Travel Diary Bagan, Myanmar <<back
28.02.2004 03:31:05 PM - nicole
BAGAN
A couple of days later we decided to leave Yangon and head north towards Mandalay, with a stop in Bagan. This area is famous for its thousands of really old temples and ruins scattered all over the place. Sounds good - we want to see the old stuff. So we bought a ticket for the 14 hours bus trip to Bagan.
The bus left at 3 pm and while waiting for it I bought the fatal noodles with vegetables and pork. Nic and I had our seats in the back row - bad thing number two on that journey. This meant we really felt the bumps on this horrifying trip. The streets weren't paved all the way through, and even when, you didn't really feel the difference. And the bus driver seemed to be in a hurry, so we went flying over all these millions of bumps and holes hell!!
After two or three hours Nic's stomach decided to turn and he started to feel really sick. The noodles we ate before had been a BIG mistake...
After hours of feeling miserable and almost dying, the bus came to a halt and some uniformed men entered and made all foreigners get out. It was like 3 o'clock in the morning. We all looked helpless at each other, but emerged the bus without fussing. There was a huge green sign which told us that we were now entering the archaelogical zone of Bagan and all foreigners were forced to pay USD 10. OK, nothing we could do about it. Of course, our passports were checked and registered too. But one good thing about it - 10 mins later we finally arrived in the town of Bagan - alive! We hadn't gotten out of the bus properly, when a whole bunch of people gathered around us asking "Taxi??", "Guest house?". We put us together with some of the other foreigners to keep the costs down and agrreed to an offer. The taxis were bicycles - what a surprise! They had something like a "Seitenwagen" like some motorbikes have, with two seats, one facing backwards, one facing forward - how cool! The backpack was tied to the backseat, I took the other seat facing forward. In the middle of the night we were cruising down a completely dark and unknown street, it was all quiet, the bicycles were like floating - am I dreaming??
Finally we fel on our beds and could sleep proparly, not crumpled up in a tiny seet in the bus. But then, as the day rose, I started to feel real shitty too... Welcome to Myanmar, I guess...
We needed a day to recover from our sickness, we still weren't 100% fit, but well enough to explore Bagan. We rented bikes from our guest house and off we went. Temples wherever you look - unbelievable!! Some you see are really old, others have been rebuilt. We were told that once there have been 2200 temples in the area, but in 1975 there was a big earthquake that destroyed many of them. Now a number of around 1300 is left. It's still a great deal, you just have to turn your head and you spot several other ones. Incredible, real stunning!
The town of Bagan is amazing too. Here time has stopped. It seems like another time, another world. There are horse carts functioning as taxis, carts pulled by oxes pulling heavy loads of different things - real rural life. Here, the buses are so crowded, that whoever could not squeeze into the bus just takes a place on the roof. It looks real dangerous, but somehow it seems to work...
28.02.2004 03:31:59 PM - nicole
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28.02.2004 03:32:19 PM - nicole
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28.02.2004 03:33:30 PM - nicole
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28.02.2004 03:35:02 PM - nicole
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28.02.2004 03:38:27 PM - nicole
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28.02.2004 03:39:27 PM - nicole
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