Bagan is the coolest place that you’ve never heard of. You heard it here. Egypt’s Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Angkor Wat, the Vatican, Machu Pichu, Copan, and Bagan. Yup, that cool, but cool for a slightly different reason. All of the former are cool basically for their size. Bagan is cool for its scope. In an area slightly smaller than Manhattan, starting 1100 years ago, the kingdom built over 4000 temples in about 250 years. That dwarfs the number of cathedrals in Europe and we are talking about an area that I explored on my bike in a few hours.
At first glance, Bagan actually looks like the rest of Burma, which means that there are a lot of temples. Burma really has a lot of temples and rarely is one out of site of a stupa, the inverted-bell shaped top of Burmese temples that ends in a skyward needle. Well, the first thing that I noticed in Bagan is that there appear to be a lot of them. Then I noticed that some of them are really big and are impressive buildings. Then upon reading and realizing that these temples are more than 1000 years old, I started to get impressed. It was when I climbed up on one of the bigger ones to get a bit of a view that the true scope of how amazing the area is becomes apparent.
There are more temples than trees in the valley of Bagan. This is not hyperbole—there actually are. When standing on a tall temple, one looks out onto a forest of temples, the stupa needle tops piercing the sky like a fir forest would in the Sierra Nevada (with a lot less snow). Taking a 360 degree view is to see temples, temples everywhere. It really is a shame that I am unable to upload photos from this country as this is worth seeing. Asking me about those photos upon my return will be worth your while. (Since I am finally posting it from the US, here they are!)
The best part about Bagan is that no one appears to know about it. There are only about 10 major temples that draw the majority of the tourists whose numbers are very small anyway, owing to Bagan’s isolation in an isolated country. In those major temples, I ran into 3-4 tourists at a time. But venturing to one of the other—oh I don’t know—400 large, amazing temples that are not on the tourist loop means solitude in one of the truly amazing man-made sites on earth. I regularly found myself absolutely alone at a 1000-year old temple. Just me and Buddha, chilling. I even took a nap in a little shady nook with a good breeze (it was so, so hot there) in an absolutely giant and abandoned temple.
I spent two days wandering the temples of Bagan on my rented bicycle dropping into temple after temple, watching the architectural styles evolve over the couple of hundred years of building, but I could have spent 2 weeks doing the same and not exhausted Bagan’s treasures. You should go there and having just gone there via bus and river ferry and leaving via bus, I recommend flying. I have mentioned it before but roads in Burma ought to be declared some sort of UN priority. They really are a travesty.
