Travel Day 1141 – Yangon to Bagan, MYANMAR

After the more than underwhelming arrival in Yangon, Bagan appeared to be a very different animal, but it came to a certain price…

While I normally like to spend at least 3 days in the first place of arrival in a new country, Yangon had made it impossible for me to stay and so my first day in Myanmar ended in an overnight bus to Bagan. Unfortunately we had the last row of seats on this bus, which meant the ride was extremely bumpy and the seats could not even recline, leaving us with a sleepless night. The freezing temperatures inside the vehicle and the constant food stops throughout the night helped then to assure that we did not get any rest along the way…

When we then arrived at 4am in Bagan, we were completely wasted and unable to make any decisions. Luckily that was not even necessary as we had already reserved a hotel by phone and it had sent a horse cart buggy to pick us up from the bus station. As we found out on arrival at the hotel, the horse cart pick-up was a sales pitch and the driver quite aggressively tried to get us to agree that he would pick us up at 9am to drive us around Bagan for a steep USD price. But since it was too early to even think straight, we simply told him to get lost and crashed in the hotel…

Obviously the hotel knew that we would be arriving at this unholy hour, but it wasn’t until after breakfast at 8am that we could actually occupy our rooms, take a shower and rest again for a while. This way we managed to spend the best part of the day doing nothing really and simply trying to fully wake up and recover from the bus ride. Finding a decent place for lunch and waiting out some rain showers left us then only with the late afternoon for some explorations on foot. But luckily the sun came out when we finally started walking from Nyaung U towards Old Bagan…

Obviously the distance to Old Bagan was much too great to be covered on foot, but since there were already temple ruins starting at the door step of our hotel, it didn’t even matter because we were excited about every little temple that we saw along the way. First there were only smaller brick temples scattered in the fields, but then all of a sudden the temples got bigger and the building density higher. It really seemed that wherever we looked into the fields, there were some red temple ruins somewhere rising above the green vegetation…

But it wasn’t until we reached a bigger temple with roof access that we finally got an overview and realized how many temple there actually were around us. Literally everywhere in the fields were temple ruins to be seen, from where we stood up to the horizon. It was simply unbelievable how many temples there existed in Bagan. With great excitement did we climb from one temple to the next in order to get a different angle on the always amazing looking, pointy red brick ruins in the green fields…

Finally we ended our first day in Bagan at the biggest temple we had seen today. We watched the sun set over the fields and then hitch-hiked back to Nyaung U, but the sight of the seemingly countless temple ruins of the area had filled us with great excitement and my personal idea was to explore them all by bicycle over the next couple of days. Yeah, Bagan really seemed to be a special place and certainly the perfect location to fully arrive and settle-in Myanmar…

Find all Bagan Photos here.