As usual, our coach
leave us again at the "central" bus station, about 6 km
from the nearest town. But this time the show taxi was even greater:
It's 4:00 am. Around
twenty taxi drivers stand in front of the door of the bus, almost
entering, they look like hungry wolves, waiting for their prey. They
only want to eat "Western" dollars! Nobody
moves from his seat, because they told us, that this bus will drop us
into downtown. The locals are also still on the bus, this means that
the bus has not reached his final destination. But the bus is not
moving. After a while the driver comes in and says: "This is the
last stop, everybody out. This is Bagan." Although no one dares
to go. The driver enter up to three times, to tell us that we should
get off. Gradually, we begin to understand
that the bus simply will not continue until all tourists leave. Only
once all the tourists have left the bus, it continues its journey
with the rest of the passengers...
To exit the bus, you
have to push yourself through the taxi drivers, every tourist
immediately receives one or two taxi drivers, who are assigned to a
distance of 5 cm from the ear, you can't
hardly walk, it is difficult to talk to
other passengers, it's even hard to talk to each other. You are under
constant pressure. US$20 is what they want, for a
taxi ride of nearly 6 km to Nyaung U, for 2 people, where we have our
accommodation. Most of the passengers accept this conditions. When we
asked for a pickup parked there, the answer we got was: "Only
for locals". Despite all adversity, we got to convince 5 other
passenger, to stay with us, and have patience until
we negotiate the price down to a
minimally decent price. After a while of hard bargaining, we got
US$14 in total, to take 7 people to each of our hotels. As a
comparison: our only taxi ride in Thailand, from downtown Chiang Mai
to the Airport, was about 30cents per kilometre, and that in
Thailand, witch is a much more developed country, and therefore,
prices should be more expensive there.
Like at the Inle Lake,
here you have to pay also a "toll". But this time it was US$20 per
person. Just five days before our arrival, the price was still US$15,
as other travellers reported to us.
Bagan is one of the
most important (if not The most important), from the site you have to
visit in Myanmar, especially due to the large number of pagodas you
can see everywhere.
Between
the 11th and the 13th century, when it was the capital of the
kingdom of Bagan, there were built more than 10000 Buddhist temples
and pagodas, from all of them, nowadays, they are still remaining
around 2200 of them.
There are several ways
to explore the 40km² of the site: by
foot, witch you can
practically exclude because of the enormous distances; renting
a bike; renting a motorcycle is not “allowed” for foreigners; but
you can hire a motorcycle with driver; a tuc-tuc with driver; car
with driver; a carriage with driver; a what-ever, but always, with
driver; a hot air balloon; etc...
There is an option, in
between renting a bicycle and all the other options (much more
expensive). It is to rent an "electric bicycle". In fact,
we would rather call it an "electric toy motorcycle", which
can carry up to two people, at a speed of 20km/h on the flat. So we
opted for this last option.
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