Day 1 – Boat to Bagan
Despite being advised against it by our friend Karen who had
not enjoyed the experience we decided to take the boat from Mandalay to Bagan (couldn’t
bear another bus!) , and so were picked up (far too early as usual) from the
hotel by taxi and whisked down to the docks.
We boarded via very narrow gang planks again and quickly
nabbed a couple of the reclined deck chair type things on the top deck, which
were covered by a canopy. Being early in the morning and on the river the first
few hours were fairly cold, even though we were supplied with blankets
(Silently cursing Shell for advising me not to wear my hiking boots). However, we were also supplied with breakfast
including tea’s & coffee whilst watching temples going by on the river
banks, so it wasn’t that bad.
(I look like my mum in this :) )
Eventually the mist burnt off and it started to get warm
again so we bought some beers on board and spent the morning relaxing and
reading until lunch was served (Chicken Noodles).
The rest of the day was spent in similar fashion, relaxing,
drinking beer, catching up on my blog and Shelley even finding the back of the boat for a bit of sunbathing (And
stealing forty winks whilst I was not watching!). We even got dinner, if your idea of dinner is
quarter of an egg sandwich, although this was all included in the £ 25 fare and
was a lot nicer than our last coach transfer.
All in all it was a very pleasant journey and we could only
deduce that Karen is either A) A moany Bitch or B) Was on some sort of
government boat and not the one we took.
We will have to confer with her when we meet her back in blighty. Or,
when she comes to visit us next J
The journey took around 9 – 10 hours and we arrived in Bagan
around 5.00pm. When disembarking it was
a bit of a free for all with porters wanting to grab the baggage from the boat
and taxi touts waiting for us on the banks.
We knew the hotel was around ½ a mile away so after a horse and cart
taxi offered us the trip at half the motor taxi we decided to go via dobbin (We
hadn’t used this mode of transport yet!), however we were pleased that dobbin
was a decent sized horse.
We arrived at the hotel and were met by the nicest
friendliest staff imaginable (the people in Myanmar are wonderful) and before
going to our room we booked a scooter for our temple adventures for the next
few days.
After checking out our room (which was very nice) we headed
out for a little explore and went for dinner in a restaurant that the hotel
recommended. I had to pop next door to
pick up some tailor made ciggies as we were running out of filters – under 50p
for twenty lucky strike!! So we had some
Myanmar Beers and a couple of Thai curry’s before heading back to our hotel for
the night.
Day 2 – ‘Bagan Fwend’s’
The day before we had agreed that we would not do the
sunrise at the temples this morning and instead have a bit of a lie in and take
advantage of the hotels more accommodating breakfast times.
We read the reviews on Bookings.Com which all banged on
about the breakfast being the best in Myanmar at this hotel (Inwa Motel) and
they were not wrong. The breakfast was served on the roof terrace and included
eggs to order, brown bread (everything up to this point had been very sweet
white bread), very nice noodles, pancakes, proper coffee, fresh fruits, etc Two
lovely serving staff – who enquired how long we were going to be there and told
us they looked forward to seeing us the next morning and I actually think they
meant it!
Anyway breakfast done it was time to do some Temples!! In the Bagan region there was at the last
count over 2,000 + temples (Shell’s too lazy to check the book properly for
exact numbers at the moment!) so we were going to have our work cut out, especially as foreigners can only
drive E-bikes which have a charge range of 50km.
So we picked up our new mode of transport from the
reception. Unfortunately, the bike is really only big enough for one (western)
bum so Shell had to sit on the bike rack. We were amazed to find that the
scooter made actually no sound at all, not even a milk float type sound, so
after a while I took offence to this soundless machine and started making my
own engine noises to make up for it!
I think we visited about 3 of the two thousand temples which
were very nice and contained some magnificent Buddha statues, again having a
bit of trouble in the soft sand tracks with the bike (fortunately no hot
exhaust pipe for Shelley to burn herself on).
We then rode around for a while and managed to track down the temple you
can climb to up to watch the sunset and sunrise over all the temples and also
took the opportunity to do some on the move video as we rode around the
temples.
Feeling like we had seen enough temples we decided to go for
a bit of lunch in what was called restaurant road. After lunch we were heading back to our hotel
when we saw a ‘Wetherspoon’s’ pub along the way so we thought we would check it
out, to be fair it was like no Wetherspoon’s you had ever seen, the bar owner
had just used the name. Inside it was
quite a cool little traveller’s pub with traveller’s graffiti all over the
walls and playing some good tunes.
Whilst we sat there we got chatting to a couple on the next table, David
and Katherine who had just finished travelling for 5 months in India and were
on the same type of trip as us and were very likeminded. So we spent quite a while chatting to them
and getting a few travelling tips, then agreed to meet up later in the evening.
We went back to the hotel to relax for a bit before going to
watch the sunset, however we cut it a
bit fine and I had to give it full throttle (34mph downhill) to reach the
sunset temple, we felt like vampires trying to get their before daybreak!! I think we made it with about two minutes to
spare, we scrambled up the temple to where hoard’s of tourists already had
taken their spots. The view was fabulous
and we took too many pictures of temples in the two minutes we had before the
sun disappeared from the horizon.
We the headed back to our hotel, worrying whether the bike
would run out of charge before we got there whilst trying to avoid the many
potholes (Shell complaining because she was on the rack!) to get ready to go
out with our new fwiends.
We met them at ‘Wetherspoon’s’ but it was a bit pricy so we
headed off on our scooters in search of a cheap beer station, eventually
finding a empty bar away from restaurant road.
David and Katherine were supposed to return their bike at 9.00 but
unfortunately as we were getting on so well 1 beer turned into a lot of beers
and I think we kept the bar owner up for far longer than he wanted (we were the
only customers in there!). I think we
finally called it a night around midnight and agreed to meet up again the next
night, so returned back to the hotel, can you get breathalysed on an E-bike??
Will we make the sunrise tomorrow?
Day 3 - Temple’s
at Sunrise
Possibly for the first time in our travels I actually woke
up to the alarm and made Shell get up for the sunrise visit to the temples
(Around 5am). Unfortunately as we had
come in a bit worse for wear the night before we had forgotten to actually find
out when daybreak actually was. It
turned out the reverse of the sunset the day and we were early! So whilst
freezing our nuts off driving in the dark we found a restaurant that was open
so we stopped for a coffee to warm us up, however it was warm but I think it
was brewed with grit in it!
So this time we arrived in very good time and waited for
sunrise, it was very atmospheric with the
temples shrouded in mist (apart from a Japanese tourist yelling up to her
friends from the bottom of the temple), we had to wait for some time but
eventually a raft of hot air balloons came into view which made the scene even
more impressive (Although the photo from our crappy camera most probably does
not do it justice.
We then returned to our hotel for another great breakfast,
before trying to do some admin for onwards travel. The problem we had was the poor internet we
had in the hotel so after a while we had to give up and try and find an
internet café (the one down the road was on holiday in Yangon!). So we spent
the next couple of hours riding round trying to find one. Once found we spent another hour and a half
booking two flights to take us to Thailand, the internet café only being
marginally better than our hotel and the delay in booking meaning the flight
prices had increased.
We returned to the restaurant road for a bit of lunch but
have come to the conclusion that the food in Myanmar is not up to that much, a
mix between Indian and Thai but not doing either that well.
After a pretty frustrating day we returned to the hotel to
relax and watch a film, we were just getting settled for the night when we got
a call from reception and found that David & Katherine had tracked us down (our
new fwiends) and were ready for an evening out.
As we were leaving early the next morning we arranged to meet them a little later to give us a chance to get
ready and pack for the next morning (given our track record I felt thought this
was a better idea than packing at 6.30
in the morning with a hangover!).
Again we spent a very enjoyable evening with them both, both
couples blowing our budgets for the day on a number of beers. As they too are doing a travel blog we swapped
these details so we could see what each other are up to in the coming months
(theirs is a lot more professional than ours!).
Hopefully our paths may cross again in Indonesia as it appears we may be
there at the same time. Eventually we
said our goodbyes and headed back to the hotel.
Although Bagan was very nice I think 3 days was enough,
unless you have some extreme temple fetish!!
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