Town of a Thousand Spires

The Bus Trip!

The master plan was to take the early morning bus from Inle to Bagan to celebrate new years. All going to plan we would arrive in Bagan at about 6pm. Things went far from the plan. The bus picked us up at about 5:30am. It spluttered it's way along. Any climb it faced took a few attempts. The drivers assistant getting out to adjust the engine at each failure. We got to a town at about 8am and the bus pulled up to a welders workshop. I knew we were in trouble. The leaf suspension on the bus was taken apart and the guys in the shop started welding bits of it. Three hours later we were back on the road for another attempt at our destination.

About an hour later we came to a stop for some road building. There was a crew of about ten people building the road. Six women carried baskets of pebbles on their heads, a guy poured tar out of a bucket and three more were mixing the tar and standing watching. For all of this the bus was stopped for about half an hour. We couldn't say that the infrastructure of Myanmar was held up because of us!

We got on the road again and about an hour later we hit another problem. The driver brought the bus to a bumpy stop against a rock on a hill and started to operate on what I think was the steering. The worrying part of this one was the locals started to abandon ship with the first alternative that came along. The first pickup that arrived was full and people started to pile on the top. We were told that there were three spots left on top, but with the state of the road, neither of us fancied spending a few hours on top of the van. We waited it out and another pick-up arrived, with a spare seat in the front. Idan and myself bought out the front two seats to take us to a town where we could catch a bus to Bagan. It took about three hours to get there and the pick-up driver dropped us to the bus stop where the Bagan buses stop.

We were told we had about an hour to kill until the Bagan buses started drifting through. We had just settled down for something to eat when the first bus pulled in, our old reliable workhorse that had somehow come back to life. We finished our food, got back on and reclaimed our seats. Another hour passed to the next breakdown! This time it seemed like there was dirty petrol in the engine. The driver was out siphoning petrol out of the tank. This took about an hour to get sorted before we were off again. Just for the sake of it, when we could see Bagan in the distance we had one last breakdown for the hell of it. Another clean-out of the engine and an hour later we rolled into town at 12:30am, 1st January 2007. Not a single bed to be had in town, we marched about banging on doors for 1 1/2 hours. One hotel eventually took us in at 2am and set us up with floor space on the top floor. We were very grateful!

And So for Bagan

After all that, we had to get out and see a bit of what Bagan is famous for, pagodas. We hired U Kyaio and his pride Shwe Ni the horse to take us around for the day with his horse cart. Without trying, what a scream this guy was. He was a middle school teacher in 1973, what he was able to teach we had no idea. He informed us that his horse had 'three children, two boys and one girl' and was obsessed with the idea that every animal we passed was just about to nip behind a bush and make babies. Two special warning noises on the cart scattered the crowds. This first was a brass bell, the second was the emergency call with him sticking the horse whip into the wheel of the cart. He was delighted with himself.

Sailing along the road in the horse cart, the road side was one pagoda after another. No single one was immensely impressive, but they were everywhere. We stopped off at a sample. The mandatory postcard and art sellers guarding the gate of each one. You get a sense of beauty wandering along the roads and paths, but really you don't get to appreciate the real wonder of Bagan until you climb onto one of the higher pagodas. It's an area of fabulous sunsets and U Kyaio assured us that he was taking us to a spot where there would be no 'girls talking'. The view was amazing. From the pagoda that we were on, the view was an endless landscape of spikes on the horizon. Standing on one side of the stupa, within eye-shot I estimated that I could clearly see at least 70 stupas. In total Bagan is said to have over 2,000 Buddhist buildings, all within quite a condensed area of about 25 sq km. Certainly one of the best sunsets places that I've been, even if there were a couple of girls talking! U Kyaio was very excited when we got back. One of the other drivers had told him that two tourists were discovered frolicking in one of the temples. No doubt the other drivers filling his fantasies.

Before we parted company, U Kyaio wanted a copy of the photos that we took of him. Surely he regularly carried tourists and had lots of photos, we thought. We weren't surprised though when we saw the address that he wrote for us:

U Kyaio Myaing, Some Gome Quarter, Horse Cart Number 65, Nyaung U.

The first time I would ever sent a letter to a horse cart!

The next day was supposed to be the main day in the Ananda Pagoda festival. There was a different version of what was to happen from every single person that we asked. We heard after that there were masses of monks there in the morning praying but we didn't catch it. We figured that since it was a full moon festival, there was a good chance of a bit of action in the evening. There was a buzzing market around the Ananda temple. At the back of the market was the local cinema. A big bamboo hall with a 40 year old projector shooting 70's shows into the hall. The locals sitting on the ground inside fascinated with what they were seeing (see photo). The main night time event was the show stage on the side of the market. Tone deaf singers blared Burmese songs over the area. The crowd looked like they were sitting there going through the motions because they had to stay awake for Buddha's sake!

And so Bagan drew to a close. The big difference to the rest of the places that we had been in the country was that this is really a relic of history, most of the pagodas lie in deserted fields. No single building could even compare to the might of the likes of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but the sheer scale of the place when you got up to the level of the pagoda tops was incredible.