-
I want to ride my bicycle (amongst the temples of Bagan)
Bagan, is Burma/Myanmar’s famous city of 100’s of temples, some dating back almost 1,000 years and, in Burmese terms, a tourist mecca, with 100’s of tourists carrying around thousands of dollars of expensive camera equipment around in the hope of catching the perfect sunset or sunrise shot of their own.
Everyone looking for their own unique photo of the same thing…
But this blog post didn’t end up dwelling on that much (and just as well as I’ve probably posted enough sunset pictures already…) Instead as I wrote it, I found I didn’t really want to write about the temples at all. And that’s because for three days it was also home to one slightly apprehensive looking man who had finally decided the time was right to see if the old adage is true that riding a bike really is a case of “once you learn you never forget…”
And what if you don’t think you ever really learned?
A bit of background, whilst like most kids I cycled around when I was younger I never did so on roads or outside of the relative safety of the nearby park. I also never really cycled again past the age of about 12. The longer the gap went on the more I convinced myself that cycling was just something I wasn’t able to do very well and by my 20’s, when any cycling would likely have to involve roads, (I was probably getting a bit to old to just ride in circles around the local recreation ground,) I had convinced myself that cycling would likely result in my almost immediate death. Its a fear that has caused me some problems over the years, one girl in Sheffield basically decided to stop seeing me after I wimped out of proposed date to go cycling together. (To be fair she did seem to be proposing some lengthy Tour de France-esq route along the not particularly flat countryside surrounding Sheffield so I’m not sure how keen I would have been even if I wasn’t terrified I’d be killed the first time I encountered a roundabout…) Whilst this did give me a fun anecdote that I’d been dumped for not being able to ride a bike, it also made me feel rather silly, particularly as most peoples response to hearing this story tends to be to ask if not been able to ride a bike was a euphemism for something…
This is not Sheffield…
And travelling hasn’t made me feel any better about my fear of the cycle as so many cities have been full of small children and very old ladies cycling around with abandon deftly avoiding buses, large lorries and other obstacles… So I have been keen to find an opportunity to actually get myself in the saddle in what would seem a relatively safe place and see just how bad I am. And in Bagan I managed it and it seems I did really once know how to ride a bike, and that riding a bike is “just like riding a bike” and you don’t forget, because I wasn’t utterly awful. In fact I thought I was quite good. I could take my hands off the handle bars and everything and subsequently had a blast overtaking old tourists pretending I was instead chasing down Victoria Pendleton…
The Lone Ranger had Tonto, I had this mighty all terrain steed…
A bit about Bagan
And as a result of discovering my inner Bradley Wiggins – I loved my time in Bagan. I had heard mixed reviews of it and its certainly true that it is perhaps one of the most geared up places for tourists in the country, compete with tourist prices and western food. It does lack some of the charm you can find elsewhere in Burma/Myanmar, unlike other parts of the country locals will largely ignore you when you wander the town and waves and shouts of “hello!” and “bye-bye” from kids and grown-ups alike, so common in the rest of the country are largely absent here. And it probably is true that after a while some of the temples can start to look a bit samey, whilst the restoration work done to them is of patchy quality to say the least whilst even many of the smaller ones come complete with hawkers trying to sell sand paintings postcards and the like.
Enjoying the vistas
The temples are still active sites of worship
But the views of the site from atop those temples where you are allowed to climb are universally impressive. Some of the larger temples are almost cathedral like in design, echoing architectural styles that to me seemed almost Romanesque, where as others look like variations on step pyramids. And if you are willing to ride off road you will soon come to temples seemingly forgotten by all other tourists, with lonely cows grazing in between them. Even at some of the more impressive temples singled out in the Lonely Planet guide (and there are many temples not in that guide) you may only meet the odd tourist, like the random Italian lady who came up to me to tell me she had lost her husband. In hindsight I think she was hoping I might have seen him and been able to point her in his direction rather than ask her if that meant she was looking for a new one…
Unlike any Buddhist temple I had seen before
From this picture alone I might have guessed I was actually in the Middle-East
Some temples are home to small families and their livestock
Still very much in use was this temple by Nraung U, lit up at dusk
Soooo good!
Beer and a Burger…
I really enjoyed my three days here and in that time I saw many temples, some more impressive than others – but in a way though I found that for me that didn’t really matter, the temples were just a convenient way of breaking up my new hobby of cycling, giving me something to climb whilst I pondered how long it would take to get thighs like Sir Chris Hoy. And for the me the Western food made a nice change – variety is the spice of life after all – and after weeks of noodles and rice, the chance to eat pasta or burger and chips was just what I wanted, even if it didn’t feel like the most cultural thing to do…
Do believe the hype
So if you are planning a trip to Myanmar/Burma and are hoping to avoid the crowds and go off the beaten track, don’t be so quick to cross Bagan of your list of places to visit. Yes, thousands of tourists visit by the coach load, but there is after all a reason why they are all going here – it really is worth seeing. In particular if you do go off the beaten track in Burma/Myanmar, Bagan can be a great place to return to to recover afterwards, and with flat roads and cycles for hire for only a dollar a day there’s really no reason not to cycle around the sites. If you are feeling lazy you can hire electric bikes that in theory save you having to expend any energy, but a word of warning – on more than one occasion I witnessed a sweaty mess of a tourist attempting to push their broken down e-bike back to town after some mechanical failure of one sort or another…
Going off the beaten track sometimes means going onto the cattle beaten track…
Its easy to get away fro the tourists
My only disappointments were that rather than ending my trip with thighs like Sir Chris Hoe I instead ended up with a rather bruised feeling bottom. I suppose if you hire a bike for a dollar, it’s not going to come with the most comfortable of saddles, or indeed any sort of suspension. I wonder if there is a way of attaching a cushion to a saddle…
Oh and irritatingly I no longer have that girl from Sheffield’s number…
Link to this post!
