30. Sunset at Bagan temples, Myanmar (Burma)

By Filipe Morato Gomes	Where is Bagan?
I arrived in Bagan, Myanmar almost dead after the worst bus journey of this part of the trip through Southeast Asia. The temples of Bagan are famous worldwide for its overwhelming beauty and I decided to visit them for a couple of days. There were a lot of tourists around but, nevertheless, there's no words to describe a lovely sunset seem from a deserted small temple of Bagan.

It was the worst bus journey in Southeast Asia so far. It was a small local bus of a regular carrier running between Mandalay and Bagan, extremely uncomfortable, with not much room for the legs and, you guessed it, overcrowded. It drove along local roads full of holes, jolting along, and the dust, omnipresent, made breathing something nearly impossible.

A man contemplating the temples of Bagan, Myanmar

A dozen people had to travel standing, and many others had to go on the roof among suitcases and bags full of rice. Whenever a woman wanted to get on the bus, it was necessary for a male passenger to volunteer and go to the roof to allow the newcomer to occupy his place. Not due to male kindness, but because otherwise it would be disrespectful for all the men on the bus to have a woman above their heads, so in an upper level. It as an exhausting journey and when the bus got to Bagan I felt little less than dying.

Bagan is the most visited region of Myanmar. And the only reason for that is existence of more than two thousand temples which spread along an area of forty square kilometres, near Ayeyarwady River. Together with the temples of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, and the Temples of Borobudur, in the Indonesian island of Java, the temples of Bagan are often considered the most impressive legates of the past in Southeast Asia.

In Bagan, there were too many tourists in the biggest temples like Shwezigon Paya or Ananda temple. It was understandable as Ananda is, in fact, one of the most elegant, best preserved and holiest among all the Bagan temples.

As the afternoon was coming to an end, the organized groups went to the highest point of the big temples, waiting for the renowned sunset. From all directions one could hear furious clicks of dozens photo cameras. And people, many people elbowing in a small balcony. Tired, I rode a bicycle with no destination in mind along the local roads far from the main paved one, until a man invited me to see some paintings made on sand.

Late afternoon in one of the Bagan Temples, Myanmar

I was sitting at the door of the tiny temple of Tayok Pye, rarely visited by foreigners. “In average, Five people visit Tayok Pye daily”, the street vendor told me. “It's not good for the business, but the license to sell near the bigger temples is much more expensive”, he continued, resigned. The building looked like a graceless parallelepiped when the man pointed to a narrow and dark staircase. “Sunset will come in five minutes, feel free to go up there”, he suggested. The staircase led to the top of the small temple. I went up and stayed there, in the company of the man that decided to go up too, appreciating the immensity of the temples of Bagan which variegated the landscape and waiting for the magic instant when the sun hides below the line of the horizon. A moment of peace.

Bagan is one of those places which possess a certain fascination but after some days visiting temples turned monotonous and tiring. And I was curious to know the most popular summer destination in Myanmar, Ngapali, before my Burmese visa expired. Still aching because of the bus journey and aware that it would take at least twenty hours and three different buses to get there I decided to take a domestic flight towards Ngapali.

Daily life at Ngapali beach, Myanmar

When I arrived in Ngapali I found myself in a spotless beach, three kilometres of palm trees lined behind a line of thin white sand, with the resorts and bungalows not showing any signs of the destructive wave from the previous month of December. Ngapali was a beautiful, calm place, but it is not a destination aimed to independent travellers. Perhaps because it's an inconceivably expensive place, maybe because it is too quiet. After a couple of days alone, I left Ngapali beaches behind.

It was then time to leave Myanmar and go back to Bangkok and to learn how to do dive in the islands of the Gulf of Thailand, before heading south to the Malaysian peninsula towards Singapore. But, being in a country where there's no freedom at all, the simple fact of being able to leave meant something. In fact, many Burmese people aim at finding an opportunity to get a job outside Myanmar and yet have no permission to leave the country. I was told about a catholic priest who had been waiting for three years for a permission granted by the military regime to visit Italy for a week. While the plane was going up in the sky and Myanmar stayed farther, a single thought came to me: “there are people in this world that deserves a much better luck”.

(originally written in Portuguese)

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