Day 17, Tanderbo and Bagan: Contrasts.

(Posted by Andrew about the events of Dec 28; from Yanderbo to Bagan, Myanmar)

The irony of our visit to Myanmar is that we chose it to see the country before it gets too opened up to the world and ruined by tourists, and yet in doing that we are contributing to that exact ruination. As our guide Khun often laments when we see something authentic: “In five or ten years, they will only do this fake, for the tourists.” Today was a study in contrasts where we saw both ends of this spectrum.

In the morning we visited the riverside village of Yanderbo where the entire village is involved in the manufacture of clay pots. They don't see many tourists (our cruise normally doesn't stop here; it has a different itinerary for this special Christmas to New Year's outing) so were not attempting to sell anything and mostly just went about producing more pots using their traditional methods.

The afternoon could not have been more different as we arrived in the city of Bagan. With its 3500+ pagodas, this city is the country's largest tourist attraction and each attraction is clogged with tourists (mostly young backpackers) and locals selling souvenirs (who have clearly been taking some lessons in aggressive sales techniques from their Indian brethren). A few more temples and pagodas later and we arrived at the lacquered wood store of the smartest businessman in all of Bagan: he has clean, western toilets and free wifi, so every single tour bus stops there and has a look through his shop. (This is where I managed to make this check-in on Facebook.)

The thing to do in Bagan is to watch the sunset over the thousands of pagodas. To get a view, they allow people to climb up onto only three of the larger pagodas. We got to ours just fifteen minutes before sunset and found it almost ready to collapse under the weight of tourists sitting on it.

We managed to find a spot about half way up. The sunset was worth it, though.