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.