Bagan - the jungle of temples

Bagan: the jungle of temples & thousands of photos

The journey began with a broken glass in the bus and a 3 hours bus replacement which led us to travel on an old bus that was not more comfortable than an air Asia flight. But I feel we've discussed this kind of inevitable travel adventures enough so I'll go straight to the nice part.

Just across our (rather crappy, ok I had to say that) hotel was a really cute cafè "Traditions" which welcomed us with a nice omelette and cappuccino around 8-9am. They were playing a typical Xmas compilation and they had Xmas decorations and a Xmas tree, the whole atmosphere was quite cute.

We decided to rent an e-scooter, a Chinese brand of course, and it is actually a very nice, and quiet for a change, way to get around Bagan. You basically ride down the main road to get to the sea of temples and start your exploration. There are a loooooot of temples in Bagan; and You have to believe me that my beloved Andy took an equally proportional number of photos of them. Luckily you'll get to enjoy them at the end of this chapter.

While I'm not so much into repetitive kind of monuments in Asia, these temples are actually all very different from each other. You could close your eyes and blindly point your finger to the horizon and you could be 99% sure you'd be pointing at a temple. I loved discovering the temples; for some kind of reason I had to think of birthday party games while walking around some of the smaller temples. And I tell you, a treasure hunt around those temples would be the best and most epic one. First, you'd have to be really good at reading maps and remembering numbers. Some of those temple don't even have names, but numbers, I think there's just too many. Second, you'd have to be really good at recognising which kind of temples are the ones you can actually climb on top of. And last but not least, it would take days to finish this kind of treasure hunt. As I mentioned, there's just so many temples.

I will never forget the sunrise view and scenery from the Bagan tower. Everywhere around there's fog until the first light comes out and the hot air balloons start taking off...when the sun is finally completely out, the landscape is just stunning. You can see the valley of temples in the best light and somehow the balloons on the other side make it even more magical. Well, I was grumpy and sleepy, but I loved it.

Once in Bagan make sure you visit "the moon" restaurant, they serve a pretty a awesome veggie burger and an extensive and very interesting vegetarian menu. Lassi was also extremely delicious there. A little bit of Bagan (restaurant) also recommended for a nice candled dinner and surprisingly good curries & potato soup.

Although the e-scooter was a nice touch to the exploration, we had bikes on our last day and it was equally pleasant and maybe more fun to ride around on those.

...you know what comes next (photos by Andy)

(click o enlarge)