Category Archives: Myanmar Travel Blog

Lie in.  🙂 Until 5.35. 🙁

After breakfast we go to Bagan airport and got the flight to Mandalay, which took 25 minutes ground to ground, followed by a bus drive of well over an hour through the city to the hotel.

Late morning consists of a trip to the Maha Muni Temple in central Mandalay. This is a splendid golden construction, but I am reminded of Noel Coward’s famous song about Mad Dogs and Englishmen when I nearly burn my feet walking around the outer courtyards. The central area under the pagoda is an open grid of columns and arches, with highly polished tile floors which generate great light and reflections.

The Maha Muni is a busy place, with constant comings and goings by pilgrims, monks, nuns and lots of local visitors as well as tourists. Playing "catch a monk", trying to photograph a monk well-positioned against the background is entertaining and quite challenging. One of the primary activities is for young novice monks and nuns undergoing initiation – most Burmese children spend at least a few weeks in training as a standard part of education. I get a great shot of a tiny princess preparing for her initiation, and a rather fetching smile from a pretty older novice who passes us in her group.

Lunch is pizza in the back of the Mercedes showroom next to the hotel. Unexpected. Delicious.

In the afternoon we head for the U Bein bridge, the longest teak bridge in the world. Unfortunately we hit bad traffic. Mandalay is a busy city of around 1.5M people, most of whom seem to be simultaneously on motorbikes, and the traffic does seem to be subject to random delays, especially around the frequent and poorly managed roadworks. It doesn’t help that the good hotels are near the old Royal palace to the east of the centre, but the airport and most attractions are to the west.

The bridge provides another "good game" (shades of Bruce Forsyth) – attempting to catch a couple of locals, ideally monks, perfectly positioned between the bridge uprights without any other people in shot, while working from a rowing boat at extreme zoom range in the middle of the lake. I prove to be quite good, not sure why.

Fingers crossed for a decent nights sleep tonight.

Sunday. We started the day very early (again!), with a pre-dawn shoot at one of the temples, which ended with watching the balloons take off in the rising sun.

After breakfast we went into Bagan’s main market town (Nyaung U as Bagan city is in the middle of the archaeological zone and very restricted in development) for some market photography and what would be described as "retail therapy" if there was any element of choice or relaxation in it, which there wasn’t. I got a few items with a bit of an elephant theme for fun.

I would describe Nyaung U as “cheerfully manic” – a lot going on, but not as frantic as a larger Asian city like Kathmandu, for example. In sharp contrast to Yangon the main mode of transport seems to be the motorcycle. The number of attractive women riding around without helmets with their waist-length hair almost in the oily bits is quite large, but they seem to be sufficiently practiced to avoid the obvious problems.

It’s not easy to capture "cheerfully manic" in a photo. I’m not sure whether the above does the trick.

After lunch I got another hour in the sun, which was almost but not quite without incident. You would think that the accumulated engineering skill of the human race would allow repeatable design of items such as the sun lounger, but apparently not. The Burmese design looks superficially similar to the western one, so much so that you could be forgiven for assuming that moving the back support beyond its final notch would just lay the bed flat. Unfortunately this is not the case – in the Burmese design this action disconnects the bed from the back "feet", turning the lounger into a see-saw with its centre of gravity (net of an adult human) outside its base. I watched with a combination of amusement and horror as the elderly gentleman beside me attempted said adjustment, and was then gently deposited head-first onto the pool deck. Fortunately no harm was done, but honestly. Gravity 1, human mechanical sympathy 0.

After that we had another hour scheduled for photographing dimly-lit temple interiors, but I declared UDI and went off to photograph the exteriors in late afternoon light. We finished up an another temple where you could get onto the roof to watch the sunset, a bit of a heaving mass of humanity but we got a few decent shots regardless.

We have another early start tomorrow (although not quite as bad as the last couple of days) and fly to Mandalay.

There’s a pattern starting to emerge for this trip: late meals, short sleeps, and then amazing visual experiences which make it all worthwhile. After a somewhat slow dinner last night and a very early alarm this morning I woke with a bit of trepidation, but I shouldn’t have worried. This was going to be a hard day to top.

The reason for this morning’s early start was a balloon flight over Bagan. This is an area of a few tens of square miles with roughly 4,000 ancient temples and pagodas, many of which date back to the 11th Century AD, although some are later. Most are in very good repair, although some have been clumsily restored in recent years, and ironically it was those which were badly damaged in an earthquake last year – the older unrestored ones weathered the ‘quake without problems. The balloon flight drifts gently over the area, allowing you a unique bird’s eye view of the temples and the landscape, juxtaposed with the other balloons in the air at the same time.

This was my fourth balloon flight, and quite possibly the best yet, even given that the last one was a mass ascent at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta in 2012, itself a magical experience for different reasons. Our flight today lasted over an hour, and included both high vantage points, but also drifting over the fields at a height where we could have picked some of the produce. The air was a bit hazy at first, but as the sun came up the contrast improved and I think I have some magical shots.

We had two breakfasts: a glass of champagne at the landing site, then back to the hotel for some more traditional fayre. After that we were out again, to visit one of the temples. I had misunderstood the instructions, and didn’t take my tripod, which was a bit of a challenge given that we were photographing inside by available light… However necessity is the mother of invention and I got some unique shots using the altar and my camera bag as a base, using the camera’s timer to fire the shutter without any shake. I’m very pleased with the results.

After lunch we had a couple of hours to ourselves. I spent mine by the pool, drinking what has to be one of the best pina coladas I have drunk in recent years. In the Caribbean they have taking to making such drinks with a pre-made mix which doesn’t taste of much. In Bagan they had clearly liquidised some real pineapple chunks, and the results where excellent.

4pm rolled through, and we set off to a "mystery event". Our Burmese guide, Shine, had rounded up some local villagers to act as models: "local people doing local things" as Steve Pemberton might describe it. I’m not quite sure the young lad who was playing the novice monk quite understood things, but the old ladies realised quite rapidly that they could earn money just sitting in the sun smoking cheroots, balancing baskets on their heads and so on, as long as they didn’t collapse into hysterics. Shine oversaw the whole thing, directing the action through a megaphone like a budding Steven Spielberg, and a great time was had on both sides.

The penultimate stop was the top of a temple facing into the sunset, and we got some great shots of the local architecture bathed in end of day light. Then it was on to our dinner appointment, which included a cabaret. After the dimly-lit fiasco of "Bhutan Culture Night", I had relatively low expectations, but it was brilliant. The dance moves and costumes were fairly traditional, but the well-lit stage and fairly modern "fusion" music certainly weren’t, and the better for it. I have some great shots and video. The pretty ladies and handsome young men performing traditional routines were fine, but I’m afraid the evening’s prize has to go to the elephant dance, performed by a couple of blokes (probably) in a pantomime elephant costume, to what can best be described as "hip hop". Hilarious, and almost worth the price of the trip on its own.

The only problem with today is that I don’t know how Clive, Phil and Shine can top it…

Just in case there’s any risk of our body clocks getting back in line, we have a 5am start to return to Swedagon Pagoda before sunrise. This is essentially a reverse of last night, with the buildings initially under artificial light and then in the morning "golden hour", but with the significant benefit that it’s very quiet, with only locals and dedicated pilgrims and photographers, until well after 8.

I realise that I’m tending to take a lot of the same shots as last night, and force myself to just sit on some steps with the 100-300mm lens mounted, and train my eyes again to look for details rather than the "big picture". However, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t "see" in the traditional 70-200mm range. I’m happy trying to capture big vistas with wide-angle lenses, up to the short telephoto range, and then looking for details at what most people would regard as extreme telephoto, but I take relatively few shots in the middle. That’s something I need to work on.

After breakfast we have a couple of hours to ourselves, which I spend on sorting out emails and getting the blog running, then we’re off again, on one of the many separate flights which comprise this trip. We stop for lunch at a Chinese restaurant which has an impressive menu but where the waiters’ English skills are less comprehensive. I order a small portion of roast duck, but what turns up appears to be almost a whole bird. Glad I didn’t order the large portion!

The flight up from Yangon to Bagan is uneventful. Despite having much less in the way of paperwork and jet engines, Air KBZ runs promptly to time… We are now staying in a hotel with the wonderful name of the Amazing Bagan Resort!

Another dawn start tomorrow, just in case. This time it’s our balloon trip over the plains of Bagan. More tomorrow. For now, here’s a picture of two nuns meditating – peace be with you!

I’m off on my travels again – another photographic trip with Light and Land, this time to Myanmar (formerly Burma).

Having recently downloaded a copy of Canned Heat’s Greatest Hits I was tempted to call this blog “On the Road Again”, but that’s not correct for this trip. It appears that outside the main centres Myanmar’s roads are pretty non-existent (despite managing to host a very good Top Gear special a few years ago), and most of the medium as well as long-range travel on this trip will be by air, hence the title. However we’ve not got off to the best of starts, and I’m hoping that’s not an omen…

Things start on Tuesday, the day before travel, when I received a flurry of emails late in the morning explaining that my outbound flight to Bangkok is being rescheduled by 3 hours, and as a result I’d be on a rather later connecting flight to Yangon (formerly the Burmese capital of Rangoon). That isn’t too much of a trial, as Frances is able to re-arrange to accommodate the later drop-off, and it means that we avoid rush hour on the M25. As a result we have an easy trip to the airport and arrived in plenty of time. At check-in I meet Julia, who was also on the Bhutan trip, and it is no great hardship having a natter and looking at photos over lunch. Unfortunately when we get to the gate, things started to look a bit more problematic, and it becomes clear that there are going to be further delays. We finally get away about an hour and a quarter later than the rescheduled time.

The flight is smooth and uneventful, apart from sleep being impossible due to the old lady next to me listening to the entertainment that I could hear her film soundtrack from her headphones, with mine on (and I’m quite deaf)!

The process for dealing with a delayed, full A380 at Bangkok airport is a number of Thai Airways employees scattered throughout the terminal, each with routing instructions and meal vouchers for a subset of the passengers. I am beginning to wonder how this can work, when the second person I ask for directions turns out to have my name on her list, and my lunch voucher. Impressive, or just good luck??

The flight to Yangon is rostered onto an airbus A330, capacity over 300, despite the fact that there are only a handful of passengers who only just outnumber the crew. Loading takes about 5 minutes, and is complete a good quarter of an hour before departure time. However that doesn’t stop departure being delayed by a further 25 minutes, for no reason which was ever explained to us. I’ve come to the conclusion that Thai Airways regard the clock as a broad guideline rather than anything more. Oh well, if you can’t face these things with reasonable equanimity you shouldn’t be doing international travel…

Arrival in Myanmar was straightforward, and it was good to meet up with the rest of the group, and particularly Clive Minnit and Phil Malpas, the group leaders. This will be the third of Clive and Phil’s trips I’ve been on, and I have great expectations based on the previous ones. It takes a while to get across Yangon – it’s a busy city of a similar size and population to London, and there’s a fair amount of traffic at rush hour – but it was noticeably different from the mania often portrayed of this part of the world, and which I experienced in reality in Kathmandu. There’s none of the milling bikes, mopeds and overcrowded buses. Yangon seems to be “London busy” rather than “Asian busy”, if that makes sense. It will be interesting to see how Mandalay compares.

We only have about half an hour to unpack the cameras before setting out again, and I’m starting to feel somewhat ragged, but that all evaporates when we got to the Shwedagon Pagoda. This is actually a “pagoda complex” over several acres, where the huge central golden pagoda has been progressively surrounded by hundreds of other pagodas, temples and shrines. We arrive just as the sun was starting to paint these fascinating structures in late afternoon light, and stay until an hour after sunset, by which time everything is artificially lit. The enormous difference from Bhutan is that the Burmese don’t mind you photographing inside the temples, and you’re free to photograph them as well as long as you don’t actually disturb someone’s meditation. Talk about a “target rich environment”!

I’m slightly stunned by the wealth of visual information, and not quite sure where to start, so these two images are just a taster. More tomorrow!