Bagan day 1

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Another early start as we leave Mandalay for Bagan. This time, there was no need to be prompt getting to the airport. We are the only people in the check in “queue”! As ever, David’s water bottles, visible on the outside of his rucksack as a decoy are confiscated at security, while the three inside Sara’s bag are not spotted on the x-ray, which could make you worry about how effective the security checks really are. It’s only a 35 minute flight to Bagan and in-flight catering consists of a boiled sweet, and we are soon on our way into town with our new guide Win Bo.

After a wander round the interesting local market where a proliferation of foodstuffs are on sale, which for some reason seems to terrify the French party who have just alighted from their Belmond Four Seasons coach, we go to the first of 20 or so temples and pagodas we will visit over the next few days. Our first surprise is that this is a large temple full of pilgrims, and not a small stupa in a field which is what most of the photos of Bagan show. The Shwezigon Pagoda has a huge gilded central stupa surrounded by smaller pagodas. We meet a group of local villagers who’ve come here on pilgrimage, and are picnicking in front of one of the shrines and smoking local cheroots. The Burmese like to hedge their bets, and there is also a nat temple, full of statues from old nat shrines that were banned when the king insisted everyone be a Buddhist back in the eleventh century but thought it wise to keep a few nat images to win the people over. Nats are spirits worshipped by animists, but Buddhists still pray to the nats for good fortune. The whole area in front of the temple was taken over by a temporary market and fair celebrating a major Buddhist festival. This market is less interesting, full of mixed manufactured stuff that seems to have come in containers from China, together with a stall apparently selling automatic weapons. Not sure where they came from.

Bagan is beguiling. It operates at a far slower pace of life than Yangon and Mandalay, and it takes no time at all to settle into the unlikeliness of driving past hundreds of mostly small red brick temples and pagodas sticking up out of fields of crops. For every large ‘important’ temple we visit, we see two or three smaller ones and drive past 20 more. We quickly learn not to ask to stop to take a photo at every stupa we see. Most of them were built in between 1044 (when the Burmese king who lived in Bagan decided everyone should become Buddhists, although Buddhism was already well established, and 1367, when the Mongol hordes swept across Burma and south east Asia, raping and pillaging as Mongols did.

Tourism is the mainstay of the local economy, especially after the villagers of old Bagan were made to leave their homes so the area could revert to fields, and were relocated in the surrounding area. As a result, all the major sites and many of the smaller ones are filled with vendors, offering a standard range of souvenirs – postcards, lacquer ware, puppets, parasols, woodcarvings and pictures. But unlike so many other countries, the sellers are not at all pushy. A polite shake of the head or ‘no thank you’ is enough to make them move on without offence. It seems somehow wrong to have souvenirs laid out for sale inside a temple where people are prostrating themselves in worship, but it doesn’t seem to offend the Buddhists who come to pray (and to buy souvenirs).

Win Bo is a wonderful guide. He explains the history in just the right amount of detail and is a genius at taking us to places that are not too crowded with other tourists. When we do go somewhere with lots of tourists, he always finds a side entrance, and takes us in the opposite direction to the crowds. We learn the difference between a temple and a pagoda – the former has an interior, typically with statues of Buddha, whereas the latter is solid, and between the different styles of architecture, and the different forms of religious buildings. Fascinating to people like us who enjoy this stuff.

Many of the buildings show evidence of earthquake damage. The most recent big quakes were in 1975 and 2016, and there is a huge amount of repair work in hand. Bamboo scaffolding encases pagodas in a tight knit framework that exactly mirrors the shape of the pagoda, with an inner layer of bamboo scaffolding inside the framework for the workmen to stand on. Bagan is aiming to become a Unesco World Heritage Site, and Unesco do not approve of replacing sections of buildings that have collapsed, so many of the tops of pagodas remain missing. The smaller stupas are obviously low priority, and many are missing their tops or else are tilted as a result of the ground having shifted. The miracle is how much remains despite the area having suffered multiple earthquakes since the buildings went up so many hundreds of years ago. Win Bo points out to us how they were built with some layers of bricks laid horizontally and others vertically, with almost no mortar holding them together, which enables them to absorb shock waves and allows the layers within the structure to move without collapsing. The tops of the structures are most vulnerable to collapse, as the shock waves cause oscillations within the structure that often shakes the top loose and down it comes.



At the end of the day, he takes us to a newly built mound by a man made lake, where we can watch the sun set over the plain dotted with stupas. The only blot on the landscape is the hideous watch tower built by the Aureum hotel (run by government cronies) which pokes up in the centre of the plain around old Bagan in a truly hideous fashion. The guidebook tells us it does not even afford very good views. We enjoy the sunset while all around us, the Spanish tourists with their backs to the setting sun haggle over the price of paintings, and the French (again!) arrive just as the sun vanishes from sight.

Scroll down for more photos.

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