Bagan in a day!

OK I probably say this for a lot of things but I think that was the worst night bus experience I'd ever had. Even for the really bad ones I've generally been able to nap even for 20 minutes but last night I got a grand total of zero sleep and I mean zero. We paid extra for the luxury reclining VIP seats and sure the seats were big but every ergonomic feature in the chair, from the head rest to the feet rest, were in completely in the wrong place for me. I was in agony. I couldn't reach the foot rest, I couldn't cross my legs, I couldn't sit up, I couldn't slouch, I tried even putting my legs vertically against the window. It just couldn't work, so I ended up just talking to all my friends in England via WhatsApp to keep me company. At 4am the bus pulled up, an hour early, and the hoards of taxi drivers came to the door. Obviously they were charging double the price and as our hotel was only an hour way and we had nothing else to do we had a quick free coffee at the bus stop and then headed off walking. Within 1 min a taxi driver offered to drop us off at the price of K6,000. We happily jumped in and the hotel staff were already up. We had another coffee, dropped off our bags and hired an ebike for the day and went off to watch sunrise! Well we might as well.

Bagan's temples aren't as accessible as they once were and they now have a few dedicated sunset and sunrise mounds. However, being the rebels we are we wanted the old authentic experience so we found an old ruined temple, climbed to the top and waited for sunset with a few other tourists who found the spot. Wow wow wow!!! I can see why people come here. When the black night curtain revealed the red crescent sky over the iconic thousands of temples it was just a dream and then just when you thought it couldn't get better hot air balloons rose into the air and joined the beautiful picture. Peaceful heaven.

After sitting for a couple of hours, making and eating our avocado sandwiches we set off in hunt of more temples. As I've said before we have seen a lot of temples but I'm not sure if it was the coffee or what but we were super on it we must have seen over 50 and gone into 20 and for once we were actually willing and happy to pay the K25, 000 but not a single person asked us to. At first we thought it very odd but there had been a 3 day festival and we think all the staff were on holiday too! Well it was a great day for us. It was so fun going in and around the temples. Although at about 3pm my steam began to run out so we sat and drank and ate the best coconut I've had in a long time!!

Going back to us driving an electric scooter. The idea we love but the execution is not great, it is undersized and back heavy resulting in a very unsteady and unbalanced vehicle. Generally we were OK but Bagan is very sandy and when going anywhere off the beaten path it was less than ideal. We had a couple of nearmisses including when Will took the corner too tight and ended up driving up a sandy Bank to which I had to quickly jump off and hold the bike otherwise we both would have been thrown off. Luckily we were going slow and all was well.

Outside one of the temples we met a really sweet lady who was proudly selling her husbands sand paintings. So far on this trip we've barely bought any souvenirs for ourselves or others but these were so beautiful I couldn't resist. We then went to the temple she said her husbands workshop was at and met him in person and he signed our paintings for us. He was unbelievably humble and sweet, so we took a picture together.

On the way to even more temples we went through a market and picked up a Myanmar version of a Dosa which was delicious and via some more temples headed to our sunset point. Again we were able to find a very quiet spot on top of temple and it was so so so beautiful.

For dinner we headed back to the market and ate tasty pork noodles.

When we finally got home it was 8:30pm. The staff at the hotel were so shocked we had been out all day and quickly showed us our room, gave us hot water and said we must go to bed now and after a gorgeously hot shower to get rid of all the sandy muck I did.Read more