MY FAVORITE BAGAN TEMPLE - Where the wind takes me! 

Hi, i just arrived in Bagan from Mandalay. I am on a trip across Myanmar and I am slowly going back to my original starting point, Yangon. This country is incredibly beautiful and I find the culture really interesting. Are you planning to visit inle lake? In my opinion it is a must when it comes to visiting Myanmar.

Right now, I am in Kuala Lumpur. I had to leave when my visa expired. But I am considering coming back to Myanmar because I want to go to Inle Lake and a couple of other places. Have you already been to Inle Lake or are you going to stop there on your way to Yangon? How is Bagan so far? Any e-bike adventures? 🙂

@@PlanetDoug I have already been to Inle Lake, it's completely worth the 10 hour drive from Yangon. My itinerary is: Yangon, Inle Lake, Mandalay, Bagan (current location), Naypiytaw, Golden Rock and back to Yangon. Bagan is up there with Inle Lake in the sense that it is a stunning place. I am planning to go see the sunrise on an e-bike, should be fun!

It makes me very happy to hear that. The dream is to make shorter, more manageable videos, and I might achieve that dream in the future, but we'll see how it goes. My instinct seems to be for these longer videos - like video diaries of my entire day. Hopefully, the coffee and cheesecake got you through it. 🙂 I just watched your video about the breakfast buffet at Le Meredien in Putrajaya. Amazing! I thought the breakfasts at the hotels in Myanmar were wonderful, but that spread puts them to shame. I wish I could wake up every morning and have that kind of food waiting for me. I'd probably feel a lot better too because I have the tendency to be lazy when it comes to food and often not have any breakfast at all. It's a bad habit I can't seem to break.

@@PlanetDoug Thanks Doug for doing what you do. I sincerely do enjoy your videos very much as you provide an insight from your perspective which I appreciate. My channel is more focused on premise or specific attractions hence I tend to make them short and sweet. That being said, I understand where you are coming from in regards to the daily dairy format which is cool and fit your personality in my opinion so keep em coming :) Last but not least, thanks for stopping by my channel.. truly humbled.

@@PlanetDoug btw if you are ever in K.Lumpur again in the future and don't mind some company over a drink, do look me up mate - wandereats.tube [at] gmail.com

That is something that I thought about quite a bit - the motivation to build so many pagodas and temples. As I read, at its height, the area around Bagan held more than 10,000 religious structures. Yesterday, I was watching a documentary on RU-vid about the train that goes from Mandalay to Lashio in the mountainous Shan State. In the documentary, they follow the lives of several people riding on the train, including a Buddhist monk returning to his temple in a small village. They explain that the villagers pay for the upkeep of the temple and support the monks because they believe this gives them merit in this life, and in the next life they will return at a higher level. And that's the basic idea that I came across when I tried to understand the motivation behind building so many pagodas and supporting so many Buddhist monks. As for the Indiana Jones mood, I think I was lucky in my timing. I didn't realize it at the time, but it really was the super-low season, and there was almost no one there. I often felt completely alone as I rode my e-bike along the small trails between pagodas. It was quite romantic, especially with the dark clouds overhead and the strong wind blowing. I think people avoid this time of year because of worries about the weather. No one wants their vacation ruined by bad weather. But the weather I encountered was perfect. In the busy high season, the mood might not be quite so dramatic.

@@PlanetDoug I love your vlog. It is so much more than good videography. As a viewer, we get to understand the place more. Bagan's history is full of bloody murders; sons killing fathers/siblings killing each other. Maybe building temples would be one of the ways to atone for their sins. I need to brush up more on Bagan history. In High school, we have to learn about two stone-manuscripts about one self-centered queen and one humble concubine and their donation. In the manuscripts, their ambition for donation was to attain nirvana or to get the chance to homage the next Buddha. I can only imagine what it would have been like back in the day.

@@PlanetDoug that too much structures in one area next taught i felt it was a populated area Or the king was competitive than the others

You're welcome. I was actually pretty disappointed that I couldn't climb up on the pagodas. I can understand why they would stop people from doing it, especially as they were pushing their case at UNESCO for Bagan to become a World Heritage Site. They have to set up rules to protect the temples. But it was still disappointing. That area was remarkably flat, and without being able to go up any levels at all, it was hard to see anything except what was right in front of you. The e-bikes were definitely a nice addition. Riding the e-bike was by far my favorite thing about visiting Bagan. I suppose I could have done just fine renting a normal bicycle, but it would have meant a lot of work, especially on those really windy days. The e-bike kind of opened up the whole area and I got to just drive around and see a lot more than perhaps I would have seen on a bicycle. Was there anything else that seemed different in my videos compared to your experience in 2008?

Thank you. I'm so glad you subscribed. You must be excited about your tour. I was traveling on my own, and even so, I found the service levels in Myanmar to be exceptional. People working at the various hotels and in the tourism industry were so friendly and helpful. So on your customised tour, I imagine you will have a wonderful time. I don't know how things were in the past, but this feels like the perfect time to visit Myanmar. The country doesn't seem to be overwhelmed with tourism yet, so going there feels special and exciting. But there is just enough in the way of nice hotels and ticket services and other services (like the e-bikes in Bagan) to make it comfortable for foreign visitors. It's the perfect combination of being exotic and fascinating and yet not too difficult. I'm sure you'll have a great time. I'm curious. On your trip, how will you be traveling between those places? How much time do you have? In Mandalay, I quite enjoyed the half-day boat trip up to Mingun. I haven't posted the video of that trip yet, but you'll be able to see what it is like. I went by the public boat from the jetty, though there seem to be private boats for tour groups, too. Whichever you take, I think it would be a lot of fun. Just getting onto the boat is a small adventure.

Hi Douglas, thank you for your reply. Yes, we're (4 of us) really looking forward to this Myanmar trip and what you're sharing so far has been invaluable for us. Myanmar is one of the most underrated destination in Asia right now. It has an immensely rich and exotic cultural heritage and I think the people are really beautiful from inside out. It makes good sense that we should take it all in when it's still at it's untouched form before tourism plays its hand on this country and takes it to another level. Our tour will only be for 8 days and we'll be covering Yangon, Mandalay and Bagan. Our travel agent will provide us with a 6-seater air-conditioned car/combi with driver and an English-speaking guide at each station. They will take us wherever we want to go since it's a customised tour and allows flexibility of their programme. Day excursions to Amarapura, Sagaing, Inwa and Mingun are some of our planned must-do visits. We are actually driving to Mingun as our eldest tour mate, 65-years-old, has knee joint issues and she's not keen to take any boat rides. We're also taking domestic flights throughout the 3 locations because my tour mates do not fancy staying put in a train or bus for long hours. I actually envy you for your adventurous and gung-ho spirit to go out and try new things on your own. You can do a lot more stuff when travelling solo...own time own target! I look forward to your updates on the rest of your travels. I enjoy listening to you and your ramblings as well while you're on your move because it feels like I'm travelling with you. :)

Welcome to Myanmar.

Aung SweOo Thank you 😊

Thank you very much. 🙂

You're welcome. 🙂 I feel bad, to be honest, that I dropped the ball while I was in Myanmar. I didn't do as much or record as many experiences on video as I should have. That's partially because I got really sick and the conditions at the beginning of my trip were really harsh: There was the incredible heat wave, power blackouts all the time, plus my computer was falling apart and Internet access was unreliable. But then things got better in general, and right now I'm back in Kuala Lumpur, and have a lot more time (and better access to the Internet) and better conditions overall. So I'm able to upload to RU-vid more regularly. I might even buy a new computer while I'm in Kuala Lumpur, and that should help a lot. I'm glad you're enjoying the videos I've managed to upload so far.

I'm glad you enjoyed my videos. I can't believe you watched all of them. That's awesome. 🙂👍 Visiting Shan State is a great idea. Right now I'm in Kuala Lumpur, because my Myanmar visa expired and I had to fly out. However, I'm thinking about returning to Myanmar just so I can go to other places in the country that I missed - such as Shan State. I enjoyed my train ride to Bagan so much that now I'm interested in taking that train from Mandalay up into the mountains of Shan State. The more I think about it, the more it seems like a good idea. Yeah, the joys of a Hero 7 Black. It's a great little camera, and I'm glad I bought it. I considered the Sony FDR X3000 (because it has a built-in tripod mount and a built-in audio jack), but it just seemed too expensive for how old it is. I went with the GoPro instead, and I'm glad I did. I particularly like having the screen for playing back video etc. The Sony has no screen at all for video playback. But, as you pointed out, the Hero 7 does crash and freeze up a lot. At least mine does. That can get annoying after a while. That's why I was pondering how professional shows can rely on GoPros. I'm pretty sure that TV shows like Deadliest Catch and Top Gear use a lot of GoPro cameras. But I have no idea how they can rely them to capture the footage they need when there is the risk of them freezing up all the time.

@@PlanetDoug When you are back in Myanamar, one thing I highly recommend that you do is - attending an "ah-lu". The word technically means "donation", but you can loosely translate it into "good deed". Burmese families host "ah-lu" all the time with or without a good reason. When they host an ah-lu, it is either at their house or at a monastery. Generally, everybody in the village is invited. The more people attend, the happier the host family is. The biggest part of an ah-lu is the lunch. The lunch usually is a three to seven-course meal. Monks will eat first, then guests and family gather in the dining room and enjoy the lunch. There is zero expectation. The guests need not do anything but to attend and enjoy the meal. The whole intention is "good deed". Therefore, the host family only means to do a good deed and expect to receive good karma or merit according to their Buddhist beliefs. Attending an ah-lu would be the best cultural immersion. There is no better way to understand the Buddhist Burmese. Just find an ah-lu. No need to be invited. As a matter of fact, famous monasteries have ah-lu practically everyday. A foreigner showing up their ah-lu is considered good luck, and the host family will be honored. If you like, you could participate in helping in the kitchen, or tending the tables with their permission. My personal experience was - I attended an ah-lu, took pictures, and gave them the pictures on a USB drive. The family was very appreciative. If you have trouble finding ah-lu events, the best way is to ask the locals for and locate famous monasteries in the area first. Then, show up around 10am. If there is no ah-lu that day, check their board. Most monasteries maintain a board which displays a calendar of events. I hope you would find an ah-lu, and experience one. Feel free to ask me if you have any questions.

Thanks for the advice. I'm currently planning a return trip to Myanmar, and Inle Lake is a place I want to visit for sure.

Bagan would be a wonderful place for you to visit. There are so many historical temples for the "History place BD" channel to feature in your videos. 👍

@@PlanetDoug lot of thanks sir

It was a funny kind of angle with the GoPro facing me. You can't see the e-bike at all, so I just have my arms sticking forward like I'm flying through the air. I kind of enjoyed doing that, though, at least for a little while. Maybe I need two or three GoPros and I can stick them all over the place and film different perspectives at the same time and edit them all together. 😃 Become a real professional operation. I never did ask anyone about which pagodas can still be climbed. I probably should have talked to a local travel agent or guide and got more information, but I guess I wasn't in the mood. I just wandered around on my own and stumbled across places to explore. And none of them seemed climbable.

Believe me you are already a pro with Go Pro. Like you said, might be even better with two or three cameras working at the same time. Looking forward to the next level of shooting when you have additional Go Pro.

You're welcome. I'm glad you like the longer format of these videos. I guess my instinct is to make longer videos because it is kind of a video diary of my day, and that just becomes longer naturally. I think the general rule is that a RU-vid video should be 10 to 15 minutes long at most. But I keep going waaaaay longer than that.

The weather was perfect - as long as you didn't want to go up in a hot air balloon. It was far too windy to go up in a balloon. But for driving around on an e-bike to visit the pagodas and temples, it was very nice - cool and dry.

To be honest, I'm not sure of exactly why I have the urge to stay on the outskirts of these temples first and wander around them before going in. I think it has something to do with mood. To go directly to the front entrance first and be among the other visitors and sellers of trinkets kind of interferes with the experience a bit. So I like to go a bit slowly and walk around the outside and try to appreciate what I'm seeing before I go inside. The wind and the wild skies certainly helped create the right mood for my visit to Bagan. 🙂 I haven't been to the Ellora Caves in India. From pictures I see online, it looks extraordinary. I think you were quite lucky to see that place in the 70s.

@@PlanetDoug It was while watching you wandering about alone in the wilderness of the first temple that I suddenly saw myself wandering Ellora, the only soul in the landscape among the various caves , temples and avilage house with a well... as written in my debut book, 'The Cal of Love' 2nd edition available @amazon.com

The price was the same for all the e-bikes I rented regardless of the condition they were in or which company I got them from: 6,000 kyats for the day (about $4 US). So there were no discounts or anything like that. I thought that was a reasonable rate, especially since they said I could bring the e-bike back as late as 8 or 8:30 at night. I guess a lot of people like to keep the e-bikes until they see the sunset and then bring them back. I never did that, so I returned the e-bikes in the early afternoon. I didn't even need them for the full day.

It's to protect an irreplaceable ancient temple from people trampling all over their sacred places ; unless the sites are strong for walking on.

You're welcome. I'm glad you enjoyed the video - brief clips of the toilets and all. 😃 I felt a particular pang at not being able to climb up any of the pagodas because I always like to get up high and get a perspective on any area. Perhaps I am part Billy Goat. It was torture to visit all those amazing temples and have those stairs right in front of me and not be able to go up them. But, as Anne Teoh pointed out in her comment, it's an understandable rule meant to protect the pagodas and temples from wear and tear and damage. I can only imagine how many people visit in the high season, and they'd end up with tens of thousands of people every year climbing up and down and up and down. I guess they can't risk that kind of exposure for these sensitive places. Being able to photograph the sunrise and sunset at Bagan is a huge draw for tourists in general, so I wonder if in the future they will be able to come up with some kind of compromise that allows people to climb up certain pagodas and maybe they can reinforce the steps or protect them in some way. Now that Bagan is a World Heritage Site, perhaps that will be even more difficult now, though, as they have to meet certain standards for preserving the area. I'd love to meet up if that is a possibility while you are in Malaysia. I'm currently in Kuala Lumpur, as you probably have been able to figure out, and I'm pretty sure I will be here over the next couple of weeks at least. So our paths will almost certainly cross. Let's stay in touch and hopefully work something out.

I'm sorry to hear about your experience at Angkor Watt. My sense is that Myanmar is a very safe place to travel. I haven't heard any stories of muggings or thefts or anything like that. I certainly felt perfectly safe in Bagan. It's true the area was quite empty during this low season period. At many (or most) of the smaller pagodas that I visited, I was the only person there. I didn't mind that, and I never felt at risk. Then again, I'm kind of used to just wandering around on my own, just like you. For some people, it might be more comfortable to go out exploring with a friend or partner just to be safe. Good to hear that your visa application process is going smoothly. I had to get a second visa for Myanmar on my trip, and that time I applied for an e-visa. It was the first time in my life getting an e-visa for any country. I usually like to just go to the embassy and apply in person (old school). But getting the e-visa for Myanmar was easy and fast. I'm starting to like the idea of e-visas now.

@@PlanetDoug Oh yeah, me too am old school, and i really don't mind going to the visa office twice to get it done. In fact a friend offered to do it for me online but I declined preferring the 'across the counter' way (a 70 year still stuck in the time zone). And I remembered that you did a video on your visa application there too.......and got a free drink in the process from a cafe on your way out from the vicinity, I am not that fortunate Doug! I presume you are already on board the boat to Mandalay by now and am waiting for your video. Travel safe and blessings.

It was fun to put the GoPro on the e-bike. When I first started thinking about buying a GoPro, it was with the idea of mounting it on the handlebars of my usual pedal bicycle. So I was glad to see how well it worked out on the e-bike. When I was cycling in Sumatra, I tried to mount a regular point-and-shoot camera on my handlebars. I also tried to mount a smartphone. Neither of those worked out very well. It was disastrous, actually. But the GoPro works perfectly for that kind of thing. I guess being an action-cam, it was kind of designed to do stuff like that.

No, I haven't been to Inle Lake yet. It is on my list of places to visit, though. Do you have any ideas of what I should do at Inle Lake or special sights I should see? I'm reading about it online, but I don't know much about it yet.

@@PlanetDoug My favourite activity at Inle Lake is the early morning boat ride. Boat leave the town about the sunrise time to the villages in the lake. You can feed the seagulls as you go. The scenery is very pleasant, and it is a very wonderful experience. There are also traditional handcraft workshops which you might be interested. There is a workshop which use silk extract from lotus to make cloths. As the name is so excotic, Lotus silk clothes are also expensive. Local cuisine is very unique as well.

Thanks!

I heard something about there being hills or earth mounds that you could climb for sunrise or sunset. But I never saw them anywhere. I just saw flat earth in all directions. 🙂 Maybe if I did some research, I could have found out about them, but I never did. I just thought that I'd see them since I drove over the whole area. But I never saw anything like that.

That's good to hear. Other than the GoPro freezing up a bit more than I'd like, I'm very happy with it. It's so easy to use, and, as you pointed out, the video quality is quite good. In fact, I'm not even shooting 4K video on it. My computer isn't powerful enough to process 4K video, so I've had the GoPro on 1080p the whole time. It would probably look even better if I used the 4K setting. 🙂

That sounds about right. It was certainly far too windy while I was there for hot air balloons to fly. And there probably aren't enough customers in the low season anyway. They couldn't make enough money to operate.

I noticed the unusual shape at the time, and I wondered about that a little bit. At first, I thought maybe they were flat stones. You're right that flat bricks with those dimensions are unusual. I don't know if I've ever seen bricks like that before.

He had a good sales technique. For one thing, he took me all around the inside of the temple and gave me a tour. I didn't understand anything he said, but he did spend time with me. So when he showed me his paintings, I couldn't just walk away. It would have felt rude. And he had all his paintings rolled up in different tubes. And he kept unrolling more and more paintings on the ground. Every time I tried to leave, he unrolled more paintings. So I felt guilty that he was working so hard and unpacking so many paintings, so I felt almost obligated to buy a painting by that point. But I really didn't need or want a painting. I have no walls to put it on. 🙂 So I finally managed to leave without buying one. I don't really know what the thorn plants were called. I looked up shameplants on the Internet, and they don't look like the plants that I saw. But, to be honest, most of the plants around these pagodas seemed to have thorns on them - long ones, short ones. My feet got all scratched up and punctured even when I was riding my e-bike along the trails and the plants scraped against my feet. I started to be really careful where I put my feet, especially when I took my sandals off. I noticed the grass there as well. They clearly made a special effort at that pagoda to plant a grass lawn and keep it nice. I'm not sure why, but I think it is because that particular pagoda was very famous for sunrise and sunset. So many people visited it, and they made it look nice. But now you can't climb up the pagoda anymore, but they kept the nice grass. Everywhere else it was more like a desert - no green grass like that anywhere. I'm having more success with video for a bunch of reasons, but it's mainly because I have more time and more reliable power and Internet. It takes many hours to upload a video, and I have to keep my computer on all night long. But in Myanmar, the power would go out in the middle of the night and the Internet would disappear, and so when I woke up in the morning, the upload would be cancelled and I'd have to start all over again. But here in Kuala Lumpur, it's more reliable, and I can just let my computer run all day and all night and eventually the video uploads. It still takes a long time, but it eventually is successful. In Myanmar, for some reason, all the uploads would fail. I stopped trying after a while because it never worked. Maybe I just had bad luck, too. I'm nervous about upgrading the firmware on my GoPro. I'm worried that if I do it, the GoPro will malfunction just like the first ones I had. My GoPro is buggy, but at least it works. I'm afraid that if I upgrade the firmware, it will stop working completely. I had such bad experiences doing that before. But maybe I can get expert help from the shop. I'll have to think about what to do and get some pro advice.

I'm sure you will have the chance to go there someday. I hope you do. 👍🙂

That's another place that I didn't visit. If I'd planned better, I could have gone, but I just didn't leave myself enough time. I saw it from the train, though. The train passed close to it, and I saw it, though I didn't know what it was at the time.

I didn't even think about that as I was walking around the outsides of the pagodas and temples. Maybe open sandals aren't such a great idea. Thorns AND snakes. 🙂