Bagan Sunset

"Spotty","deplorable", "horrid".

This is just a sample of the derogatory adjectives I found while researching Myanmar's dubious government-operated "budget" airline safety record: a history of downed planes and missing tourists so extensive it rivals even the world's great socialist "no-frills" commercial airliners of Africa and Russia. Myanmar Airways claims its record has improved dramatically after they dropped a rule requiring that planes take off on time regardless of the flight mechanics' advice- certainly little consolation.

Our other option was the decidedly safer "Air Bagan", privately owned and operated by Tay Za: Burma's most flamboyant and nefarious business tycoon who not only hordes the profits of Myanmar teak-wood industry, he also has close ties to Burma's massive illegal opium industry (surpassed only by that of Afghanistan). Naturally, he is a close friend to the military junta having paid for the current Senior General Than Shwe's daughter's notoriously extravagant $300,000 wedding.

Alas, we chose to patron Tay Za's Air Bagan and may we burn in hell. It was either that or face the sprawling twenty-four hour odyssey of crossing the entire country in the hot stuffy confinement of a Myanmar pickup truck. Somehow, eternal damnation didn't seem so bad anymore.

Our plane touched down into the cruel dusty furnace of April in Bagan, and by night-fall we found ourselves wandering the desolate streets of a third-world tourist dystopia. New Bagan is the brainchild of a military junta that gave all the residents of the original city one week's notice to pack up and move their lives to this more convenient location. The paved streets and ritzy hotels around us are widely believed to be the product of government enforced slave labour in a failed effort to bolster their tourist industry.

Long boat on the Irrawaddy near Bagan.

These days, New Bagan is downright spooky. A loud wind howls across dark empty roads in the night. Swanky western-style cocktail bars are populated only by dusty horse and carriage drivers pestering us to rent their services. Vacant luxury resorts sit sadly idle next to the murky green waters of their forgotten algae-ridden pools. Tourists don't seem to come here anymore. Too spooky.

Myanmar has a complicated and turbulent history consisting of periods of disunity and warring ethnic groups alternating with more prosperous periods of Burmese domination when rival ethnic groups were controlled with either the carrot of autonomy or the stick of force. It is tempting to consider today's predominantly Burmese junta as a continuation of this pattern. History repeating itself. While the military junta is rightfully despised, people are reluctant to consider the possibility that when junta is gone so will be the uneasy Union of Myanmar it barely managed to cobble together.

Each Burmese Empire had its capital. If the modern ghost metropolis of Naypyidaw is the unlikely capital of today's military junta, Bagan was the capital of the very first Burmese empire more than one thousand years ago. Alone and sadly outnumbered by the hotel staff, we checked out and began our hot and sweaty exploration of this more ancient Myanmar.

Marco Polo was the first Westerner to see Bagan (13th century). He described it as "one of the finest sights in the world." He also claimed that many of the towers were covered in gold a finger thick.

There use to be more than 13,000 temples in Bagan, but only 2,200 remain today. This is more than all the Cathedrals in Europe.

Touring Bagan is as exhausting as it is exhilarating. Temperatures soar well into the mid-forties, and the barren landscape provides no respite from the sun. Literally thousands of temples are strewn across a forty square kilometer requiring long hot bike rides between the sites accessible by road, and dusty pony rides for the rest. Each temple is home to gangs of touts either hawking the same paintings and postcards, or trying to barter them off to us in exchange for various personal items.

Most Burmese restaurants serve a large variety of foods arrayed unattractively in plastic pales at the entrance. The food in each pale is actually intentionally covered in a thin layer of grease in order to keep the many nearby flies out.

Covered in sweat and sun-screen on our second day of plodding along sandy roads on clunky third-world rental bikes, we collapsed inside a dingy Burmese restaurant suffering from a mild case of heat stroke and a major case of temple overdose. The Lonely Planet describes Burmese cuisine as a "curious" mix of Indian and Chinese influences which seems to be true since the food they served us had all the greasiness of Chinese take-away with all the cleanliness of an Indian hole in the wall.

Nevertheless, Bagan at dusk is positively magical. We climbed atop lonely nondescript pagoda number 384 somewhere in the middle of the ancient city. A gang of souvenir hawking pre-teen touts was there to join us as we sat down together for the evening's spectacle. Sunset over Bagan is perhaps South East Asia's most awe-inspiring sight. Even the grubby kid shoving postcards into my hands while tugging at my wrist-watch found himself stopping momentarily to bask in the terracotta twilight. Unlike other preeminent ancient cities of the world, the view before us was neither shrouded in jungle nor banalized by popular media. At sunset, the full extant of a massive ancient martian world lies unhidden, disappearing with the sun into the horizon.