Two years ago, Alexa and I watched our first episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, our favorite travel show. He visited Myanmar at the beginning of its opening to tourism in 2013 after decades of isolation. The entire episode was interesting, but one bucket list location truly awed us: Bagan. Bagan was the capital of the Pagan Kingdom between the 9th to 13th centuries. To earn great merit, the kings built over 10,000 Buddhist temples, pagodas, and monasteries between the 11th and 13th centuries, about 2,200 of which still stand today. Brick structures remain, while the wooden sites disintegrated over the centuries. Bagan has not yet attained UNESCO World Heritage status because of disputed rebuilding practices by the military government following an earthquake in the 1990s. A serious earthquake in 2016 destroyed much of that renovation work, so Myanmar reapplied for the designation last year, although controversy over temple preservation and local overdevelopment persists. We first visited Shwezigon Pagoda, built roughly 1000 years ago, but still gleaming from gold leaf and the vibrancy of worshipful crowds. Most of the tourists we saw were domestic, as Bagan is one of Asia’s most important pilgrimage sites. We visited most of the major temples throughout our first day. We ended with a breathtaking sunset on top of a temple next to Dhammayazika Pagoda. The sun dipped below the mountains just beyond the Irrawaddy River. The next day, we stopped at some of the countless groups of smaller stupas, which we had to ourselves. Bagan is so vast that only the large, famous temples have crowds, and much of it is completely open to explore.
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September 2018
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