Begin Bagan

The chapati stand around the corner seems to be the local favorite among the city's Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and backpackers. (In general, the best food seems to be in these Indian joints that are always nearby to the Hindu temples) Its a bunch of women slapping our chapatis dough in front of bubbling vats of curry, just out on the sidewalk and spilling knee-high tables with buckets for chairs into the street. The waitstaff are all under ten years old, and are constantly sneezing into the food, and wiping their hands on their filthy shirts. For change, they don’t always have exact, so they augment with a random few pieces of candy, a package of instant coffee, a few cigarettes, or a packet of tissues. Locals get chapati and curry scooped into plastic bags, and a lighter hangs from a tree to light cigarettes. Its great, except for the nasty cold I got from eating there, that I'm still nursing a few days later in Bagan.

My motorbike driver to the bus station and I chatted for a while, as we zipped through traffic and he cursed the local drivers. He spoke with an amazing cockney accent, I asked where he learned it and he said "Where do you think." I was right. "On the pillow. Ya know what I mean mate? I've got a British girlfriend. Ha ha!" He's going to Thailand next week to marry her, and we discussed the relative benefits of living in Thailand, Burma and London - he's not sure. We zipped past some massive new malls on the way out of town and I asked who shopped there. "Chinese arseholes... Government arseholes..." was his response. I didn’t press more about politics.

Busride was only moderately hellish. Bus filled up and they put down the dreaded middle seat for half the bus, ending, mercifully at me. (sometimes in these place they put seats in the aisles to make more

money illegally. Unpleasant and claustrophobic experience for all. Seated next to an elderly monk who snapped open the sports pages on the bus, and smoked cigarettes (albeit mindfully) at the dinner stop. Ended up making new travel companions though as we searched till nearly midnight for a guesthouse, and four of us shared one crappy double room somewhere near the market in Bagan. Thankfully, the next day we all got adjoining singles on the roof of the hotel across the street.

So let me introduce the gang- there’s Josh, the septuagenarian pensioner Basque Spaniard who fled Franco's Spain when he got drafted for the army and moved to Australia and joined the merchant marines, sailed the world, then moved to Australia and worked as a professional chef and waiter. He's great, old timey salty left winger with a great accent. (You can guess what we all talk about, politics and food!) Andreas is an Italian chef/teacher with dreadlocks down to his knees that brings joy to all the local people, but whenever he meets a foreigner as tells them he is from Napoli, they all say, “Ah, the garbage place!” much to his chagrin. He also chain-smokes the local cheroot cigars. Kis the LA yoga girl who is bright but not super knowledgeable and breaks no stereotypes (sample conversation: Me: Oh, did you get an Indian SIM card for your blackberry? Her: No, I havent gotten aroud to it yet and I’ve been here for five months, its been like, thousands of dollars in roaming fees.” Evenings are generally spent filling her in on who was the Khmer Rouge, and other relevant history of the region. But she’s sweet. And then their friend P, a grumpy Swiss arrived today.

So the first morning in Bagan we rented a few bikes, ancient fixed gear Fuji cruisers for a dollar a day. Realized that they all ride bikes with no top bar because the men and women wear Long-Yi shirt/wrap things, so makes more sense. And the temples, well, they were amazing. The ruins are red brick colored, and over 4000 Buddhist temples in this area about the size of Manhattan, dating back over a thousand years. If you’ve been to Angkor, they mostly look like some of the smaller temples there, and there are little villages all over the place, peanut and sesame farms everywhere, and very, very few tourists. The occasional trinket seller is at some of the larger temples, but mostly we had the temples just to ourselves and the noisy locusts. The day was hot as hell, (Sorry east coasters, no sympathy for your current heatwave), but a nice breeze when you climb the temples or clamber around in the candlelit tunnels and stairways inside. Best temple was the Ananda temple, with its four incredible buddhas and striking and imposing architecture (and striking and imposing AK47 wielding soldiers out front!). One of the statues is designed to appear to smile up close, and frown at a distance. A few hawkers outside try to sell stuff, as with any sight, but they leave you alone after a few minutes and the talk just turns to family, life, the usual while we wait out the heat. One guy tried to sell us some rubies, and we waved him away. “Fakes, right?” He paused a moment, and nodded in agreement, we all laughed. “Where do the real rubies come from?” He pointed to the mountains. “Mines.” “But we cant go there, can we?”

“You, no, me I can go there.”

“What else is there? Heroin?” He nodded. “Yaa-Baa?” He nodded. “War? He nodded. “The minority peoples." We then spent some time chatting about how he prices his goods (we were cheap riding up on bicycles, he'd charge far more if we arrived in a car, or with a tour group... I tried to explain that Americans werent rich anymore but he wasnt believing it.

Other locals were similarly friendly and chatty, offering to repair our bikes free of charge, and laughing and joking with us. Many were excited about the previous week’s visit from Aung San Su Kyi, and showed us pictures they had taken of her, or casually mentioned their cousin who had sold her a trinket of some sort.

A few took us to their village one day, where we

got to watch an ancient grandmother rolling and smoking cigars the size of bananas, (seriously!), the animals at work, and women getting water at a 1000 year old reservoir that they still use, walking down the steps barefoot and dipping yoked buckets into the water. We saw cave temples that were still active with monk beds in them, ancient temples, new temples, all pretty incredible with views that were even more incredible than the temples themselves, over the Ayerwaddy River, boats carrying illegally harvested teakwood upriver to Ikea factories in China and to the mountains beyond. We biked down back pistes and got lost in villages on the way to watch the sunset at one particular temple, and had a village full of kids cheering us on and running to keep up as they directed us to the temple, and we rewarded them with some of the delicious local tamarind candy. The sunset temple was hilariously crowded after a day of exploring temples undisturbed, the one recommended by the Lonely Planet, so ended up seeing every Westerner I’d met in all of Myanmar there, well all fifteen of them. We looked out on the plain dotted with spires and turrets, looking like massive overgrown chesspieces dotting the plain. Temples of all sizes and shapes, wedding cake white cubes, rich red cathedrals, and gold-leaf topped spires in every direction. Then the rain hit, we watched it coming across the plains and barely made it to our bikes as the storm was upon us, soaking us thoroughly for the 45 minute bike ride home in the dark, though it was the only rain we got in the rainy season, so cant really complain too much.

Another day we went to Mt. Popa, a Nat (local pre-Buddhist) and Buddhist site, that basically I dont know how to describe other than showing a picture. Its the Mt. Olympus of pre-Buddhist Burma, with shrines to the holy Nat spirits all over it. Although really, it has monkeys and monkey shit all over it, and is best viewed from a distance. The first tip-off should have been watching tourists climbing off the mountain and purell-ing their bare feet (you have to take shoes off in all the temples here). The razor wire is also a tip off, and yet still the place is crawling with monkeys and reeking of monkey shit. Up close and at the top the views are pretty cool back over Bagan, but for the most part its most interesting to stand in front of the pagoda-topped volcano and view it from a distance.

Our taxi driver picked up some guava at a local fruit stand and delivered it to a friend in a small village on the way home, where we got to his his moonshine still for palm sugar whisky (I passed on trying it), and sampled the fresh palm sugar and palm juice, delish. Fell asleep only to be woken by Andreas shouting as a starfish sized spider climbed over him. On our way again, we made it back to relaxed on the roof-deck of the inaccurately named Eden II guesthouse and swapped travel stories for our last night before Yangon again. Andreas won the best travel story ever, with tales of a tour driver dying of a heart attack in central Tibet.