Bagan – Angering the Gods in Tourist Town

Bagan.

My first impressions of the Burmese tourist Mecca of Bagan were coloured by the dreamworld of a 5am bus stop. Two drunks stood under a streetlight exchanging wild haymakers that connected with sharp slaps. Somewhere in the distance a tinny loudspeaker broadcast the Buddhist morning prayer, a monotonous monotone chant over discordant music. Three young monks pedalled past and creaked into the mist. The brawlers chased each other away but their yells echoed out of the darkness for a long time as I warmed my hands on an instant coffee and watched a yawning man hitch his blinkered horse to a cart, ready for the morning rush of tourists wanting to watch the sunrise over Bagan’s ancient temples. I yawned in sympathy and my mouth felt gritty after 24 hours on a succession of dusty buses so overloaded that people sat in the aisles on plastic stools and men rode on the roof and spat blood-red beetel nut juice past the open windows.

            As the dawn tinged the mist orange, a trishaw driver offered to take me to a cheap hotel. The place was old and dirty but I didn’t care as I flopped onto the bed and passed out.

            At midday it was a different place – hot under a clear sky and crawling with tourists. I walked past souvenir stands and hotels to restaurant row where I wolfed my first meal in 36 hours. Desperate to stretch my aching back, I spent the afternoon walking amongst the crumbling ruins of ancient temples. No longer haunted and foreboding as they had seemed from my bus window, they dot the plain at random and goats graze around them while their herders sit on thousand year old steps. There are more than 2,000 within a few square miles and although a steady stream of middle-aged tourists in horse carts and backpackers on wobbly bicycles passed me, there were still more temples than visitors and I spent a happy few hours humming the Indiana Jones theme while crawling through dark passages and clambering over crumbling roofs. I wished I had a large whip and a sexy assistant, although what I’d do with them is no business of yours.

Early morning ballooning over ancient temples.

            In the evening I hired a bike to get an early start for sunrise but at 6am my hotel clerk was snoring on a cot and my bike was locked behind a spiked gate. I didn’t have the heart to wake him so I muscled my bike over the fence, nearly skewering myself. I pedalled through another cold mist and again the temples seemed ghostly and strange, like squared-off pyramids silhouetted against the lightening sky. I swerved through soft sand towards a likely looking temple, off by itself and on a slight rise. The view from the top was a postcard scene of hundreds of temples wreathed in mist and sapped of colour in the half light. As I clambered higher up the steeply stepped roof for a better vantage point, a 500 hundred year old piece of mortar came away in my hand and for a moment I teetered above a 30 foot drop. I wind-milled my arms like a cartoon character and remembered that I had forgotten to remove my shoes before entering the temple – that’ll teach me.

            I returned back to my lower, less spirit-infuriating position and watched the scene change colour and sharpen in the breathless air. As the sky began to blue, five hot air balloons took off and drifted low and slow above the skyline. I could clearly hear their burners hiss from a kilometre away. The sun appeared dull orange and stretched from behind low mountains and I stood filling SD cards as the landscaped changed from uniform grey to jungle-green broken by red-brown temples and white mist which hugged the ground.

Eventually I tore myself away and spent hours wobbling my bike between rows of deserted temples on sand tracks I shared with ox-carts before hunger forced me back to the burgers, wi-fi and all-day happy hours of restaurant row.

Poser.