came off the rails. The domino effect rippled through every flight and hotel reservation that I had meticulously arranged. Over the weekend I rebooked flights and hotels, and Monday I got my Myanmar visa in time to make it to the airport for my rebooked 2015 flight to Yangon. Except that there is no longer a 2015 flight to Yangon. The last one was the Friday flight I was supposed to be on. So I rebooked again for a 0715 flight the next morning and found a hotel close to the airport for another night in Bangkok. So yesterday morning, I left my hotel at 0500, checked in for my flight, went to the gate, got on the plane, took off on time, flew about halfway to Yangon and the plane turned around and went back to Bangkok! They were never really clear why, I suspect it was some sort of instrument problem and if they went on to Yangon they would be grounded there until it was repaired and there are no parts available. When we landed back in Bangkok, they kept us on the plane sitting out on the tarmac while some mechanics came out to look things over. The they loaded us on a couple buses and headed back for the terminal. About the time we got to the terminal, the buses did a U-Turn and headed back out on the tarmac and we re-boarded a plane. I’m not sure if it was the one we got off. Maybe that’s why the drove us around in circles for awhile. At any rate, that plane made it all the way to Yangon. If getting there is really half the fun, I’ve got a whole lot more fun in store for me for the remainder of the trip.

I was planning on taking the overnight train to Bagan this afternoon. I went to the train station yesterday afternoon to buy my ticket. The gentleman in the office said yes, there were berths available in the sleeping car for US$40.00. I pulled out two 20’s and gave them to him. He looked them over and handed one of them back to me and said that it was not in good enough condition to accept. It had been folded, so there was a crease in it. So I pulled out 4 more 20’s and told him to pick one. Nope, none were good enough for him. So I asked him if I could just pay in Myanmar Kyat since I had a nice stack of mint bills straight out of an ATM. Oh no, he said, you can’t buy a train ticket with Kyat, only dollars. So tomorrow morning I’m flying to Bagan instead because you can but a plane ticket with Kyat, no problem.

Today I hired a very nice young guide who took me all over Yangon to shoot temples. We would taxi to a temple, spend some time there then grab another cab to the next. Taxis are cheap here, the most expensive was about 4 bucks for a 30 minute ride. It helps to have a savvy local negotiate the fares though as there are no meters in the taxis.

Here are a few images from the day’s touring:

A 216 foot reclining Buddha (I only saw 2 feet).






Lots of bells at the temples.








These are two of Yangon's famous Pink Elephants. They really do look pink, and you don't have to be inebriated to see them.






The Buddha's LEDs add a modern touch.


The North Gate to Shwedagon temple.




The Shwedagon Pagoda is 99 meters high and covered in 60 tons of gold. It also has a 30 carat diamond on the top. You can see Shwedagon form miles away, even at night. It's the most impressive Buddhist temple I've ever seen.