BAGAN

The hotel was lovely – small groups of cottages with small verandas set in lush, beautifully maintained gardens. 

One of the main buildings had originally been designed and built to accommodate the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, who visited in 1922. 

The restaurant area overlooked the Irawaddy and was shaded by a group of wonderful old acacia trees. 

And this was the view from our verandah............

During dinner on the first night there was a musician playing soft local music on a sort of bamboo xylophone – very pleasant, but this later gave way to a display of traditional marionettes, dancing to traditional music. It went on quite a while, and we enjoyed it but were happy when it ended, and then we heard the terrifying words from the announcer….”we hope you enjoyed the first of our ten traditional dances…… “. We lost the will to live after about three………………………

Bagan is unique. We had never heard of it until we started planning this trip, but I don’t know why it isn’t much better known. It’s a vast plain with trees and farmland – but dotted with thousands upon thousands of monuments from the modest house-sized ones to enormous cathedral-scale ones. They were built between the 9^th and 11^th centuries, apparently building was started by a monarch newly converted to Buddhism who wanted to gain some fast merit. Some are plain brick, some stone, some rendered, some restored, others crumbling. You can wander about at will – a bike is a good way to get about. And many of them have stairs, either outside or inside, so that you have access to the higher levels which afford fantastic views over the area. And everywhere you look are monuments rising above the trees. It’s an astonishing sight.

We went on foot the first day to get a feel for the scale of it. We got an early start  - it was still quite hazy - and  just walked out of the hotel and immediately came across a huge variety of types and styles. It was quite hard work though, a lot of walking and climbing in the hot sun, so at lunchtime we went back to the hotel and spent a lazy afternoon by the pool. At around 4pm we went out again and found a huge monument where we could climb four levels up to give a great vantage point for watching the sunset.

The next day we needed to go further afield so we got a horse and buggy for the day – many more monuments and a lovely, more relaxing, day.

It's probably the most photogenic place we've ever been, changing all the time with the different light conditions during the day, and we took hundreds of pics - here are a few, probably too many , but what can you do........?

On the third day we felt that we’d seen enough monuments so we got a car and driver and guide to go on an excursion to Mt Popa about 90 minutes away.