Day 11: Stupafied

Khin Zaw, our horse cart driver, was waiting outside the hotel when I emerged at the much more socially respectable time of 8:00am. Determined to get the best possible tour of Bagan but unwilling but feeling rather cruel, I had him hopping as I put him through his paces as to why I should opt for him over a tour organised through the hotel. There are well over 400 horse cart drivers in Bagan, and well under 400 tourists a day. Competition makes a full day’s guided tour of the entire plain cost around 12,000kt, or around US$8-9.

Khin Zaw wasn’t actually the driver, he was just renting his cart as his horse had died several months ago, and was saving up 150,000kt to buy a new one. 

The driver was the village’s elderly horse-cart driver teacher, who didn’t speak a word of English and was completely silent apart from the odd clicking noise to slow the horse. This meant we would have Khin Zaw’s full attention as a guide, a good bet because of his strong English (he had studied in Yangon).

He turned out to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of not just the history of the temples, stupas and pagodas, but also the flowers and plants that dotted the plains, and their medicinal properties for treating both humans and animals. 

I learned that his wife had died of heart disease during her late 20s, leaving him to raise his eight year old son. Initially devastated, he had joined a monastery while he sorted himself out, but had left to ensure he was able to provide for his son. As well as ensuring his son got all the schooling he could afford, he read prodigiously at every opportunity. They now lived with his mother-in-law, which he wryly explained

precluded him from remarrying, and would continue to do so after the additional blow of losing his horse several months ago.

My overall impression was of someone who had experienced an absolute bastard of a life, and had emerged softly-spoken and far wiser than his years – a perfect poster child for Buddhism (although he was very interested in “what is it like to drink beer, and be drunk?”) 

The plain of Bagan is surrounded by a huge looping divided highway, with another main road cutting through the middle. The rest of the plain is criss-crossed with tiny dirt paths, sometimes only as wide as a goat track. Many are unmarked on the maps, and many that are marked have long overgrown.

The port village of Nyaung U sits on the banks of the Ayeyarwady river on the north east corner of the loop, while ‘Old Bagan’, a walled city with the bulk of the ruins, lies in the north west. New Bagan is about four kilometres south, and is basically a refugee camp after the government, in 1996, forcibly evicted all the Old Bagan residents at gunpoint to make way for tourism development. Several little bamboo villages are scattered between them, while the best facilities for independent travellers are in Nyaung U, including decent budget hotels, internet facilities, a bustling morning market and some excellent restaurants.

But you don’t go to Bagan for the food. You go to see what has to be one of the spiritual wonders of the world: thousands of monolithic stone temples, stupas (pagodas), monasteries and zedis, emerging from the undergrowth as far as the eye can see. They are uncounted (estimates are about 4000), largely unpreserved, and unguarded – you can clamber up the steep faces, explore mazes of claustrophobic passages, climb tiny stairwells and discover meditation chambers filled with ancient Buddhist paintings. There’s usually no one else around, no ropes to stand behind, and nothing to stop you feeling exactly like Indiana Jones as you hurtle down a dim stone passageway pursued by a flock of angry bats you disturbed in the dark. 

You need at least two days to do Bagan justice. Most visitors start with a horse-cart tour around the whole loop to orient themselves for a bike ride the following day.

I have no idea how many temples we visited that day – it would have had to have been at least 50. Many were off the beaten track and some had been gated, which required hunting down the ‘keymaster’ who was usually lurking around a souvenir stand nearby. Khin Zaw knew all about the lavish paintings inside many of the larger temples and was able to translate the Pali script on the walls in many others, which gave me a general understanding of the buildings Buddhist connections. 

The paintings had inspired a cottage industry of copycat painters, who spent their time carefully copying the paintings and reliefs inside the temples onto cloth canvases for tourists. Some of these were lovely, but again subject to money and baggage issues.

Around many of the larger structures you would also have to run a gauntlet of souvenir sellers, most of whom seemed to have resigned themselves to the fact that nobody was going to buy their wares and instead followed tourists around chatting to them about their travels as they clambered over the monuments.

As with all Buddhist sites you have to do this shoeless. I never figured out why, but it added a certain tactile element to the experience as you waded through bat shit in the dark and slipped on moss while clinging to a tiny ledge 40 metres above the ground and 400 kilometres from the nearest semi-competent medical facility.

While you clung for your life, you had a spectacular view of the government’s vile new observation tower that had been erected in the middle of the plain like a giant concrete penis. It had no windows going all the way up, but someone had, as an afterthought, tried to make it fit in by whacking a prefabricated pagoda roof on top. The luxury hotel underneath cost US$400 a night, while cheapskates could go up to the top for US$10. Everyone else could climb one of the temples next door for free.

I also quickly saw that Bagan isn’t as ruined as it looks (or should be). The government’s dubious Department of Archeology, which replaced UNESCO heritage teams after the sanctions were introduced, has done restoration work far more destructive than the 1975 earthquake which damaged many monuments. This includes ‘repainting’ over old paintings with what looks like black texta, and renovating old temples with fresh masonry and a lick of gold paint and plaster.

It was quite easy to follow the logic - what’s better than a 900 year old temple? A 900 year old temple with a new roof, additional storey, and a fresh plaster Buddha to replace that musty old one with the solid gold head nobody wants. While you’re at it, go over the paintings in texta.

As a Western tourist it was easy to be horrified at the archaeological desecration. But there’s another side to it that goes to the core of the Buddhist concepts that built the monuments in the first place – Bagan might be an ancient city, but it is by no means a dead one. In fact there is nothing more quintessentially Burmese than to clamber up the ancient stones of a moss-covered 11^th century temple to discover a brand new Buddha stuffed inside bedecked with Christmas tree lights.

This is because there is much Buddhist merit to be gained by restoring a mouldy old stupa, and even more merit to be gained by building a few more. This is one of the reasons why nobody knows exactly how many monuments there are scattered across the plain; at least 300 new ones have gone up in the last seven years.

An interesting characteristic of the Burmese brand of Buddhism is how it lives alongside animist ‘nat’ or spirit worship. I saw this when we stopped for morning tea at a tiny village nestled between the Buddhist temples. On the way in we stopped at a large overgrown reservoir on the outskirts of the village, and Khin Zaw explained that the reason it was overgrown was because the villagers would not take any firewood from the place to avoid displeasing the resident guardian nat.

There only seemed to be a couple of families living in the village, which specialised in weaving cotton. We were proffered tea, peanuts (more bloody peanuts) and little round jaggery sweets made from palm sugar that I quickly developed an addiction to.

I was feeling guilty about brushing off all the souvenir vendors, so I bought my first and only souvenir – a blue cotton shirt that made me look wannabe-asian but was nice and cool. The villagers did not have plastic buttons so it did up with cloth buttons fed through little hoops. Amid my desire to support Burmese cottage industry was the thought that the shirt would be a good thing to wear out to the pub in order to steer conversations with attractive strangers towards the lines of “well, this one time in Burma…”

On the way out an elderly lady who had been weaving presented me with an enormous cigar made from the husk of a corncob. I slipped it to the driver.

We stopped for lunch in New Bagan, a depressing street or two filled with prefab buildings and a lot of listless-looking people. The restaurant was a touristy one overlooking the Ayeyerwady river, which I suspected Khin Zaw had picked out for the sake of commission. I didn’t mind and invited him to lunch – he declined in horror, insisting on waiting outside with the driver. I later discovered that this was because he thought it was far too expensive an offer, as our total bill would have paid for six months of his son’s education.

He went off to have lunch with the driver at a teashop while Yoshi and I had a passable curry and rice lunch overlooking the river. We were the only customers in the massive restaurant apart from (predictably) another Australian.

Dr Brian Palmer was an Australian wheat research scientist who was on a package tour, an easier but more expensive way of exploring Burma than independent travel and one that has a tendency of seeing a great deal of money flowing into government coffers.

Dr Palmer turned out to have worked with Dr Lindsay O’Brien from the wheat research institute in Narrabri, a small town where I had worked for two and a half years. I had written a rather successful article about Dr O’Brien’s Icelandic wife Solveig Einarsdottir, a correspondent for Iceland’s major newspaper and author of a book about her father who was one of the founders of Iceland as an independent nation.

Sitting in a nearly-deserted restaurant in the heart of Burma surrounded by ancient ruins, Dr Palmer and I agreed it was very small world indeed.

I found another Narrabri connection as we trundled through a haphazard cotton field (“strong horse” Zhin Zaw would exclaim as the creature scrambled over collapsed bridges and piles of rubble heaped in the road).

I thought it was probably the one my new shirt had come from. Yoshi looked on with amusement as I insisted on posing with the plant for a photo with the ancient temples in the background, imagining it appearing somewhere in the pages of the Northwest Magazine.

It was getting dark as we drove back onto the main road. Along the way we stopped at a large golden stupa that Khin Zaw explained with great pride contained a relic of the Buddha himself – his collarbone, no less. Feeling mischevious I asked him if anybody had checked it was in there.

“No,” he said.

I asked him how people knew it was in there.

“The scriptures say it’s in there,” he said.

I thought of a phrase I knew well: ‘If it’s in the paper it must be true.’

I had learned a lot about Buddhism during my trip through Burma. It was by no means the peaceful religion it is given so much credit for being, and like any belief system was wide open to being twisted and interpreted for any purpose.

I liked its respect for individualism and emphasis on mental self-improvement so missing from other more constrictive and controlling systems, but at the same time I found the Buddhist world view very morbid: that life is suffering and that the only way to escape is to repress desire and sensation and disappear completely into nothingness (nirvana).

It was just the kind of thing to make life bearable for those with no hope, and just the kind of thing to crush the innovative thinking that might actually produce some. Why make life easier if the purpose is to suffer?

As the light dimmed we scrambled up the steps of the massive Shwesandaw Paya, hoping for a sunset photo. The ultimate sunset photo is something of a sport in Bagan, with visitors swapping ‘hot’ sunset temples and locals giving their own conflicting recommendations. You need height and angle, but the highest temples are some of the most impressive and if you’re standing on one you’re not going to get it in the photo, are you?

Unfortunately sunset photography was a moot point this evening as it was too cloudy. Still, I could tell Shwesandaw was a popular location for sunset photos - not because of the tourists, but because of the vast number of painting and souvenir vendors who clambered up after me.

I escaped and we headed back to Nyaung U. On the way I made up for the missed sunset.

Ananda temple is 52 metres high and a sight to behold at night when it is lit up and glimmers golden against the dark blue of the dusk. I stopped the cart and went for the photo – but I had no tripod and couldn’t keep the camera still enough for the long exposure I needed.

Luckily I got a dose of karma. On the way around I had taught Khin Zaw about taking photos, mostly out of vanity so I’d feature in at least a few of my holiday snaps. We’d gone over things like framing subjects, the rule of two thirds and dealing with dim temple lighting. I had figured it was a useful skill for someone taking solo travellers around the ruins and something else he could add to his sales spiel.

Struggling with the photo I heard a noise and turned around to discover he’d realised I needed to keep the camera still, and dismembered the horse cart to produce a large wooden crate which made a perfect improvised tripod.  

I lightened the blues and yellows, put the camera on timer mode (avoiding the shake you get when you press the button), and managed to produce the best photo of the entire trip.

As well as his 12,000kt fee we gave Khin Zaw a 4000 tip towards his new horse and promised to recommend him to the guesthouse owner, a way of ensuring a steady supply of future business. 

Absolutely buggered from all the climbing, I avoided the backpackers and went to the same teashop with Yoshi for a quick mohinga hit. I was feeling very glad I had got out of Yangon quickly because I had learned that foreigners who had paid ‘too much’ of an interest had been saddled with government informers, who followed them around and interrogated anyone they talked to. It was paranoid – but at the same time this was a government that had just discovered they couldn’t censor the BBC World Service and had compromised by banning people from listening to the radio.

Feeling confident at not having run into too many junta obstacles, I resolved to have a poke around the Yangon monastery on my way out of the country now I knew the layout of the city.

I had also learned that some people were getting international calls out of the country – but not to places like America, Britain and Australia. And calls were being monitored: a girl who had phoned her mother in Israel was startled to hear a third voice come on the line and explain very politely that the conversation was to continue in either English or Burmese, or else the call would end.

Over dinner I discussed with Yoshi my plans to go to Ngapali via overland, a trip the Lonely Planet described as “officially the world’s worst bus ride”, and “worse than boot camp in the Swiss army”. It all sounded like a challenge to me but I tried to warn Yoshi so he could make his own informed decision. He either misunderstood or was determined to tag along – I’d been doing pretty well so far, after all.