Today is November 9th, it is 9:36pm. I am laying down in my bed at SECMOL in Leh, India. The temperature in my room is about 10 degrees Celsius.
Bagan...so many people I had spoken with about Bagan had raved so much about it that I had built up this ultimate supreme valley in my head, beyond any other world wonder.
My bus arrived in town, (Bagan, or at least Nyaung U the main town, is a town) at about 4:30am. No street lighting, and not that many people in the streets other than tourists leaving their guesthouses on bicycles heading to the temples to catch the sunrise. So I walked around for a good half hour to find a decent place to stay and take a nap before getting myself a bike and touring the valley.
A trishaw convinced me to pick me up and take me to a place that was fairly new and only charged $7 a night. Great! Not the cheapest, but central and within my budget. The Pann Cherry.
By 9am, I have myself a bike, and ate breakfast. So I hit the road.
Despite the fact that my bike was probably the worst bike I have ever ridden, I tried to follow everybody's advice as well as my usual instinct, and rode among the various temples and got lost multiple times. It was so precious to feel like I was the only one in this giant valley. There are so ma y roads, dirt paths, and temples, that even though there are many tourists, one can easily feel alone. I even managed to find an abandoned temple, facing the river and the other bank, and surrounded by a flock of grazing cows, in order to meditate for an hour. Ha! Denis, I caught myself laughing in my mind at the beginning because some of the cows were making the exact same noise as the master burper we had during our course. Hilarious!
I ended the day with a flat tire, and watching the quite disappointing sunset from the top terasse of a giant temple. So I strongly hoped that the sunrise would not disappoint me and set my alarm clock for 5am the next day.
After getting back home and showering clean, I headed out yet again, to try and find a place to meditate. I walked quite a bit and finally out of the darkness, found this temple, playing very loud music, and someone speaking with a microphone even louder. I got closer and was informed that it was the celebration ceremony of a going child passage from novice to monk. Interesting event to witness and see. But definitely not quiet place to meditate. Lol so I keep on walking. I reach the biggest temple in town, and in the giant entrance galleries leading up to the main pagoda, tons of souvenir stalls and a huge crowd of local young student tourists. I take part to the crowd to see where it will lead me to, and to observe the crowd itself. So interesting to see all these students shopping in group for absolutely tasteless souvenirs. Bunch of souvenirs which pretty much prove that they were in Bagan, but nothing more.
So not a quiet place for meditation either.
I gave up, it was getting late, and I needed to eat dinner before going to bed.
During dinner, I sat down next to this tourist from Penang, Malaysia. It was nice chatting about his city and his country...and be able to speak about it in a very knowledgeable manner.
The next day, paddling in the total darkness, headlamp on, and hoping I took the right direction, I paddled as fast as I could to make it to the tallest temple in the valley. I made it! Thank God I bumped into two British girls on their bike at a junction and they knew the way to go.
Well...the sunrise was indeed quite magical...not as magical as the nirvana sunrise over the Borobudur valley, or the sunrises over the Angkor temples, but still magical...and watching the hot air balloon fly over then valley, made it even better...totally reproducing the typical national geographic photos.
After two days of roaming around in the valley, from temple to temple, and walking for hours in the morning market, I was happy to leave Bagan. This town was quite strange in many ways. Not much of a dynamic community life. You could easily tell that the town was fully relying on tourism for its economy, and was actually very well structured around tourism.
I saw so many monks with a cell phone and even a back pack. Some even hung out in bars at night, drinking red bull, and watching soccer games while seating next to a group of female friends.
Anyhow, on day three, at 7pm, I hop into a bus to Yangon...for another 10 hour ride through the night. (I counted, in total, in Burma, I took about 10 times a 10 hour bus ride.)
Arrived in Yangon as scheduled, with enough time to grab breakfast at the bus terminal and catch a taxi to the airport.
Unfortunately, since the bus arrives so early at the airport, I had to wait a good 6 hours till my flight to India. And since it was so early in the morning, it didn't even give me enough time to find a market to buy warm clothes for Ladakh. The up side of this long wait is that I bumped into Angelina (the Brazilian girl from the meditation course) as she was running to catch her plane to BKK.
And so voila, I spent my last hours in Burma, at the airport, starting a magnificent book about Burma's old times: The Glass Palace. And at the same time, I was getting mentally ready for the dramatic weather change I was going to experience going from hot Burma to cold Ladakh.
The one thing that keeps running in my head after one month in Burma though, is the life and behavior of the monks in their community. So indefinitely want to research a lot more, and hope I can make it to Tibet next year to investigate directly at the source of Buddhism.
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