2014 / Myanmar / Bagan

  





 

The plan was to spend three days in Bagan. Yet, after the second day, we were down with food poisoning and had to spent the entire of the last day in the hotel. A doctor was called into our rooms, who then gave me an injection and even put my brother on drip (!). I do vaguely remember the night before the fiasco beginning with...

Me: I'm damn giddy. 

Brother: Same. I'm going to vomit. 

- a while later - 
Me: Do you feel better?

Brother: Ya
Me: Ok good I'm going to try vomiting too!!

Regardless, the previous two days saw us in more temples than we can even remember in the ancient city of Bagan. 

We also had Burmese-style buffet at a teahouse situated under tree. It had been made popular by Aung San Suu Kyi who apparently ate there once. The moment we sat down, they served all the dishes they had to offer. Once we finished, say, the tiger prawns, all we had to do was to call the waiter/waitress to top it up. It was free flow of each dish & we only had to pay for the dishes we ate. (Despite its seeming lack of hygiene, this is NOT the place that did us in with food poisoning.) 

As evening approached, the driver scurried us off to the famous "sunset temple" to get spots as early as 4.30PM. Needless to say, the long wait got me sunburnt. This temple was also merely five stories in height but I only made it up to the third because fear got the better of me... oops. If you notice in the photo carefully, the staircase was VERY steep so each "storey" is effectively 1.5x the average storey we'd expect! Not to mention, the steps were equally as steep and narrow. At one point, I was on all fours, trying not to miss a step and fall to my death. I have no idea how the other tourists with a crutch or a Canon store's worth of camera equipment managed to climb up those stairs all the way to the top. Funny story: My brother climbed all the way up, before realising he needed to go to the washroom and then went all the way down almost immediately. So definitely relief yourself before you embark on your climb!

With that, I'm probably down to the last part of this road trip - Mandalay & Yangon, the two major cities of Myanmar.