It’s Always Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt, Then It’s Hilarious

Currently Listening to: “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show

Guess what everyone… When you don’t take a VIP bus, things get interesting really fast. Tom and I left  Inle Lake on a night bus. Despite asking several travel agents about a VIP bus to Bagan, we were out of luck and had to take an ordinary class bus. We found out the seats reclined and that it wouldn’t be much different  than the VIP bus we took to get to Inle Lake. Well, they were wrong. The seats were small with enough leg room for me, but Tom was a bit cramped. We got going at about 7:30 and listened to Buddhist prayers for the beginning of the journey. They then turned on a Burmese variety show. The bus moved quickly and with a solid hour of switchbacks, I was eventually car sick. At 4am, about a half an hour before arriving in Bagan, the bus suddenly stopped. The driver turned it off and he and his two companions scurried outside to the back of the bus. You could hear them tinkering with the engine and then suddenly the driver was back on the bus attempting to start it again. It didn’t start. More tinkering and several more attempts at starting it again and eventually it started. What should have taken 20-30 minutes left in the drive was more like 45 minutes as the bus could no longer accelerate as much as it did before.

The sun beginning to rise just before I climbed up a pagoda

The top of a random pagoda for sunrise. We got lucky as we were the only ones on it for quite some time

 
We arrived in New Bagan just before 6am and once again were checked in quickly and back in bed. This time, we awoke at a more respectable 10:30am and immediately went to the pool. We decided to be flash-packers in Bagan. Bagan is an area in Central Myanmar that has 2,000-3,000 temples dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries. The itinerary in Bagan is simple. You wake up just before 5am and see the sunrise atop a pagoda, go back to the hotel have breakfast, take a nap, go for swim, eat, and eventually head back to another pagoda for sunset. You then have dinner, some beers, a night swim, then off to bed to repeat it the next day. On our first day, we rented an e-bike, which looks just like a scooter and Tom drove us around the area after lunch. That afternoon we decided to see sunset from the famous Shwesandaw Paya. It was so crowded. There were people all over the top 3 tiers of the pagoda. We made it just in time to see the sunset and lingered behind as the buses took the other tourists back to their hotels.

The next morning we were up before 5am and this time, we each rented an e-bike. I was a little nervous.  I haven’t had the need to drive my own motorbike or scooter the entire time I’ve been in Southeast Asia, but to get to each of the pagodas you have to navigate down sandy roads and it would be easier for each of us are o just do it on our own. In a shocking turn of events, I wanted to feel like I was in control of the situation. I also knew it would be easier to wear my midi dress if I drive myself.  So off we went to Lawkaoushaung Paya to watch the sunrise!  We made it with enough to time to scale the side of the temple and get to the top platform. Did I mention I was wearing a dress as I climbed up the walls? It was my most graceful moment ever.

The rest of the day was great. We napped, went for a swim, and then took our e-bikes out to Nyaung U, a larger town about 20 minutes north of New Bagan. It was going well until we started making our way to a pagoda for sunset. My e-bike went from having a full battery to no battery in about three minutes. We parked it at a restaurant along the main road and decided we could just call the company from the pagoda and meet them back at the bike after sunset, so back onto Tom’s e-bike and we were off again. As I mentioned before, the roads to the pagodas are very sandy and at times hard to navigate by e-bike, and just as we were making our way through the sandy road, the battery in Tom’s e-bike began to die. Now we were moving at a glacial pace trying to make it to the pagoda safely. Then we suddenly stopped and in slow motion tipped over to our left at a snails pace, while both slowly saying “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoooaaa”. We landed in a thorny bush with the e-bike on my leg. The best part is that upon standing back up, I realized the pagoda was just a minute walk around a bend and we had almost made it accident-free.   We climbed the steep steps of Bulethi Paya and then sat down and watched the sunset as we removed thorns from our arms.  After sunset, we asked a cab driver to call the e-bike company for us because he would be able to explain where we were better than we could. Twenty minutes later, we see two teenage boys on motorbike headed down the sandy road towards us. They then drove through one of the thorn bushes and we heard one of their tires pop. They had brought two batteries with them, so the plan was to replace the battery in Tom’s e-bike and then he and one of the boys would ride out to my e-bike and change the battery and bring it back to me and the other boy. As Tom left to get my bike, it was 6:30pm and almost pitch black. The kid that stayed with me is 16 and wanted to see pictures of my trip, so we stood looking at my phone, while we waited in the dark with bugs, bats, and other animals in the bush. About 20 minutes after Tom left I went to get my Chapstick and found the key to my bike. The kid and I looked at each other and shrugged. Just as we were about to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, Tom showed up!  The other kid was pushing the bike along the main road, so I jumped on the back of Tom’s bike and we want to find my bike on the road.  After finding the bike, we had dinner, a few beers, laughed at our small scrapes, and I was able to really laugh at our ridiculous day at that point.  After the adventurous evening, we were both exhausted, besides, we had to be up by 5am again, so we were asleep early yet again.

Our last morning we tried to find one pagoda and were eventually led to one by one of the locals. It was amazing, simply because we could easily climb to the top and we were the only ones for quite a bit of time.  That would be our last pagoda climb. After our nap and during our afternoon swim, we decided that we would just enjoy the pool and skip the pagoda sunset.

Bagan was beautiful. It was everything I had hoped for and wanted it to be. It was the most peaceful experience I’ve had while in Southeast Asia. Each sunrise and sunset was spectacular in its own way and each time I asked Tom, “How beautiful is this?”  It was as though I couldn’t believe it was real. Each sunrise felt like a dream and each sunset was like a movie. It was all just too perfect.  But perfection had to come to an end. On Monday the 19th, we wee planning to be up at 4:30am to take what is considered the express boat up the Ayeyarwady River to Mandaly, an 11-hour journey.