Every morning, the sun rises, dispelling the mist and fog, revealing a canvas of a dusty plain dotted with pagodas as far as your eye can see. Fortifying myself for a day of biking with breakfast on the roof top of my hotel was a good idea. I started early, which is essential, to avoid the rising heat as the day progresses. I cycled every day of the four days I spent in Bagan. There is also an intense sense that you want to get lost among the grandeur, transporting you back into another age when Bagan was once the capital of the country under King Anawrahta. All the more to make adventure with! But essentially, you cant get lost here. They also hand you a map that looks like it has been drawn by a child. They are all cycles for women, considering most men in Myanmar wear Longyis and not pants. It makes it that much easier to stop anywhere that catches your fancy and explore.Įvery hotel rents out cycles for as little as $5 a day. And just as cycling is the best way to see Angkor, so it is for Bagan. Bagans temples, on the other hand, are still functioning amidst rural life in Myanmar. Angkor fell to ruin because it was largely forgotten after the fall of the Khmer empire, and a forest took over. Bagan (or Pagan, as it is sometimes known) sits almost right in the middle of the countrys plains, three quarters of the way along the Yangon-Mandalay highway, East of the bend in the Irrawaddy River.īagan is the lesser known, Burmese step-sister of Angkor, only just as beautiful and more pristine. It was as if time stood still.Ĭontemplating on this feeling, I hopped on to my cycle and peddled along the mostly flat main road that connects the four villages that make up Bagan-Nyaung U, Old Bagan, Myinkaba and New Bagan, in that order. by payal shahĪs I stood on top of one of the thousands of unnamed pagodas, breathing in the air that was red from the dust, seeing pagodas in different states of disrepair in every direction, I felt as if I had been teleported to a different place thousands of years ago. Explore this land, rich in history and with few parallels anywhere on earth, on a slow set of wheels. N Bagan, the land of a thousand pagodas, the clock has no value for time stopped ages ago.
Summary: Road trip, Bagan: Tread softly, travel slowly
MLA style: "MYANMAR." The Free Library.
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