Bagan: temples and dust

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<a name="DDE_LINK19"></a>My first port of call after Yangon was a place called Bagan in central Burma where I would be looking for dry-country birds. There are night buses and day buses from Yangon to Bagan. Night buses can be good because they are your accommodation and transport all rolled into one, but I had heard from a few people how terrible this particular night bus was – it wasn't a bus where you could actually get any sleep. I knew it couldn't be any worse than the 20-hour nightmare-bus I took in northern Sulawesi one time with blaring dance music, stops every twenty minutes to let passengers on and off, people and freight packed in like sardines, chicken-pox-infected children rubbing themselves against everything and everybody they could – but nevertheless I decided the day bus would be better because then I could look at the scenery along the way. Most of the other major routes I'll be taking later only have night buses though, so no choices there! The bus was at 8am and I needed to check-in at 7.30am. I was told by the people at the guesthouse that it was “a long way” to the bus station so I would need to get the taxi at 6am – it only took half an hour. The bus ride to Bagan took ten hours and it was freezing cold. If you've ever ridden in a long-distance bus in Thailand, same thing: it is like they are so proud of their air conditioning that they set it to “Deep Space” just so you can't miss it. You'd think the fact that everyone who gets on the bus immediately puts on their jackets, and even hats and gloves, might tip the driver off that they have it set too cold, but no.

For the first seven hours the scenery didn't really change much – mostly flat with occasional low hills, dry sparse grass and what little vegetation was left was scrubby secondary growth. I imagine in times past this whole area would have been covered in the dry broadleaf forest like that still left at Hlawga Park. For this part of the trip the bus was on a highway which surprisingly, after the manic traffic of Yangon, was almost empty of anything except other buses. For the last three hours of the trip the bus left the highway and took to a narrower road, also with not many other vehicles present, and this road ran through what I guess you would call wooded savannah, or in a more long-winded way, open forest in arid grassland where sometimes the forest was almost entirely made up of fan palms and sometimes of broadleaf trees with the palms scattered through them. There were introduced red river gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) scattered along the roadsides as well.

Bagan was not what I imagined. I had been expecting a city but it is barely even a town, and the parts you see from the bus on arrival give the impression of only existing to cater to the tourists who come to see the temples. The landscape around the village is arid lightly-wooded savannah on the edge of the Irrawaddy River, and the entire area is dotted with ancient stone temples and pagodas; I read somewhere that there are 2200 temples here. It is certainly impressive birding here. Whichever direction you look in there will be the peaks and spires of a dozen temples visible amongst the trees. It reminds me of being at Angkor in Cambodia, but fortunately without the same intensity of pestering to buy souvenirs. Most of them are small temples, often smaller than a standard-sized house, but others are a lot bigger.

I arrived in town at about 5.30pm and discovered that every guesthouse and hotel was full. I don't normally travel at this time of the year and it was a bit of a shock to see the sheer number of Europeans here. I don't mean Europeans as in “white people”, I mean actual Europeans, predominantly French from the accents. It took quite a bit of walking before I found a place called Winner Guesthouse which, although full, gave me a little spare room with a mattress on the floor for US$7. It sounds like every accommodation in Mandalay is also full, and possibly the same at Lake Inle and Kalaw as well. I may end up in some tight spots as I continue onwards.

The next morning I headed off on a bicycle to look for some birds. It's pretty chilly here at night, so much so that you're wearing a jacket or jersey in the morning, but it gets quite hot in the day. All the habitat is the same here so I just cycled along the main road and took any dirt side-roads that looked interesting. As the morning progressed more and more tourists emerged from their beds and spread out into the countryside but luckily most people gathered at certain temple sites (I suspect the ones mentioned in Lonely Planet!) so it wasn't too difficult to find quiet areas. Only one mammal is common here, the Irrawaddy squirrel. In fact it is very common but so darn quick that I only managed to get a photo of one individual and it doesn't show it to its best. The Irrawaddy squirrel is a very dapper little squirrel, mostly sort of a grizzled grey with whitish underparts and face. They were often seen in pairs, chasing each other through the trees, over the temples, and between the cactus trees. The squirrels are surprisingly shy – as soon as you see one it is off like a shot. I was trying to sneak up on one squirrel which was on a little temple but instead I found a pair of spotted owlets which were much more relaxed about being photographed. The owlets were almost as common as the squirrels, and I saw several over the course of the day. Hoopoes were even more common: I saw eleven in one day, which is more than my previous record of two!

The first new bird of the day, before I saw a squirrel or an owlet or a hoopoe, was a flock of vinous-breasted starlings which are gorgeous birds and as it turned out another very common bird here. The next new bird was a group of white-throated babblers, another common one but also one of Burma's few endemic birds. They behave in the bold manner of Australian babblers rather than the skulking manner of most Asian babblers, so they are easy to see. After some pied bushchats and scarlet-backed flowerpeckers (both common – seeing a pattern here?) another new bird in the form of a Burmese shrike, possibly one of the nicest-looking shrikes around with its sharp colour patterns. This one fooled me though because despite the name it isn't endemic to Burma, but that's still the best country to see it in for the first time. Burmese bushlarks are endemic but took a bit longer to nail down; they are common but have a habit of flushing from the side of the track and when they land they scuttle quickly off across the ground into the undergrowth before you can see them. I only got a good look at two birds. The other two endemics found here, the Jerdon's minivet and the hooded treepie, I did not find today, but I did see river lapwings and plain-backed sparrow which were new for me.

Tomorrow I will be trying to get to a place not on most visitors' radars, the Shwesettaw Wildlife Sanctuary. I'm going there for a particular species of mammal of the hooved variety but it has the same sort of habitat as at Bagan and both the minivet and treepie are found there so I might see them there. Then I'll have another day at Bagan on my return, so we'll see what happens.

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