12th January 2015 Bagan - MYANMAR (BURMA)

12th January Bagan - MYANMAR (BURMA)


A lazy start to the day today after our early start yesterday was the order of the day after which Paul and Mandy went for a wander round the local festival going on across the road from the hotel for the Ananda temple and came back with some very nice velvet flip-flops – time to get Mandy out of here – she’s going local between the flip-flops and the longis plus with all the temple visiting in bare feet our feet are starting to look like the locals as well !

Steve and Janette tried to sort out some of the thousands of photos and get some of the blog loaded on the excruciatingly slow internet. It’s torture ! One of our guys said that was the government’s way of promoting the Buddhist tenet of patience………..aaaagghh !

Steve was keen to take some more photos of the groups of temples in the late afternoon light and our guide from yesterday had also been a keen photographer and shown Steve some good locations, so we rang him and asked if he would take us out for a few hours pre and post sunset to some good locations (hard to know where is best out of 3000 !). He was happy to do that and said he would pick us up at 5pm in his car.

Off we set to the first location where not only had he brought a friend of his who was a local photographer but his friend had brought along 2 young novice monks !.  To make matters more complicated or just plain "Myanmarian", the monks were under the watchful eyes of a local photographer and his assistant.

Another surreal Burmese experience was in store ! 

(Above) Steve deciding how the staged shots should look

They spent ages setting up great shots with Steve in a couple of really atmospheric temples using candles, incense and the young monks were having fun messing around in between the shots. 

After the first temple the photographer and the older monk jumped on their motorcycle to the second temple while Janette, Steve and the younger monk hopped into the guide’s car and off we went ! 

Now, its not every day that Janette has a Buddhist monk in the back seat of a car but this was her day. Turns out his "nick-name" is movie star as he has already appeared in films

After that the guide took us to a great location for sunset where we had to climb up inside a pagoda on near vertical steps within narrow stairways with no head room but eventually we came out onto a flat roof with a  panoramic view of 3 of the largest temples facing the sunset. We had just great views of the sunset and the golden hour after sunset.

The golden hour after sunset

 (Above and below) Beautiful Bagan temples lit at night in all their glory

We finally clambered back down the stairs sporting head torches in our socks (watching out for snakes) to head back to the hotels for a shower and cocktails.

(Above) Steve (with permission) climbing on a Buddah image in search of the perfect picture.  The curator was bribed a little to open up with the keys and we used local people for the photo shoot.

The paintings on the right are 13th century so Steve was hyperventilating trying not to touch them. 

Smoking out the little monk with incense is all part of the search for the picture. We told him that smoking was bad for him but incense is OK.

Steve gave him a head torch as a gift and he would do just about anything after that including sitting in 6 inches of dust for pictures
Eventually passing tourist were shooting pictures and thought their luck had changed when they saw their own pictures.
All of these locations our out public reach and were opened up for us especially.

(Below) some of the 100 pictures that were shot.  They have been watermarked prohibited copy as they will be entered into amateur competition and they need to be unused to qualify for entry.
Later, the pictures will be given to our guide and his friends who want to make a book about Bagan photography.

Another first on this holiday we managed to get Steve and Paul into not only a VEGETARIAN restaurant but an UNLICENSED vegetarian restaurant. Just shows what 36 days of eating out will do to them…. All was not lost though as the owner smuggled in some bottles of Myanmar beer wrapped in black bags for them. We now just accept what comes as the norm here as you never know what will happen next.