Bagan Myanmar

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This is one of the places we visited in Myanmar which from now on I'm going to call Burma. After a long straight boring bus ride to Mandalay on a road built by the Chinese to privide access to Yangon it's port, we arreved in Mandalay. Our friend Soe Soe was at the hotel looking for us with his trishaw which had 'welcome Angela and Philip' printed right on the pillows of it! After a tearful reunion we made plans to meet the following morning. We spent 8 days with Soe Soe and I'll blog about that later. We eventually left for Bagan, a Unesco World Heritage site about 8 hours away.
Since the road to Mandaly was so good, divided highway and all that, we thought that people who warned us about roads were mistaken. Well the bus started off on a divided highway and about ten minutes later turned off onto a side road that was virtually one lane with large rock/dirt shoulders. We thought it was a pee break or food stop but the bus continued along and we eventually realized this was the road! It pretty quickly became just rock or dusty dirt. The roads here are a man's fist size rocks as a base with dirt layed over them. Soon enough the dirt washes away and your left with a very bumpy road.
We made several 'pee' breaks on the side of the road, leaving the female passengers with full bladders. I couldn't bring myself to try to find a bush to get behind because I imagined walking through a minefield of poop and pee spots because it seemed like the buses always stopped in places where other buses had stopped. Along the way we did make a food stop but all the foreigners on the bus were timid about eating as the driver picked a dubious spot. The ladies were desperately trying to sell the foods atop their heads but with very few takers. We saw one boy with a tray on his head drop one of the dumplings he had and rinse it off in a bucket of dirty water and pop it back on his tray! We usually carry some small gifts for people so I started giving hair clips to the women and girls. they took so much pleasure in it and traded back and forth to get the colors they wanted. Soon all of the vendors were around us and the other tourists were deserted. They used the opportunity to at times quite rudely take pictures leading us to refrain from taking many.......
We had already decided to stay in the small town of Nyaungshwe rather than old or new Bagan because it was more of a real town. The government forcibly removed people from old Bagan years ago and built new Bagan. Now old Bagan is full of huge resorts where you can pay hundreds of dollars for rooms.
The historic site of 'Bagan' covers an area about the size of Manhattan and has around 2,500 structures. I'm sorry but my pictures uploaded like a shuffled deck of cards so they're in no kind of order. We had booked ahead and even though we weren't entirely satisfied with our hotel we had to stay as everything was full. There are not so many independent travelers in Burma, mostly it's tours of older people,, some looking too frail to endure some of the primitive conditions you find here. I haven't seen so many older travelers in all my travels in Asia. The governement here is trying to avoid the backpacker scene like in Thailand so they dictate the price of accommodatiion leading to high prices. We found that the bang for your buck in Burma with lodging falls far below anywhere's else we've been. Most include breakfast though and our hotel had an open rooftop dining room which we loved.
The first day of touring the temples we hired a wagon for the day and spent the day with a lovely young man the age of our son. He is the oldest child in his family and as such has the responsibility of helping his parents and siblings go to university. He has dreams of higher education as well but for the time being cannot pursue them. He bore absolutely no resentment about this it was just an accepted family value.
We trotted from place to place getting an overview of the entire area so that when we rented bikes we would have the lay of the land. The structures date from the 11th century when the King of the era decided that their religion was in need of change partly because the monks got to sleep with brides before the husbands! He introduced Bhuddism and built the temples. The people were so happy with the change that they built many of the stupas. You are able to climb up only a select few of the temples, sometimes from the interior or sometimes from outside. It was a perfectly enjoyable day and a feast for the eyes. For the next several days we cycled around the countryside enjoyng the freedom and the sites. a huge During a huge earthquake in 1975 most of the temples were damaged, many severely. A lot of the beautiful plaster work crumbled from the underlying brick structures and left huge cracks and devastation behind. Over time some restoration work has been done. The amazing thing is that many of them are still used by the people leading to the repainting of many of the Bhuddas.
The picture of me stitting on the stairs was taken on a temple which bus loads of tourists watch the sunset from. It was the only one which has a metal rail to help you climb up. It was so steep that Philip didn't climb up, worried he might reactivate the vertigo he experienced in Nepal on our last trip. We're planning another trek next month in Nepal and he didn't want to cause problems with doing it.
The first two pictures were of the food stop on the bus and some of the vendors, one of them examining the hair clips. The women here wear the ground up bark of a tree on their skin in various different ways. The picture of me with a woman with lines through her thainika (sp?) was taken after I had removed my earrings to give to her. Isn't she beautiful? The picture of me in a longi was taken at the market where I bought it. The picture of the table full of food is a typical Burmese meal. You order a curry ( not at all spicy) and everthing else comes with it!
The whole site was overwhelmingly beautiful and equal to Ankor Wat in many ways. I'm usre there is a million more things I could say about it but I've got to pack for a trip to some islands in the Andaman Sea side of Thailand. We've been back a few days and head out tonight. Hope I haven't made too many typos and spelling mistakes!