Bagan Part Two - How to Stew Your Own Brain
Bagan, Myanmar
I was up at 7:00 the next morning in an effort to get in the bulk of my Greater Bagan touring before the mid-day heat reached capacity. I ate breakfast on Eden’s second floor, open air balcony. Any other time of the day, this spot, which is directly over the pandemonium of Nyaung U’s main drag, would be fully objectionable, but at such an early hour, it was actually quite peaceful and enjoyable. The air was still cool and the building refrain of constant horn honking was just getting started and was largely easy to ignore. I ate every scrap of food that was offered to me, even downing two cups of the muddiest coffee I have ever had in order to stockpile the calories I would be needing for the extensive biking I would be doing that day. My plan was to be the first one at the bike shop when it opened, carefully inspect everything and sneak off with the best bike they had. From there I would zip down the same route I had taken the previous afternoon and pick up the trail at the Tharaba (Sarabha) Gateway on the edge of Old Bagan.
Bagan temples From there it was time to go to the airport. I returned my bike, collected my bags and jumped into a waiting taxi that I had arranged the day before. It became clear to me on the flight to Yangon that not only is Myanmar full with people who have no nerve endings in their asses, but they actually make a point of designing every chair to be as uncomfortable as hell. Impossibly, the seats on the airplane were the same, pathetic, cushion-free caliber as on the buses and only fractionally better than the train seats. I had no idea that passenger planes came with seat options that were this harsh, but there was no disputing the evidence.
The general flouting of safety in much of Southeast Asia extends to air travel as well. Everywhere else you go in the world, you are chastised if you unbuckle your seat belt even a second before the plane comes to a complete stop at the gate. Every flight I’d taken in Asia, people threw off their seatbelts as soon as the plane touch the ground. While the plane was still hurtling down the runway at 160 MPH, the distinctive sounds of latches being flung open filled the air. Fortunately, people usually wait until the plane is only going 30 MPH to get up and start pulling their things out of the overhead bins. Seeing as how seats aren’t assigned on most Asian airlines, I had started to make a point of sitting as far back in the plane as possible, so if the pilots ever had to perform a hard stop everyone and all of the bags they were throwing around while we were still in motion would fly forward and brain the less intuitive people sitting up front.
I shared a cab into the city with two locals, saving 1,000 kyat, checked into Motherland II and was in bed by 8:00 p.m.
