Bagan
I was honestly blown away by Bagan. I sort of knew what to expect, but the reality was so much better! I arrived in the middle of the night with the bus from Yangon. By now you shouldn’t be surprised that I got a ride to my hotel and that the hotel offered me a room at 3am and didn’t charge me for it. Only in Myanmar!
When I got up in the morning, I decided to rent a bicycle to explore the area. Bagan is a complex of thousands of temples (I heard someone quote that there are 3300 temples) over an area of 41 square km. So most people either visit it by bicycle, by horse cart or using a tour bus. I opted for the bicycle…
What I didn’t realize is how deserted Bagan is. It was basically me and my bicycle in the rice fields, with temples every 100 meters (many of which were not even considered important enough to be featured on the map), together with goats, cows and their herders. I felt lost in the middle of nowhere wandering around a beautiful place that I had all to myself. Except from the few main temples, I would only encounter other tourists every couple of hours…
There was also an Indiana Jones feel to Bagan. You could reach many temples using dirt roads, but there were also hundreds of temples that had no path leading to them. Sometimes the path was also flooded, becoming one gigantic muddy puddle. I don’t know how many times I got my bicycle or my shoes stuck in the mud. So in the end, the best option was to leave my bike and flip-flops with the goats and just continue barefoot walking through the mud, or pond I should say.
Once you got to the temple, they were often locked. If the temple keeper wasn’t around (most common case for small temples), you had to look for the key yourself. It usually wasn’t too hard to find it, as it was often kept below or behind a brick near the entrance. Some temples also had narrow stairways leading to a second floor. Again, you first needed to find the key and then you had to have a torch to navigate the narrow hallways. Of course, don’t expect any interior lighting! At times, the experience really felt like in a movie, I loved it!
Now a bit about the temples themselves. Bagan was built from the 11th till the 13th century as the region was transitioning from Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist beliefs to Theravada Buddhist beliefs. It was built by king Anawrahta, a newly enthusiastic devotee of Buddhism who wanted to create something that is as great as Buddha. People then argue whether or not the area was abandoned as Mongols took over Bagan, which may be the reason why the area isn’t developed at all.
Later, Bagan was heavily damaged by 16 different earthquakes. The most important one was in 1975 which really destroyed most of the temples. The Myanmar government and Unesco have been restoring the temples since, but there is a lot of controversy about the restoration process. Since many of the temples are hundreds of years old, they often actually don’t know what the temples looked like originally. In these cases, the Myanmar government didn’t hesitate to improvise, using materials and designs that were different from the original. Some Unesco officials even call Bagan a “Disney-style fantasy version”.
It’s true that some of the restorations are a bit humorous. For example one statue had a nice old fresco behind it, and another one in the same temple had what looked like a kids drawing behind it. But as a whole, Bagan remains incredibly impressive. I just looked at it as a living piece of art that continues to be embellished, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. If it was me, I would even put the whole complex as one of the world’s wonders! The fact that it is so non-touristy and undeveloped adds even more charm to it. So go there quickly if you can!!
View more images here.
