Travelling Myanmar - Pictures and recommendations #2

casperbd (47)in #travel • 7 years ago

Wearing local dress (longyi) in front of a pagoda in Bagan

After a somewhat comfortable 10 hour busride we arrived for Day 2 in Bagan. We started out by paying overprice for a taxi and before heading into the Bagan area you have to pay 25.000 kyat (20 USD), but it's absolutely worth it.
We arrived at our hotel, had a nice breakfast and then we rented an ebike for our pagoda adventure. We started out by getting semi tricked into buying the longyi (we thought we had to buy it to enter the temple, guess not), which was a bit overpriced (10 USD), but the street credits we got from the locals the following days made up for it!

We spent the whole day in Old Bagan, where you find a massive landscape with countless amount of Pagodas. A must visit area if you go. Quite quickly we ran into a group of police officers and they walk towards us, so we quickly thought "what did we do now?", turned out they were from the local tourist police and wanted to take photo with us. Come on, how many places does that happen? 1-0 for Myanmar. We also met a local girl, who played us perfectly, by coming across as someone who didn't like that her people tricked tourists to buy overpriced souvenirs, where afterwards she managed to get us to buy some small owl souvenirs which she claimed she had made herself. We found out 30 min later, that not only was that probably the most common souvenir in the entire Bagan, we also paid 3 times more than any other place. Well played local girl, well played. Luckily my friend and I are not the type of people who hold grudges, so after we burned down her house, we managed to laugh about the situation. Okay relax, it was just a joke.

Later in the evening we drove out to what seems to be the sunset pagoda, to enjoy a beautiful sunset. Unfortunately it wasn't time for air balloons, so I had to stick with my newly acquired sand painting, to imagine those.
We finished the evening with dinner at a restaurant called Leo, which I can highly recommend as well, before taking a 8 hour busride to Inle Lake

Photo with the local police

Local girl who tricked us. At least she gaves us a face paint for free, which is also supposed to function as sunscreen. I was pretty sunburned in the face the day after, so yet another trick and the 'protip' here from me to you, remember sunscreen yourself.

The beautiful sunset, slightly ruined by clouds, but still stunning

My happily acquired sand painting, that the guy claimed to have painted himself. Only reason I believe is because I didn't see it anywhere else, unlike the owls!!