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| The perks of a family visit - the pool at the Metropark Hotel, Causeway Bay |
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| First visit to Aberdeen |
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| Mum’s birthday dinner at Saigon Vietnamese restaurant, Stanley |
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| The iconic Ruin of St. Paul’s Church, Macau |
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| Guia Hill lighthouse |
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| The guns of Monte Fort and the Grand Lisboa Casino |
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| The Colonial District |
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| The Grand Lisboa Casino |
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| The Peak - any excuse to climb up there |
The beauty of hiking in Hong Kong as a city (and what in my opinion makes it so unique) is that in the space of a few minutes you can leave a major tourist centre and find yourself in your own little piece of isolated wilderness and this was no better proven than the hike today. Being a Tuesday morning, the only people we only saw a handful of other hikers and had soon escaped the roar of traffic from the city. For the most part the hike was easy going and while the views were not particularly spectacular, the charm of this hike was the knowledge that we were doing it essentially in the middle of one of the world’s financial capitals. It took around three hours to get from the Peak down to Aberdeen Reservoir, where there were some picnic spots and options for further hiking - we had the choice of going over to Aberdeen or clambering back up the Wan Chai gap to meet another bus coming back down from the Peak to Central station. We chose the latter as we both had other plans for the afternoon, but agreed that the brief hike had been a worthwhile half-day excursion and had shown yet another side of the city. The hike was taken from my ‘Historical Hong Kong Hikes’ book by David Pickerell - a book that I can thoroughly recommend purchasing. Photos of the hike below:
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| Aberdeen Reservoir |
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| Towards Aberdeen |
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| The Irrawaddy River overlooked by Sagaing Hill |
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| Ruins of Inwa |
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| The old teak temple |
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| The Buddhist university at Sagaing |
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| View from Sagaing Hill over the Irrawaddy bridges |
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| The flooded streets of Mandalay |
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| Dancing of a car bonnet |
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| One of the temporary water-spraying platforms |
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| Your intrepid blogger on the flooded streets of Mandalay |
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| Mount Popa |
Having finished yesterday with a sunset panorama, we decided to follow up with the sunrise. This meant getting up very early and making our way to the temples before 6am. We had no particular location in mind and (with plenty to choose from) clambered our way up the side of a temple where there were no other people around. The sunrise itself was not that spectacular admittedly but it was still a wonderfully peaceful scene to admire the temples rising above the haze in the twilight. Having risen so early we made our way back to the hotel for breakfast and then checked out for our next major journey, this time to Mandalay.
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| A early start at the temples |
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| The full team at Mout Popa |
In order to make the most of our hired vehicle, I had asked the company to factor in a few diversions along the lengths of our major journeys to allow us to see more of the country than your average visitor. This journey was to be broken up with a visit to Mt. Popa, a major religious site located within a national park of the same name. The site, a temple perched on a rocky pedestal, is one of the iconic pictures from Burma but is not necessarily easy to get to without private transport – making a visit all the more tempting for us. It took us maybe an hour and a half to drive from Bagan to the village beside the pedestal where we were greeted with a massive traffic jam that forced us to proceed on foot and expose ourselves to being sprayed with water, as the festival was in full swing. As daunting as the climb appeared to be from a distance, the staircase to the top was covered and easily climbable – even with the phalanxes of monkeys that guarded the path. The views from the top over the countryside were impressive, but the temple itself was surprisingly a bit grim – dirty, crowded and a long way from the usual serenity found in Buddhist religious sites.
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| Dinner in a lake |
After a few hours at Mt Popa we continued on our journey on the “Road to Mandalay” – a road that is entirely devoid of the romance that it has garnered from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, being for the most part flat, straight and featureless. It was perhaps another four hours from Popa to Mandalay and as we arrived the sun was just beginning to set. We entered the city through the south western suburbs, home to several lakes, one of which contained the iconic “U Bein Bridge” – the longest teak wooden bridge in the world and another of Burma’s most photographed locations. The water festival was now evident everywhere, with groups of children lining the road and covering every passing car (and motorbike) with buckets of water. At the lake we found that a range of restaurants had been set up (presumably for the festival) in the lake itself, with tables positioned in several feet of water. This was too interesting (and ridiculous) a place for us to not try it out, even if it meant breaking every rule of avoiding food poisoning… After dinner we had a look around the bridge itself, ambling all the way across and back for photos and to chat with inquisitive locals before watching the sunset and making our way into the centre of Mandalay to the Royal City Hotel where we would be staying.
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| Sunset at U Bein Bridge |
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| Bagan Temples at Sunset |
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| The Shwezigon Pagoda, |
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| Karina is the first victim of the water festival |
Having arrived the night before from Yangon to the wonderful Hotel Zfreeti, we would only really have one full day at the temples. The ruins at Bagan are the remains of what was once one of the most significant empires in South East Asia, with some of the highest standards of living on the entire continent. In the 11th to 13th century, around the time that William the Conqueror was invading England, Bagan was the capital city of an empire that stretched across almost all of modern Myanmar. Until it eventually fell to Mongol invasion, Bagan was truly one of the world’s great centres of Buddhist civilization. The religion of the region played a decisive role in its make-up, as its people believed that by building stupas, pagodas and other religious buildings would atone for any negative karma that they had accrued. Essentially, every time a wealthy person did a bad thing they could make up for it through an act of piety. The nearby town of Nyaung-U, where we were staying, just to the north of the ruins, itself contained a pagoda - this one a more modern one named the Shwezigon Pagoda which is still used by locals. It was our first taste of a Burmese religious site and it certainly didn’t disappoint - red robed monks and golden towers combined to produce an area of both peace and beauty. Outside the gates however, the water festival (about which much more will be said later) was just beginning and as we made our way back to our waiting van we were ambushed by a group of young locals armed with water pistols.
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| Ruins at Bagan |
From here, we headed south into the main area of ruins. With only one day and with there being no stand out ‘must-see’ temple, we were happy to just make our way around the vast Bagan plain, stopping wherever we saw an interesting structure or vista. We used the Lonely Planet maps to give us some structure however, dedicating the morning and early afternoon to so-called 'Old Bagan’ before moving to the 'newer’ region and the banks of the Irrawaddy around sunset. Some of the temples had been renovated (with mixed results) after a combination of earthquakes and general decay had made some of the ruins unstable - this took nothing away from just how amazing the place was however. In terms of practicalities, visitors to the temples are supposed to pay a $15 entrance fee for a ticket which lasts for five days. This is loosely enforced however, though we got caught without a ticket at our final temple and had to pay up - in our defence, even if we had been aiming to buy the tickets there was nobody visibly selling them. In the olden days, I would have done my best to avoid giving money to the government, but things are supposedly changing and it now feels like a small price to pay for the preservation of what is undoubtedly up there with the greatest monuments I have ever seen - more impressive than Angkor Wat and as good as any of the ruins of Ancient Egypt. In terms of required time, I am very aware that we did not stay long enough to fully immerse ourselves (particularly as we were travelling in the van), but gave ourselves a good overview. As a solo traveller with more time, it makes sense to travel by bike (pedal or motorised) to get around - both varieties of two-wheeled vehicle are available everywhere. We stayed around the temples until sunset (and would be getting up the next day to watch the sunrise).
This is a difficult blog to write really, as the ruins of Bagan are best explored at a reasonably leisurely pace with no particular goal in mind - so its hard for me to list a comprehensive list of things that we did. As a result, I will just let the pictures do the talking:
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| A temple on the banks of the Irrawaddy |
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| A young monk and his friend on a wall at a temple beside the Irrawaddy River |
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| Sunset over the ruins |
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| Sunset over the ruins |
I have often talked, on this blog, about destinations whose very names evoke an air of adventure and exoticism. For Brits, Burma and its major cities from Mandalay to Rangoon (Yangon) are familiar in name but in little more than that. The country has gone through much and has experienced more change in the last decade than many nations do in a century. These changes have allowed tourists and travellers to begin to enter Myanmar with greater ease than ever before and as a nation with a wealth of historical sights and a unique culture, sandwiched as it is between India and China, now seemed like a unique opportunity to visit.
Sitting in the departure lounge at Hong Kong International was a unique experience in itself, joined as I was by people ranging from orange-clad monks to western families on holiday, Chinese tour groups to businessmen from all over the world. Additionally, of course, there were a few scruffy fellow backpacker types. I arrived at Yangon International Airport in the early hours of the morning on a direct flight with Dragonair and met up with the rest of my travel companions (seven of us) at the hostel. By happy coincidence our entire ten day trip to the country would fall between the Burmese Water Festival and New Year’s celebrations – every day being a national holiday. While this was excellent in terms of seeing and experiencing something new, it also meant that travelling as such a large group would be challenging – particularly when it came to getting bus and train tickets to move around. Our solution to this was to turn our large group size to our advantage and we therefore hired a minibus with a driver who would stay with us for the duration and turned the trip more towards being a bespoke independent expedition.
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| Taukkyan Commonwealth Cemetary, Yangon |
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| The featureless road to the north |
(as a side note I will switch between Burma and Myanmar because I haven’t actually yet heard a 100% convincing argument as to which name I should be using)
