Bagan, Myanmar at sunset

[The_Traveler]

 

[tirediron]

Very nice Lew! On my list of places I REALLY want to visit one day.

 

[The_Traveler]

You better hurry.
In 5 years it will be another thailand.

 

[tirediron]

I'm really surprised it isn't already.

 

[The_Traveler]

I'm really surprised it isn't already.

I was there in 2010 and 2013 and the changes in the span of three years are enormous - and not always for the best.
The ban on car imports was relaxed and the number of cars probably quadrupled while the actual road infrastructure stayed much the same. Outside of a few main arteries, the main roads are potholed and broken. There isn't the industrial infrastructure, or probably the funds, to make Western style roads anywhere but Yangon and surrounds or larger cities. Roads are made, literally, by hand with crushed rock being carried and laid down by hand and someone with a sprinkler drizzling tar on the top.
Myanmar has been 'discovered' by main stream tourism and small hotels are jumping out of the ground at the three or four main stops on the tourist routes. In 2010, you could go to Inle Lake and just walk around and find a room; now, if you don't have a reservation, you are sleeping on a floor somewhere.
Yangon, Bagan, Mandalay and Nyaung Schwe get the greatest bulk of the tourists, the rest of the country still lags badly in roads and amenities (like electricity)

roadside ditch in Kalaw with water pipes. Streets are very badly lit and sidewalks are laid over smaller versions of these ditches so it is very easy to stumble in and get hurt while walking home in the dark.

 

[The_Traveler]

typical cafe in non-tourist area.
what we would see as children's plastic chairs work well for the much smaller, finely built Burmese.

 

[JustJazzie]

WOW!!! This has got to be my favorite shot I have ever seen you post. Absolutely stunning!

(Original image nominated for POTM)

 

[The_Traveler]

Thank you for that lovely compliment

Lew

 

[bc_steve]

John, get there. It is such an incredible place. Bagan and Inle Lake, while very much worth a visit, are quite touristy. But it is quite easy to get off the beaten track.

 

[The_Traveler]

John, get there. It is such an incredible place. Bagan and Inle Lake, while very much worth a visit, are quite touristy. But it is quite easy to get off the beaten track.

I had wanted to go to the southern end of Inle Lake but the water was low, the canal connecting the two halves was almost dry and no luck.
As bc_steve said, if you do go, get off the beaten track.
I like Pindaya, major caves full of Buddhas and tourist destination for Burmese.
If you are a bit more adventurous, go to Mawlamyine by bus. There is a major island across from the city that is just now opening for non-Burmese.
Then go by bus to Hpa An. That is a small city that is bustling up the Salween River where the trade is all from smuggling drugs and porn across to Thailand; this trade is supposedly controlled by a local warlord, the abbot in the local monastery, who has his own army.

Here are 3 blog posts about Myanmar.
Lew Lorton Photography | Esther, Sitting By the Road
Lew Lorton Photography | A Day on Inle Lake
Lew Lorton Photography | Pictures of Involuntary Memory

and a piece about Hpa An written by my oldest son and partly quoted with his permission:

Hpa-An, 40 kilometers up the Salween River by twice-weekly ferry from Mawlamyine, looks pretty much like any other Southeast-Asian one-water-buffalo town. Dusty ragged streets, tiny stores and restaurants, cheerful children and their watchful mothers, harassed-looking pariah dogs slinking by.

Some things, though, are subtly wrong, subtly off. The rice shop is so stuffed with bags of rice, stuffed to overflowing, that the owner and his clerk do their sums not inside where it’s cool but out on the sidewalk, with more stacks of rice-bags as a desk. The children are particularly cheerful, playing on complicated Chinese- and Thai-made plastic riding toys. My hotel cost $25 a night, twice what I had paid at Mawlamyine, and the electricity, water, and sewage systems are all far from reliable, but the room is provisioned with full-sized tubes of Close-Up and genuine Sprite instead of the local equivalents. There are more hotels in the town than there are tourists (after a day we know the name, nationality, and quarters of any white face we see) but every hotel claims to be full. What is going on here?

It took me over a day, chatting with those of the locals who speak English, to find out. Myanmar is said to be at civil war, has been since at least 1962, by far the longest-lasting war in modern history. Actually, calling it a war is something of a misnomer. It’s more like the warlord period of China before the Communist takeover. Almost every one of Myanmar’s 130 ethnic groups has its own army, and each army constitutes something like a government-without-portfolio in whatever territory it controls. The Burman people, being the majority ethnic group, have the largest and most powerful army, the State Peace and Development Council or SPDC, so it gets to be called “the” government, it issues the currency, credentials ambassadors to other country, and so on. It maintains shaky truces with several of the more powerful of the other armies, and puts some effort into combating the rest.​

continued at Inside Hpa An | Blue Apsara

 

[JoeW26]

I just love, Love, LOVE the perspective in this shot created by the foreground. Yet with all of that detail, the horizon and the sun is what grabs our eye. A very successful shot--well done!

 

[annamaria]

Really nice Lew. I like the foreground and how the road leads you.

 

[The_Traveler]

thanks all.
My wife doesn't like it.
I'll make a print anyway.

 

[DavefromCt]

Wow, fantastic shot...what a different and interesting place too!

 

[The_Traveler]

It is much easier to get good pictures at this kind of place.
Even as a non-religious person, it was impossible for me to come away from Bagan without being moved.
Except for what a guide told me, I couldn't find anything about this Buddha with Japanese features.
Supposedly it was donated about 900 years ago and has sat in that same spot since.