Bagan 31/5/16 - 1/6/16

Arrived 3 hours after what was originally planned (and US$25 more each) but still managed to check in at a reasonable timing, booked our next bus, settled down, and went out for dinner. Retired for the night early thinking we're gonna wake up for sunrise. Insomnia meant I only manage to sleep after 1pm, but somehow managed to wake up at 4am. Didn't hear any rain so went out to check; used the toilet and I came out to a thunderstorm! So no more sunrise and the other two slept in, and me... Insomnia once again. Didn't sleep for the rest of the night until the other two woke up at 7am, we then had breakfast, check out, and left for our temple visits. 

Orange, Red and Blue ranger, roll out! 

First part of the self-guided tour was rather nice, even met a nice local in charge of one of the temples, Soe Naing, who brought us up to the roof of the temple. Bought a painting from him and then we left for lunch. 

First temple just round the corner from our guesthouse has this huge golden dome; every year there's a ceremony for devotees to apply gold paper onto the dome. It's sort of under construction now though (so what you see is straw) 

These random brick style temples are everywhere! 

And this LOL also common everywhere HAHAHA

Nice even from the inside

And that's our "guide" who owns this temple (or so he says). But cool that he invited us up to the roof and pointed out some of the prominent temples in the region and also gave us a briefing on the history 

Met fellow NUS recent graduate Songlin and Chengling from environmental studies, the latter was on a conference tour and stayed in Yangon for the past two weeks! So we traveled around and just so happen we left our map at the lunch place so we just followed them to a few more pagodas, two of which we climbed up, the latter of the two offered such a stunning view we stayed on for quite a whole despite the heat. 

This one we went past

and this one we climbed

For this view

And this "Lion King" feeling

And this is us less Songlin. Somehow there were more to see but less photos were taken; guess we were all too excited by the vast horizon of spiritual structures (or perhaps just templed out) 

I must say Bagan did not disappoint even though Pung got pretty templed out (just way too many temples here) mid-day. I stand with my point that the city is amazing when we have an overview, and no individual pagoda can wrestle the impressive macro view it offers; for this, perhaps some day I'll return just for the hot air balloon view during the peak season! 

Sugar cane and 100plus was our reinforcement (salvation, really) and then we bid goodbye soon after. Washed up and we're ready to leave for our final city...

Bus was less impressive than the previous JJ Express though