Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Day three had me stumbling out of the night bus at four in the morning and into the clamour of waiting taxi drivers at the Bagan highway bus station on the outskirts of town. The Burmese plains get cold in winter and I was still in t-shirt and shorts, breathing steam in the dark. I had no hotel booking and only a rudimentary knowledge of where the place I had marked down on my map was located. I took the first offer of a taxi that came to me, even though I knew it was too much, and got him to take me into town.
The ticket office was located on the road from the bus station, a fact that I wasn't aware of. The driver was saying to me "Ticket, ticket," but I had no intention of buying one at four in the morning. "No ticket!" I said back to him, trying to wave him on. He looked confused for a moment and then told me to duck my head down in the seat. I was a little slow on the up-take. He was helping me to dodge the entry fee altogether. I'd grudgingly agreed to pay him what was probably double the normal fare into town, but he ended up saving me a good ten bucks or more on entry.
February is high season in Burma, and as it turned out the guest house I'd earmarked was full. A pair of Japanese students from Osaka were waiting on a wooden bench outside reception, huddled up together for warmth under a shawl. They were waiting for the manager to wake up so they could take their room. He was asleep in the office on a mattress on the floor. I could see his red beanie sticking out of the blankets. What were they studying? I asked them. Politics, they told me. I paced around trying to keep warm until the manager finally stirred from his cot. I was sure somebody in the place must be checking out later that day and that I could take their room. He went out for a piss while I was brushing my teeth in the kitchen. I followed him around the side and caught him squatting in the dirt. At first I didn't realise he was taking a piss. He told me they were full, undisturbed by my presence. He zipped himself up, apologised for the inconvenience, and went back inside. Burmese are friendly people, I thought to myself. Even when they're out to rip you off or in the middle of doing their business, they're still happy to lend a helping hand.
I found a more up-market room with a bathtub in it just a little way up the street. The owner lowered the price from the double room rate to the single when he saw that I was alone. I was ecstatic at the prospect of a hot bath. I hadn't had a bath in more than a year. It was so good I almost fell asleep in there. After a breakfast of fried eggs, milk tea, and that horrible sweet and spongy substance that passes as bread in this part of the world, and a nap, I rented a bicycle for two dollars for the day from the hotel and set out to explore one of the great remaining ancient wonders of this world, Bagan.
A quick layman's rundown of Bagan. Founded around 850, the city, which would grow to become the first kingdom to unify the regions later that would later become Burma, underwent a centuries-long stupa-erecting fest that lasted until the invasion of the Mongols and Kublai Khan, who may or may not have conquered what was an already all-but-abandoned city. Wikipedia lauds it as being "equal in attraction to Angkor Wat in Cambodia". Almost. Having been to Angkor over New Years, there are a number of differences I'd be keen to point out. First and foremost, the labeling of many of these red-brick structures as "ancient". Yes, they have been there for a long time. Millennia, in some cases. But that's not what you're seeing when you go to Bagan. Centuries worth of earthquakes have taken care of that, especially the big one that hit the centre of the old city in the late 1800s. Bagan is and has been in the midst of a slap-dash "re-building" campaign since the end of the Second World War, and arguably a lot longer even than that. In many cases the well-intentioned builders haven't even used the same building materials, or even the same building styles. The over-reigning motto seems to have been, "that's close enough." Many of the stupas look damn impressive and photogenic from a distance, but up close the shoddy brick-and-mortar work becomes all-to-awfully apparent. In some cases laughably so. Honestly, there are some sections of temple in Bagan that I feel I could have done a better job with. Some of the "rebuilt" stupas look like nothing more than oversize ornamental mail boxes. This can be disappointing at first, but you have to realise that the most interesting aspect of Bagan is that in essence it's a still-functioning ancient city and religious site, much in the same way that Varanasi is. It is believed that the site itself was never completely abandoned. Think of it, a hundred generations of veneration and shoddy craftsmanship.
Basically the reason I came out here to Burma was to see Bagan. And so I put that bicycle through its paces trying to see as much of the place as quickly as I could in the time I had to spare for it. I pushed it through the sand of dried-up riverbeds, across the stubble of burnt rice paddies, up chalky river banks, through bushes of thorns and stinging nettles. I had no f***ing idea where I was going, I was just out to explore some stupas. Rivers, rice paddies, and sand tracts be damned. But of course, in reality, the only thing being put through its paces was me. The Burmese sun, worthy of Orwell's, Kipling's, and whoever else's poetic platitudes at sundown, is one hell of an unbearable motherf***ing son of a b**** at just about any other time of the day (not counting sunrise, because I'm never awake for it). That pig f***er beats down on your head like a mallet. Unrelenting. I had no sun protection whatsoever, not even sunscreen, and had neglected in my boyish excitement to bring so much as even a water bottle with me. In dry season, the roads turn to sand and the rivers as well. It's dry and hot as a desert out there. And as anyone who has tried it knows, riding a bicycle through sand for any length of time is a b****. I found myself pushing the thing as much as I rode it. I had a basic map with me of the area printed off from the internet, but I didn't want to rely on it at the expense of discovering things by myself. At least for my first foray into the site. The biggest and best temples could wait for last. That's one thing I'd learnt in Angkor. The big-billed attractions are always the ones crawling with tourists. And if there's one thing that ruins the atmosphere of old world grandeur, it's queues. Queues and buses. No, thank you. The B and C sites, while typically (but not always) less impressive, are the ones you end up appreciating the most. They're the ones that stay with you long after the backpack and camera have been put away into the closet. But I aim even lower than that. I go for the D sites. The ones with usually no people at all. You don't need a goddamn map to stumble onto a D-grade site in a place like Bagan. They are absolutely everywhere. The only people you are likely to encounter at the grounds of these low-hanging fruits are cows, farmers, and the other occasional lost person such as yourself (easily enough avoided). Needless to say, I had my fill. Old Huck came back out for ample company in the shaded alcoves many a sun-warmed stupa. I sat on carved stone and read under the gaze of painted Buddhas. Outside the heat was crippling, but easy refuge was found in the stupas dotted all about the landscape. No people at all (I was pretty on the edge of the map, it turned out), just the silence of the desert.
I retired for lunch in the late afternoon. I came across "restaurant street" on my way back from the stupa fields. Pizza, pasta, pancakes, and all the usual tourist fare. I stuck with curry rice for the carbs. Carbs give you energy, right? That's what I told myself. I thrust myself back into the pages of history for a few hours. Japanese suicide fleets ploughing stoically into the flanks of the American war machine. Englishmen on their last Far East adventure to re-take Burma from the Japanese. They landed not far from Old Bagan in their push to re-take Mandalay. Myanmar tea, fruit shakes, chilled mineral water. Peanuts from the bowl. The furnace of my face died down a bit with the fan-blown breeze. When it came to dusk I'd consulted the maps as to where the prime sunset spots were located in an effort to avoid them. I rode out and spotted from the road a somewhat unassuming stupa of decent height. I could see some people already clinging to the top in anticipation of everyone's favourite hour abroad.
Sunset is a funny thing at these ancient panoramic sites. I'm sure it's the same all across the world. As the sun starts sinking down into the denser bands of the horizon there commences a frenetic surge in activity, like ants before a storm. People on bicycles and e-bikes in floppy hats with cameras and tote bags hanging from their necks scurrying to find the highest piece of climbable real estate. There is something, some aspect of the carnival to it. A festival of clambering up rock faces and hillocks and temple ruins in a race with the dying light. Everyone in competition with everyone else for the best position in the best spot. There was already half a dozen people up on the top of this stupa by the time I got up there, but plenty of space. I picked out my little spot, the highest possible point on the structure climbable, unless you wanted to chance scaling the spire itself. From my vantage point I could see visitors madly consulting maps and cycling to and fro in a race for the remaining places with the best ratio of views to people. Soon the top of my stupa held a good crowd of people. The selfie sticks were coming out and the photo-bombing was underway.
But the strangest aspect to all of this, with the sun going down and the silhouettes of the stupas contouring the skyline, was the feeling that I'd seen all this before. Because I had seen all this before. I realised that I was looking at my desktop background. But it was more than that, it was as if I had been transported bodily into my desktop background itself. I wasn't seeing Bagan at all, no matter how hard I tried. Instead I was stuck inside my desktop wallpaper, now brought to life before my eyes. Bagan was somewhere else, if it existed at all.
- comments