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Published: January 12th 2012
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Today is our last day in Mandalay, but since the only sights we haven't seen involve giving money and entrance fees to the government, we decide to take a boat ride up the river to Mingun to see the Mingun Paya. Mingun Paya is the remnants of what was supposed to be Myanmar's largest paya ever. Unfortuantely the earthquake of 1938 cracked in parts and the construction was never completed. As it stands now, it is 240ft high, less than half of the intended final height!
That morning we made our way to the jetty to catch the boat 1.5 hours to Mingun. We pay 5000K return each for the boat ride. While we waited for the boat to depart we interacted with some local children. It was clear that many families actually lived in tents among the chaos and dirt of jetty. These children had been trained to flock towards tourists to get money or candy from them. We chose not to give them any money, since we had become weary of where the money actually went, but they were more than happy to play for the camera a little bit and take our empty water bottle
to use as a play toy!
On the boat, we enjoy the views of fishermen and stilt houses lining the river. Mingun is certainly set-up as a tourist destination and the first thing to great us when we arrived was a primitive "taxi" that was a bull pulling a buggy with the word TAXI painted on the side! In order to get some distance from the rest of the tourists on the boat, we took a different path and visited the Settaway Paya first. It is a white temple with gold tops and a supposed Buddha's footprint in it.
We slowly made our way to Mingun Paya. Man, this thing is huge and the earthquake cracks are enormous! Certainly big enough that I could fall in the cracks if I was on top! We decide to climb it before it gets too hot. We decide to take a wander around the main level before going up. This brilliant thought brought us up at the back of the 3$ government admission gate and so we got up without paying! Yay for us!
The top of Mingun Paya features amazing views over Mingun,
the river and we can even see Mandalay Hill from here! We walk all around the top, jumping over weeds and cracks in the paya. At the front of the paya are two giant lion statues that are missing heads and really ressemble nothing, but are neat.
Next we visit the Mingun Bell, a huge bell beside the Mingun Paya and then we check out Hsinbyume Paya, the round, white paya we admired from the top of Mingun Paya. Just as we are arriving so does a bus load of monks. It was a quite a sight to see red and pink and maroon covered monks walking around the stark white temple!We hang around while the monks do their prayer and then wander through the village waiting for the return boat trip.
While we are eating fried rice for lunch, some children tell us that school starts in the town at 1:00, after the daily tourist bus leaves. It certainly is true that these places live for tourist money! We board the boat and get back to Mandalay at 2pm. Once there, we check our email for the first time in quite a few
days. This is the longest we have been without internet and it is soooo slow that it's almost not worth it.
We catch a taxi to the "bus station", which is more of a dirt field with busses and chaos, and we get the 4:30 bus to Bagan. We get an entertaining bus ride with karaoke and Burmese movies on. Although we can't understand the words, we make up a story to go along with the video and it's awesome! We drive into Bagan at midnight, and since we had the sense to make reservations before we arrived, we got a free pick-up at the bus station, a very welcome perk at midnight! We drive straight to New Park Hotel and hit the sack!
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