Christmas in Bagan

Christmas has always been my favourite holiday. When I was little, the excitement of anticipation was so great that I would struggle to fall asleep and would be up at the crack of dawn, gazing wide-eyed at the glittering tree heaped about with presents and the bulging stockings hanging over the fireplace. The family rule was that we weren't allowed to start opening presents until everyone was ready, and I had to wait till some unconscionably late hour (probably something like 7:30) for my father to get out of bed and stagger downstairs. As if to provoke me, he also needed to casually brew a cup of coffee before coming in to the living room where we could get started on the stockings. (Apologies if I'm getting any of this wrong--that's how it's lodged in my memory at least.)

One reason I need to remember to be patient with children is that nothing in my life occasions that kind of excitement anymore. But I was nevertheless up before dawn on this Christmas morning, although I needed an alarm clock rather than just the thrill of the coming day to do the job. I was awake at 4:45, out of my hotel and on my rented bike before 5, and at Shwesandaw Paya before 5:30 to beat the bulk of the crowds and get a decent sunrise-viewing spot. There was still no sign of dawn by the time I arrived, and a little light pollution aside, I had a good view of the stars, including the Big Dipper, which is normally hiding below the horizon in the early evening, preventing me from using it to locate the North Star, as well as a luminous Jupiter almost directly overhead. 

Over the next hour, I watched the dawn come up much more gently than thunder, starting with a slightly less dark shade of blue behind Dhammayangyi Pahto on the horizon. The dark blue expanded outward followed by progressively paler shades of blue, gradually unfolding a rainbow of yellow, then orange, then pinkish red sky on the horizon. That rich rainbow then flattened out to pastels and then to white as the first rays of sunlight peeked over the distant hills. The gradual increase in temperature conjured mist from the ground, creating a panorama of mist-shrouded temples with rays of silky white light streaming between them. As the light expanded, the hulking Dhammayangyi and other neighbouring temples seemed to grow, as if the dark had shrunken them and they were blossoming forth in the light. 

As the sun came up, so did the balloons. I counted a squadron of twenty rising far off to the northwest and drifting lazily toward us. Costing between $320 and $380 for a 45-minute flight, a hot air balloon ride was too rich for my blood, even at Christmas, but I'm glad others laid out for it (by my estimation, there was over $50,000 in the air that morning) because they took the view from magical to otherworldly. They passed us close enough that we could hear the deep whoosh of the flames firing up, like heavy breaths, so that these massive, bobbing beasts seemed like a passing pod of flying whales. And then they drifted past us into the southeast, rotund silhouettes against the pure white of the rising sun. 

That's how I began Christmas Day in Bagan. Bagan (aka Pagan) is probably Myanmar's best known tourist destination, and you've all seen at least one image of it, even if you don't know it yet--I lifted an image of Bagan to use as the background for this blog. Bagan was the Burmese capital from the 11th to 13th centuries, and is Myanmar's answer to Angkor Wat. (I've never been to Cambodia so I can't compare the two, but tourists I've met who have been to both say that Angkor Wat is indeed more impressive, but also overrun with tourists in a way that Bagan isn't--yet.) 

Bagan got its start under Anawrahta, the first Burmese king to adopt Theravada Buddhism (before that time, the Burmese people practiced Hinduism, and--interestingly, given that Theravada is the more ancient tradition--Mahayana Buddhism). The legend has it that Anawrahta was converted by a monk sent by the Mon king Manuha from the southeast of present-day Myanmar (where I'm headed as I type this). The monk made a violently enthusiastic convert of Anawrahta, who insisted that Manuha send him some sacred texts and relics, and, when Manuha refused, Anawrahta sent an army, plundered the Mon kingdom, took all he wanted, including a troop of monks and the captive king Manuha himself, back to Bagan. There's such a thing as being too successful in your ventures. 

Over the next two and a half centuries, Anawrahta and his successors oversaw the construction of over four thousand structures on the roughly 25 square kilometre plain of Bagan. Some of them are 15 to 20 foot tall stupas, just large enough to house a small shrine, while some of them are cathedral-scale temples ten times that height. At the peak of temple construction, a new building project began about every other week.

No one's quite sure what brought the Bagan period to an end and prompted the move of the royal court to the Mandalay area, but the most likely guess is Mongol invasions, real or simply threatened. (It says something about the destructive reach of the Mongols when you consider that I've witnessed effects of their raiding in places as far flung as Myanmar, Iran, and Russia.) I don't know if you need such a violent explanation for the decline of the Bagan kings. I would have thought that eventual collapse is inevitable if you pour most of your resources into merit-making conspicuous consumption. 

Bagan lies in a seismically active area (Maybe another reason for Bagan's literal collapse--I think I felt a slight tremor on Christmas morning) and the temples have been shaken around a lot in the last millennium, most recently in a devastating quake in 1975. Restoration has been a bit haphazard, so that some of the structures look like they were built from scratch in the last few decades (because they were), others have been repaired with a more conscientious eye to preserving their original form, and some have been left to crumble. 

I arrived in Bagan on the boat from Mandalay on the evening of December 22nd, as I recounted last time, and after a busy couple days in Mandalay I felt the need to unwind. So I invited myself to dinner with a pair of English women and a Dutch man who were celebrating the end of their stay in Bagan, and stayed on as the party shifted--one feature of the backpacker circuit is that acquaintances are everywhere and everyone is sociable. I ended up staying up past midnight for the first time since I left Chicago and woke up hung over the following morning to join a tour with Laura (England), Brittany (USA), and Mathew (Hong Kong). Compared with the rest of Myanmar, which is quite lush even in the dry season, Bagan is arid and dusty, with succulents as well as trees and a searing midday sun. Not the best place for a hangover, let me tell you. 

Our tour took us to some of the more far-flung temples of Bagan on e-scooters, little battery-powered numbers that are to motorbikes what frilly lace shirts are to muscle tees (if you were wondering what could make a scooter feel less manly, the answer is a nearly soundless battery-powered motor). A couple of the main roads in Bagan are paved, but a lot of the driving is on sandy tracks where you have to be careful to find the rockiest bits of road for fear of sliding uncontrollably on the thicker sand. Sand and dust get everywhere. The following morning I had a sore throat and a hay fevery itch in my eyes. 

Besides knowing which temples to go to and a couple bits of interesting information, our guide was useless. He spoke in a rapid and incomprehensible English, which he uttered with the insistent cadences of someone who's certain that the site of the communication breakdown is in his audience's ears and not on his own tongue. Figuring out what he was saying became an interesting intellectual puzzle in itself, as the four of us worked together to decipher, for example, "pestle" as meaning "pedestal." The once-again disappointing tour got me reflecting on the misfortune of an inadequate education. It's not just that this guy hasn't had adequate training in the English language. The deeper problem was that he hadn't had the education to know how to frame a narrative, to make sense of Bagan as something more than a series of memorized names and factoids. I didn't learn much from his tour because he gave me nothing to feed my imagination. And I got the sense that I was able to have an imagination that wanted feeding and that he was unable even to grasp what such a want might feel like because, unlike me, he had never benefitted from an education that taught him how to think. One of the things I like about travel is the way that it teaches me to see things that are normally so seamless that I take them for granted. Infrastructure is the big one--in the developing world, every telephone pole suddenly stands out as a work of human ingenuity brought about with a great deal of effort--but basic education, and its effect of prying open the imagination, is another. If a prerequisite for political change is having the political imagination to envision such change, it should come as no surprise that authoritarian states tend to leave education to moulder. (Although credit to the Soviet Union and Iran for investing in their people's education. I suppose that, unlike Myanmar's generals, they know--or at least care--that a country can't rise above abject poverty without an educated populace.)

Almost all of the temples are made of red brick, although remaining--or in some cases reconstructed--fragments of plaster hint at the fine stucco moulding that would have originally covered the brick. Many of them also have frescoes on the inside, but surprisingly most of the frescoes are very crude, in sharp contrast to the elegance of the structures themselves. There were a few exceptions, mostly lavish comic-book-like row-upon-row and column-upon-column depictions of Jataka stories or scenes from the Buddha's life. Unfortunately, almost all of the finest frescoed temples didn't allow photography inside (presumably so as to maximize the profits of the ubiquitous hawkers selling reproductions of the frescoes outside) so you'll just have to trust me that some of them are good. 

Bagan matches Inle Lake in tourist circus terms (so I can only imagine what Angkor Wat is like if this is low-key by comparison), and on our lunch break, we were ushered through a "traditional" village where we got to see various handicrafts being practiced with traditional methods, from weaving to peanut roasting. It all felt so contrived that I couldn't help but wonder if the prominent National League for Democracy signage was for our benefit as well. The National League for Democracy is Aung San Suu Kyi's party, and whereas you couldn't openly display your support for her five years ago without asking for a world of trouble, NLD banners are now all over the place, as are posters of "the Lady," almost always sharing the frame with her father, General Aung San, in military hat and greatcoat. Although the daughter is far more famous in the West than the father, it's thanks to her father--who led Burma to independence and was assassinated in 1947 shortly before he could become independent Burma's first leader--that Aung San Suu Kyi attracts such reverence from the people of Myanmar. And indeed, it's not just that she's his daughter--she also bears an uncanny resemblance to him, so that pictures of the two side by side really bring home the idea that Aung San Suu Kyi stands for Burmese independence. All of which is a bit awkward for the generals. Their propaganda machine had long touted Aung San as a national hero--after all, he too was a military man, conferring legitimacy on the military's claim to power--so it was uncomfortable in the extreme in 1988 when his daughter suddenly appeared to make a far more legitimate claim to his mantle in opposition to the generals. Since that time, the junta has gradually downgraded Aung San's place in the national mythology, but there's only so far you can downgrade when half the country's large public places--like the national stadium and Yangon's central market--are named after him. On the other hand, as "Yangon," and indeed "Myanmar," suggest, the generals aren't shy about renaming things. 

But I was talking about my guided tour. Our day ended where my Christmas morning began, on Shwesandaw Paya, which is one of a handful of the big temples that people are allowed to climb up on (Shwesandaw looks vaguely like a Maya temple, with steep steps on four sides leading up to a series of terraces). The sunrise gets healthy attendance, but the sunset is a zoo, with every tourist in Bagan crammed on to one of four or five temples. Alpha males jostle for space with their telephoto lenses that would give the Washington Monument a case of penis envy. But despite the occasionally irritable (and irritating) crowds, the sunset, like the sunrise, is too perfect for mere mortals to spoil. The late afternoon tumble into evening is consistently spectacular in Myanmar, but Bagan takes the cake. The sky pinkens, reddens, and then darkens, casting long shadows from the hundreds of temples across the plain, all a brooding red set against the dusty green. Sunset and sunrise in Bagan are two of the greatest shows on Earth, and, unbelievably, they happen every morning and evening. 

That evening, the four of us had a less hedonistic time of it before parting ways and staggering off to bed. The next two days--Christmas Eve and Christmas Day--I had mostly to myself. I hired a bike and took in a range of other temples, most of the big names plus a few unknown ones--not hard to find a temple that's not marked on the map when there are more than 4000 of them--that afforded some isolation. I've been impressed by the number of parents with young or youngish children with them, but I can see what a treat Bagan must be. I loved clambering about the castles on the Welsh border when I was young, and Bagan is a treasure trove of adventures waiting to be dreamed up. 

And now I'm on the night bus to Yangon. If all goes well, I'll arrive in Mawlamyine (aka Moulmein) by tomorrow afternoon and find a reliable wifi source with which to post this. The plan is to stagger off my bus in Yangon early in the morning and then find another bus for the seven-hour stretch to Mawlamyine. Call me a sucker for punishment, but time's running short and there's a lot of Myanmar I've yet to see. 

Facebook seems to get very clingy when I don't log on for a week. I'm now getting daily emails alerting me to things my friends have posted (it doesn't normally do this) with messages like "a lot has happened since you last logged on to Facebook." Damn straight a lot has happened, Facebook: I've been to Bagan.