Traveling to Southeast Asia: Bagan, plain of the thousand temples

The crazy nightbus

After having a much needed shower, and washing our shoes for about half an hour (they were covered with mud), we got our backpacks and made plans for the next days. It turned out that my sister and I had the same plans as the swiss couple Thibault and Noemi. We all wanted to go to Bagan, the most famous sight of Myanmar. It is a huge plain in the middle of the country, covered with over 3000 (no I didn't get the number wrong it's really that much) temples! If you are wondering, why exactly several thousand of temples get built in one place: This used to be a HUGE city several hundred years ago. The thing is, all the buildings were made of wood or clay, only the temples were made of stone so they are the only thing that remained when the city started to crumble.

It really looked like out of a fantasy story! (Click to see in full resolution)
1/200 Sek. f/5,6 80 mm ISO 200 Mode HDR

There was not much to be seen in Hsipaw so we decided to catch the night bus on that very evening. After getting tickets, we repacked our backpacks and were wondering where Mike and Olive had gone. We hadn't seen them since we went for a shower, they stayed in the hotel while we stayed in the guesthouse. It turned out later, that they had gotten a Bus to Inle Lake, right after getting their luggage from the hotel. Poor Olive sitting next to the unshowered Mike for hours! Actually every passenger of that bus must have regreted taking it :P

One of the few Pagodas which are still in use today (Click to see in full resolution)
1/3200 Sek. f/5 14 mm ISO 200

Another temple still in use, they really got a thing for gold there (Click to see in full resolution)
1/1000 Sek. f/5 14 mm ISO 200

Our own busride was torture aswell. When we started off a movies was played over a tiny screen in the front of the bus. To compensate the small screen they turned up the volume so high it was annoying when trying to have a conversation. I would have watched the movie, but it was all in burmese and no subtitles... In the end we all got our headphones and listened to some music with an occasional scream (the burmese movies are VERY theatralic compared to western ones) punching through the headphones.
At about 10 or 11 pm the movies stopped. However the driver and a few people still awake didn't seem to give even half a shit about the rest of the bus sleeping. They talked in a volume I would have called full blown shouting. The guy sitting infront of us got a phonecall at about midnight. Of course he answered it and I didn't understand a word but I am pretty sure they had a competition on who could talk louder without actually screaming. He was however considerate when I gestured him to quiet down a little bit. I doze and got some patchy sleep. When I woke up again I noticed were where on the (only) highway of Myanmar. Standing. Doors open, people shouting.

This temple reminded me of the jedi temple in Star Wars (Click to see in full resolution)
1/125 Sek. f/5,6 120 mm ISO 320

The sleeping beauty (Click to see in full resolution)
1/500 Sek. f/5,5 80 mm ISO 400

I got up and tried to ask around why we were standing but either nobody understood me, nobody knew why or nobody cared enough to tell me. Everybody went for a piss on the roadside. I thought I didn't have to but watching so many people going for a pee finally made me want to go aswell. Of course right when I was standing there pants down in the bushes the bus was about to leave.

Generously the bus driver waited for all passengers to get in again and off into the night we were.
At about 4am the bus stopped once again and we were ushered out. There we were in the middle of nowhere, with us the only other tourists on the bus got woken up and put on the street.
A pick-up truck was waiting for us to bring us to Bagan. Half asleep we checked if we had all our luggage and got into the back of the pick-up. The guy on it offered us quite agressively (he was not mean, nobody in Myanmar is, he just wouldn't give us time to think) to bring us directly to our hotel. Weary of scams and too tired to properly calculate it through we declined and asked him to bring us to the proper busstop. There we would see how to get to our hotel.
On the busstop it turned out, the price he offered us was the same we got everywhere. In fact the very same guy drove us to our hotel just with a different truck. We got to the checkpoint were every tourist has to pay 25000 kyat (about 17€) to get into Bagan. A huge amount for Myanmar (you get meals from 1000 kyat) and a slightly racist practice, since only foreingers had to pay and we read that only 2% of that fee actually go into restorating the temples, the government keeps the rest. Just to be clear I would be happy to pay for keeping the temples in good shape, but this was a real ripoff!

After passing the checkpoint our guy told us, he would have skipped it, if we had taken his offer in the beginning. And no, he hadn't told us that little but important detail before... We were pretty frustrated.

This farmer besides the ancient temples is one of my favorite shots (Click to see in full resolution)
1/640 Sek. f/5,6 36 mm ISO 320

Electro scooting through thousands of temples

After the not to perfect journey to Bagan we checked into our fancy hotel. We had a pretty awesome deal via Agoda: a room in a topnotch hotel, which normally costs over $100/night for only 27$.
The first day we walked around a little bit and got a feeling of the area. We didnt stay directly in old Bagan since there are only 4-5 star luxus resorts. Our stay was in Nyaung U a few kilometres away from most of the temples. As we explored the area near our hotel we quickly realized, that going by foot wouldn't cut it. We needed something faster, plus we wanted to catch the sunrise the next day. The best solution was to rent scooters. I was delighted when we found out nearly every scooter renting place had elctro scooters only.

Riding the scooter over these paths was just as much fun as it looks like, maybe even more! (Click to see in full resolution)
1/640 Sek. f/5,6 14 mm ISO 200 Mode HDR

I don't know about you but I can't get enough of that landscape (Click to see in full resolution)
1/640 Sek. f/5,6 90 mm ISO 200 Mode HDR

This one reminded me a lot of the Disney castle (Click to see in full resolution)
1/200 Sek. f/5,6 90 mm ISO 200 Mode HDR

The next day we got up at 4:30am to get the scooters. 2 scooters for 4 persons, my sister drove ours since she was the only one of us who already did it. When we arrived at the temple we had chosen we found out we weren't the only ones with that idea. The eastern side of the temple was crowded with people.
After a not so epic sunset (too many clouds) we shot a few super cliché pictures of each other and drove on over the plain. Most of the temple were totally abondoned. We had great fun climbing through the pitch black straiways onto the top of the temples.

The sunrise wasn't quite as we expected, due to the clouds, but it was still nice (Click to see in full resolution)
1/10 Sek. f/20 150 mm ISO 100

My sis looking dramatically into the distance, while the wind makes for a nice mood. Isn't HDR awesome? (Click to see in full resolution)
1/250 Sek. f/5,6 14 mm ISO 200 Mode HDR

We weren't the only ones enjoying the coolness of the temples (Click to see in full resolution)
1/60 Sek. f/5,6 80 mm ISO 250

The same day we also wanted to see the sunset, so we chose another temple to watch from its top. This one was less known so there were only a few people on top. The sunset itself was beautiful but not as cool as I anticipated. What I didn't expect was a lot of the biggest temples being lit up by floodlights giving them a magic look at night.

Pre-sunset views (Click to see in full resolution)
1/125 Sek. f/5,6 14 mm ISO 200 Mode HRD

That's not a forrest fire, just the sun being lit (Click to see in full resolution)
1/50 Sek. f/5,6 150 mm ISO 200

Once more the Disney temple, but this time awesomely lit by some floodlights (Click to see in full resolution)
1/8 Sek. f/5,6 135 mm ISO 320

We spend 3 days in Bagan which weren't very adventurous, but still very nice. The sight of thousands of temples on one plain is not something you see every day. Hell it's something you see once in a livetime maybe!

After Bagan we took another nightbus (despite our bad experience with the first one) to Inle Lake, the most famous lake in Myanmar. More on that next week!

---

P.s.: Sorry that I ended up writing more about the nightbus than about Bagan itself, but it was just too crazy of a ride. The pictures also tell a much better story of Bagan than I could ever do with words :)

---

All shots in this post were made with my Olympus OMD EM-10 Mark II with a 14-150mm lense in manual mode.

If you want to learn more about my travel through southeast Asia you can read the previous posts here:

• 1. Bangkok
• 2. Myanmar, Mandalay & Malaria?
• 3. The best trainride of my life
• 4. Hiking through rebel area (1/2)
• 5. Hiking through rebel area (2/2)

There is a new chapter coming each Thursday

If you want to know more about me check this out:

• Introduction to steemit

---

Steemit Worldmap Data:
!steemitworldmap 21.162642 lat 94.865570 long Photostory about my visit on this marvelous plain d3scr

What is this?

---

Thank you for reading and feel free to upvote, resteem & follow me :)