It’s dusk on Inle Lake, and the egrets are flying in noisy formation from the reed beds out towards the middle of the lake. The last embers of a fiery sunset are lighting up the sky in front of me as I type this on the balcony of our lakeside tourist cottage. It’s an unbelievably peaceful spot, despite the occasional rumble of a passing long-tail boat. Across the lake occasional spots of electric lights point out some of the villages and pagodas on the opposite “shore”; with the lake being so marshy and the surrounding villages being flooded, it’s hard to define where the lake starts and dry land begins.
Joanne and I arrived here from Bagan today. On the flight, we looked down on heavily flooded areas in central Burma. Torrential downpours over the past few days have caused major and minor rivers to burst their banks and flow through fields and villages and over roads. It’s the last gasp (or so we’re told) of a rainy season that we hoped might be over by now. Two days ago we tried to take a taxi to Mt. Popa, a religious site about 50 km from Bagan, and were turned back by the aftereffects of flooding, which had left vast swathes of road buried under a metre or more of soft river sand. Unlike the tour buses full of worried German tourists, our taxi made it through, only to be turned back by landslides further ahead. Today it seemed as though the road between Mandalay airport and the city was cut by floods. Here at Inle Lake, we had to take a different route from the airport to the lake to avoid heavy flooding, and we arrived at Nyaungshwe, the main tourist town at the northern end of the lake, to find a metre of water flowing down its main street. We decided to head out onto the lake just in case the flooding got any worse and inundated the whole village. We saw plenty of villagers in outlying areas drying out soaked clothing and bringing blankets and mats from their now-subaquatic houses to sleep on higher ground. It was a bit reminiscent for Joanne and I of our diving holiday in Indonesia that ended in a tsunami. Maybe we could make money by threatening to visit countries, and accepting bribes not to show up.
Our five days in Bagan were excellent. I love ruins, and Bagan is one of the big boys in the international ruins rankings. It was the capital of the first really Burmese kingdom from 1057 to 1284, during which time an absolute mania for pagoda building swept the city. Spread out over a plain about 8 km by 5 km, over 4400 pagodas of all sizes and shapes were built. If you’re counting, that’s about 20 new pagodas each and every year. The capital was situated in the “dry zone” of central Burma, and was never really good for agricultural production. When the Mongols appeared on the horizon in the mid-1280s, the last king turned tail and fled, and the trade connections which kept Bagan’s residents fed fell apart. The city was abandoned, and fell into a truly picturesque state of decay. Over the centuries the gold leaf was stripped off the pagoda spires, the bronze statues were melted down and the plaster and stucco fell off in great chunks, leaving the red brick structures standing. In 1975 a major earthquake flattened a lot of the remaining buildings and sparked a big reconstruction boom. Now some of the temples look distressingly new, while others are more pleasingly ruined. Apparently 300 new pagodas have gone up in the last 8 years as modern Burmese seek to acquire merit the way their Bagan forefathers did.
We clop-clopped around the site for 2 days in the back of a horse-cart, a relaxing way to see the major sights and to hear some of the standard lore of the temples. Bagan is famous for its sunrises and sunsets, with a horizonful of stupa spires puncturing the skyline while either backlit or set on fire by the red sun. Unfortunately, of the 6 mornings and 5 evenings we had at our disposal, precisely none provided a real sunrise of sunset, so we had to be content (and content we were) with occasional bursts of midday sun and dramatic cloud-filled skies as the backdrop to photos of the atmospheric piles of brick.
Bagan is overwhelming in its scale and in its number of ruins, but a few buildings stood out for their scale and proportions, soaring skyward like Mayan pyramids or looming like European cathedrals. As well, the fresco paintings adorning some of the walls provided variety, although most were of Buddhist images. A few showed everyday life, and were by far my favourites. Some of the temples, with their gilded giant seated Buddhas surrounded by frescoed walls, were reminiscent of Florentine Renaissance chapels, and provided Joanne with endless photo opportunities.
The area has never recovered its pre-Mongol prosperity, and most of the local villagers still graze cows amongst the ruins, or grow corn, cotton or sugar cane. With so many rich Western tourists around, though, come the inevitable effects of mass tourism: hundreds of postcard-selling boys who should be in school, hundreds of purveyors of sand paintings buzzing around on motorcycles, gantlets of kitsch-selling souvenir stands to run on the way into the temples, opportunistic begging (“one bonbon, one stylo, money’). One of our fellow teachers, a definite soft touch, went walking along the road one day and by the time he’d reached the market, he’d dispensed 8000 kyat to various folks who’d tried their luck with him. Given that the average wage here is 1000 kyat a day, you can see how begging could become a lucrative alternative to work.
We left Bagan well satisfied with the sights we’d seen and the history we’d imbibed, and with Joanne’s wonderful digital images. I now know that the time has come for me to break down and get a Nikon digital SLR camera; the quality of pictures that Joanne was able to take was tremendous, and since it costs nothing to take extra photos, you can take as many shots as necessary to get that one perfect image. You can see some of her shots at her photo page:
jsandrin.spaces.live.com
posted by xuanzang @ 7:25 AM
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