Bagan

We arrived in Bagan at around 5.30am on an overnight bus. The bus had left Yangon at about 8.30 the previous evening, and strangely stops at a service station at about 2am where everyone is forced off the bus. A lot of the locals had a meal at the restaurant, but we pretty much spent half an hour walking around like zombies! I actually slept really well after this, but was so tired when we arrived as just not enough sleep. We took a taxi to the hotel (we were definitely overcharged as paid 8,000 kyat, and noticed signs later saying it should have been 6,500), and as you’d imagine no chance our room would be ready. We just slept and lazed around the pool until about 11am when we could check into our room.

We didn’t get up to much on the first day, mainly spending our time exploring the local area. There wasn’t too much to see within a walking distance of the hotel, but there was a few bars and restaurants we popped in for drinks and lunch. It is really hot here (up to 43 degrees during the day), so we are really missing air conditioned coffee shops to chill out in! We did visit the Shwezigon Pagoda, which was a beautiful gold pagoda in the town we were staying (Nyaung U).

Old Bagan

The next two days we spent exploring the pagodas around Old Bagan. Bagan is an ancient city and was capital of the Pagan empire which ruled most of present-day Burma. They built over 10,000 pagodas during the 11th-13th century, with over 2,000 still standing to this day. We were really hoping to do a sunrise hot air balloon flight over the pagodas, as this is meant to be one of the best balloon flights in the world and would have been an incredible experience. Unfortunately the balloon season finishes on 10th April in Myanmar, so we were about two weeks too late – gutted!

The second best way to view the pagodas is to hire an e-bike – this is an electric bike (although looks more like a scooter) and costs about £2.50 per day. It was so much fun riding around on the e-bike exploring all the pagodas. There are a couple of main roads which are extremely quiet (just a few motorbikes, e-bikes and the occasional car or horse and cart), but most of the time is spend riding around sandy backroads – I felt like I was in the map for Red Dead Redemption at times (PS4 game if you don’t know it)! It’s disrespectful to enter the pagodas with your shoulders or legs on display, so I also bought a longyi to wear – it was a bit cooler than the jogging bottoms I have with me (my only pair of trousers).

We wanted to find an elevated spot to watch the sunset (sunrise would probably have been better as much quieter, but the sun rises at 5.30am and we didn’t fancy that), so whilst riding around were keeping an eye out for somewhere to go back to. In the past people have climbed up the outside of the pagodas, but this has been illegal since early last year as having thousands of tourists climbing over these old buildings damages them (and is not safe). We found a couple of options; there are a couple of mounds that are good and also a big tower which has been built (and I think is $5 to go up). The tower probably gives an amazing view, but is very controversial here as it is a huge blot on the landscape and I heard someone mention that a lot of bribe money must have been paid to get permission to build it. So we opted with one of the mounds, and I think this was a good choice as it gave us a great elevated view across the landscape with all of the pagodas. It did get quite busy though, so you need to get there early to get a spot at the front. We were a bit unlucky though, as there was a layer of clouds just above the horizon which the sun disappeared into before it set.

The obvious comparison to make with this would be Angkor Wat. I would say the pagodas/temples themselves at Angkor Wat are more impressive (they are just so much bigger), however, you need a tuk tuk to take you around and it is horrendously busy. Bagan was so quiet and much more charming. Although sunset was busy, and you’d see other people at the larger pagodas, most of the time it was just us on our own riding around the dusty backroads and exploring random ruins.