Goodbye Yangon, Hello Bagan

We arrived in Bagan at the slightly earlier than expected time of 4.45am, after an overnight bus journey from Yangon. If I said I slept like a baby; that would be a lie.

Before my feet even had chance to touch the ground, a bunch of Burmese men swamped around me shouting ‘taxi, taxi!’ as I stepped off the bus.

It was pitch black outside except for one or two dark and dingy lights. And my head was spinning circles.

After sitting like a vegetable and dipping in and out of sleep for the last 9 hours, the immediacy of new faces and sharp sounds assaulted my peace of mind. Bartering or trying to assimilate to my new surroundings required a mental shift I wasn’t ready to muster up. But quickly, I did.

I wanted to get to Ruchi before any negotiations about taxi fare were made so I pushed past the crowd to find her.

And there she was, looking like she had been dragged through a bush backwards, hurling her backpack over her shoulders in one shaky swoop. I didn’t need to ask her whether she had slept or not. The evidence was all there.

I was glad I wasn’t by myself, for the first time in my trip I felt slightly intimidated. It seems silly now because Burmese people are the most peaceful and non-threatening people I’ve ever been in the company of, but you only need to imagine how it is to be thrown out in the dark somewhere new and alien into what seems like dozens and dozens of men trying to hurry you into their taxi to know why. It’s a woman’s instinct to feel a bit cagey in new surroundings, especially when completely outnumbered by the opposite sex. And isn’t it funny how the mind plays tricks on you in the dark? – Everyone looks scarier and creepier than they really are. But maybe that’s just me.

Ruchi and I settled negotiating with a short, chubby man with a friendly face. He had this wide, enthusiastic smile that made his cheeks double in size. He reminded me of a Cabbage Patch doll, these are soft rag dolls famous in the UK for their squidgy cheeks. Every girl has one at some stage in their life. He went by the name of Easy, and indeed it was easier to remember than his Burmese name which he mentioned but I can no longer recall.

‘You can take a taxi to your hotel or a horse,’ said Easy.
‘A horse?’ I repeated.
‘Yes’, then he got his mobile phone out to show us a photo. The resolution was bad but it was a photo of a dark brown stallion. Amusingly, it was his screensaver too and because of that I was sold. Any guy who takes a photo of his horse and puts it up as his screensaver has got to be a good guy. Ruchi agreed.

‘He’s over there,’ said Easy pointing to his horse, but it was too dark to see anything so we took his word for it.

Without much deliberation we decided to go by horse, it was a couple of dollars cheaper, and hopefully it would give us something more memorable…

His horse had a little cart with two wheels attached for me and Ruchi to climb inside, groping our way into a comfortable position like two blind moles. Already it felt kind of surreal, but as the journey continued it grew more and more surreal. We rode through darkness on a long road, the sound of crickets hidden in the wild and trotting hooves filled the silence of the night. But the sound of nature was broken up by Easy, who waxed lyrical about Chelsea United, we said we didn’t follow football but that didn’t matter, he wanted to share his love of the beautiful game, and who were we to stop him? Long ago I always said to myself that I’d never get in the way of a man and football!

If Easy wasn’t talking about football, then he’d make grunting noises which ascended into a high-pitched note, and every so often he cooed ‘PO-THA-JIAN’. That was his horses’ name. By this point I was having one of those unexplainable laughing fits you might get when everything around you has absolutely no common ground to your normal life back home, and you think to yourself ‘if my friends could see me now’. For thirty minutes we bobbed up and down to the rhythm of Pothajian trotting along. After a while the flow of it felt quite therapeutic.

As we reached the hotel, we were unsurprisingly told it was too early to check-in. Despite looking and feeling like the walking dead, we asked Easy to take us somewhere to watch the sunrise. For the sum of $18 US dollars he brought us to a big pagoda where we took off our pumps and climbed up, careful not to slip on the sand and cracks that lived along the narrow, steep steps.

We stayed until the sun rose and the full extent of Bagan’s incredible landscape, littered with ancient stupas and temples, came into its full glory. It was like stepping into a time warp.

We decided not to pay for a hot air balloon to save a wad of money to go towards food, and we didn’t feel bad about it because we took some awesome photos and had more time to go biking!

Where have you seen the best sunrise from?