Magical Bagan

One of the main tourist attractions and of course our main reason to travel to Myanmar is the temple city of Bagan. Here, right next to the city, there is a large area with countless temples and small pagodas. We rented a small electric scooter every day for an unbeatable €3 per day and explored the surroundings. It was so much fun to ride on the small dirt roads with the scooter, stopping from time to time to enjoy a delicious coconut. Unfortunately, many of the temples were already closed for climbing and we only found three that were allowed to be climbed. Naturally, it was much more crowded there too.

The only disadvantage of the whole thing was that it was endlessly hot!! On the first day, we made the mistake of driving around during midday and got too much sun. The next days, we either left early in the morning or only in the late afternoon. The rest of the day, we spent in the air-conditioned hotel room.

A 'must-do' in Bagan is to watch the sunrise. Even though the alarm clock at 4:30 am almost didn't manage to wake us up, the expectations were too high to just lie in bed. Yes, expectations are always a tricky thing. We have seen countless pictures of stunning sunrises with temples and balloons. Unfortunately, not for us... Along with some other tourists, we waited at the temple, but the sunrise was quite unspectacular and unfortunately, not a single balloon flew. It was low season after all...

Nevertheless, we had three wonderful days in Bagan, managed to take some beautiful pictures, Jonas had the best vegetable curry ever (every evening=) and once again we learned to never set our expectations too high.