Bagan

Bagan – 15/12/12. We arrived at Nuang Ou, near Bagan, very early in the morning by bus (around 3.30am).  We dropped our bags at a guesthouse, where we hired bicycles just as the city alarm o’clock came on.  At 4.30am we were amazed to hear a big truck with massive speakers on top of the roof going back and forth on the main street playing loud and cheesy Burmese music (bubble gum pop or Annie Cordy sort of style).  “Is this to wake everybody up?” we joked with a cyclo driver.  As it turned out, it was for exactly this purpose.

It was still dark and the town was asleep (or now awake, in fact) when we took a small breakfast at the local “tea shop”.  We then got back on our bicycles and headed to the temples of the old city to watch the sunrise and discovered thousands of pagodas and stupas rising in front of us in the middle of the dusty scrubland.

At this time we were alone riding our bikes for the next couple of hours and we enjoyed this spectacular landscape.  Later, when the sun was higher and the heat started to hit us, we stopped for lunch and rested for a couple of hours (staying to charge our batteries after the short night we had).

In the afternoon it was much busier and also more stalls of sellers turned up in front of the main temples.  They were trying to sell their lacquerware, postcards, books and drawings (we couldn’t resist buying one of those drawing from a young “art student”). One kid showed us his drawings of some of the temples and tried to sell them to us, it was quite cute as they were the kind of drawings you get from a young kid and he made us laugh with his sales banter.

In the late afternoon we decided that we had seen all that we wanted to see in Bagan, and instead of staying the night we jumped on another bus heading north-east for Inle Lake…