April in Wanderlust: Beautiful Bagan (a.k.a. Pagoda City)

Yes, Bagan! Bagan is pretty f’n awesome! The instant our plane was over the area, it was nothing but pagoda, pagoda, pagoda everywhere! All shapes and sizes. 4,000 of ‘em all over the place. It sort of trumps most of the other pagodas that are all over Asia. It’s S-T-U-N-N-I-N-G. Most tourists explore by either bicycle (the best way even if you’re not in shape) or others do the tourist buses (tacky!). Some do horse and carriage… but I just feel bad that a horse has to lug fat Americans around in extreme heat. While there are the top five big pagodas that you’re suggested to go to, you should try and just explore some of the other random (and I mean random!) pagodas that are there. Most you can go up to, inside of, crawl on, sit at, sleep in.

The big thing for the tourists to do is at sunset, go to one of the big pagodas to watch the sunset. We decided to make it a happy hour as well. We bought a bottle of one of Myanmar’s finest rums – Myanmar Rum (it was $3, ‘nuff said), and bought some cans of coke, a few containers of lychee juice to use as cups (definitely not to drink!) and sat on top of a pagoda with our rum and cokes and watched the sunset until it was dark. Then we had to get down some extremely steep stairs with our little happy hour buzz and bicycle all the way back to our hotel in the dark (one headlamp didn’t even help with the road... and there may have been a slight crash into a sidewalk too) for a few miles, and then along some dirt/sand paths too. Let’s just say, it was an adventure. An awesome adventure!

Construction on a pagoda - the lower guy throws what the guy above him needs, higher guy catches it. Yes, this is how things are done here.

At the same construction site, two ladies go up and down these stairs all day to deliver stuff to the guys above

Cutie kid who kept hiding under my chair and laughing, then LOVED having his picture taken and seeing it afterwards

That's HIS pose, he kept doing this one for some reason or another...

Chris playing soccer with a local boy

Public water... if you dare drink it

Inside one of the pagodas where ALL stairways are meant for pygmy people, I had to hunch over to go up and down this

Typical Allie pose

The EXTREMELY steep stairs of the pagodas... where of course we drank at the top and then had to get down without falling all the way down in the dark. No, we're not that bright.