Bryan's Travels: Myanmar part 1

Looking at my last post, it's been way too long. I planned, and started writing a post about our move to the Philippines, but that will have to wait.

Early November we, Cindy and I, went to Myanmar with Eyes on Asia. It was a great trip for the two of us because it was designed for photographers, so no-one got upset if you moved a little slowly to take some pictures. There were eight of us all in all, just a nice size. Two from the Maldives, one from Singapore, one from Switzerland living in Singapore, one from Germany living in Singapore, one from Australia, and the two of us. Cindy and I flew a day early to Singapore, and then left early the next morning to join the group. Two of the others were on the plane as well. The rest were already waiting in Yangon.

So after a lunch at Sharkeys, highly recommended, we set off for two pagodas.

The first I don't remember the name, I should have written it down. It was a bit more relaxed than the big one , and there were interesting activities going on around it. One room had about 8 weavers working, and people spinning as well.

The second pagoda we went to was Shwedagon, the main pagoda in Yangon. We stayed there for a couple of hours, and took pictures in the late afternoon and early evening light.

We only stayed in Yangon one night, as we were headed to Bagan (or) the next morning for 3 days of photography amidst over two thousand temples. We spent the night at the Savoy hotel, which was a nice, older, more of a 'boutique hotel'.

It seemed to be our fate to get up early many times during this trip, this was the 2nd of 3 mornings in a row we had to get up at 5:15. We caught an early flight to Bagan. I found it interesting that we had to show our passports when going from one city to another within the country, not as identification to get on the plane, but to internal immigration control officers. I will admit that I had been a bit apprehensive about going to this country, but all in all, this was the only thing we saw which was in any way indicative of the political situation in the country.

In Bagan, we of course visited many temples, taking horse carts, and busses around to get to them.

The horse carts were nicer in a way because we were able to go on roads the busses couldn't and we went at a slower pace and could stop and get off when we wanted to.

We were two persons to a cart, and at a couple of times we ran into a whole lot of other carts. Tourism is increasing. We went early mornings two days, one on a balloon ride, and the other to see the monks going around town.
Here are a few photos from our balloon trip.

Getting the balloons full of hot air and ready to go. The basket could hold 12 plus the captain.

Taking off in the pre-dawn light.

View of another balloon after sunrise, about 3/4ths of the way into our one hour ride. I was surprised at how warm I was in the basket, but then since that flame was only a few feet above us when it was on, we would get warm.

Another view of one of the balloons, and many of the temples in the distance. As I mentioned already, there are over 2000 of them. There certainly isn't time to see them all. Some are in very good shape, others damaged by earthquakes, weather etc.
Many of them are over 2000 years old as well.

I'm not necessarily keeping our days in order. We visited the Shwezigon pagoda in Bagan, where I caught this group of musicians as they strode around the temple.

We took pictures of temples at sunset (here you see Muha, the master of Silhouettes).

And this was our guide. He was very helpful as he knew a lot about the history and culture of the place, as well as having been a photographer himself, he understood what we wanted and where the light would be good etc.

He just didn't like to be in the photos.

One day we went to see the young monks go around town, I felt a bit like one of the paparazzi, but it was fun none the less. Cindy managed to lose us as we had to move fast to keep up with the monks, but fortunately she found us again not too much later.

There are many more photos on my flickr

We also visited a 100 year old photo studio, and since lacquer-ware comes from this area, also a factory.

I'd love to go back and visit the wonderful people again. Everyone was very warm, friendly, and open-hearted. This must be the result of the Buddhist influence on the people.