In This Dust That Was a City
In the ancient Burmese town of Bagan, all it takes is a bicycle to travel back in time.
(A version of this story originally appeared in the October-November 2016 issue of Wanderlust Magazine.)
BAGAN, Myanmar
Sunset in Old Bagan on an August evening, not far from Myanmar’s mighty Irrawaddy River. We stand, bathed in silence and fading sunlight, atop a stupa whose presence is older than our earliest known ancestors.
The dust of many centuries drifts into our noses. Before our eyes is an arresting vista of oranges and reds, just beginning its nightly ebb into purples and blues. They illuminate a landscape of careworn structures that seem, to outsiders like us, to be visitors from another world. And in a very real way, they are.
There was a teeming city here once, with tens of thousands of people — lives lived, meals and children made, commerce transacted during its many years as the capital of the powerful Pagan Empire. But that was so very long ago — eight, nine, 10 centuries past. Bagan is different now. It is a vast, dusty plain of assorted yesterdays. And walking through it — or biking through it, as we did — feels at times like moving through a waking dream.
No one is entirely certain what caused the town to effectively dry up and blow away around 1287. Many cite the arrival of Mongol invaders, but whether they actually ever reached Bagan has never been completely proven. Earthquakes played a role as well, it seems. What’s clear, though, is that Bagan was in effect abandoned, and its Buddhist structures — built over the 250 years previous to its collapse — were left behind to endure or rot, or in reality a bit of both.
Last summer, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake hit Myanmar and rumbled through Bagan’s ancient soil. When it was over, bricks and mortar alike sat cracked and fissures both ancient and modern had been revealed.
In the end, an estimated 200 of Bagan’s oft-restored monuments — nearly 10 percent of the 2,200 that remain of the original 10,000 built centuries ago — were damaged during the tremor. That number includes damage to some of the structures that were restored in extensive but uneven efforts by the government during the 1990s. At last count, visitors were being barred from 33 of the structures due to quake problems.
The problems are being fixed. And given Bagan’s importance to Myanmar’s tourist industry, the rebuilding will not take too long. But while Bagan heals and rehabs under watchful official eyes, it’s worth a look at what it’s like to experience the place.
For Bagan is — and this is no travel-brochure hyperbole — one of Asia’s most magical destinations.
Old Bagan is a vast, dusty plain of assorted yesterdays.
We are staying at a little riverside hotel that touches the nearby Irrawaddy, in an area my late father wandered through nearly six decades ago during his Burmese travels as a young man. For me, this trip is an attempt to see a bit of what he saw, for he was enchanted by Burma and talked and wrote about it in essays and personal journals for many years afterward.
During a rather epic train trip by the water in 1961, he called the Irrawaddy a “vast quiescent stream,” and it feels exactly that, as if waiting patiently for something, perhaps the flooding that it brings to its river plain during the wet season. The stupa-studded landscape of Old Bagan lies just inland from the water.
There are many ways to meander through the sprawling, lightly tended plain that is Old Bagan, but the most effective choice — and ours — is by rented bicycle. We set out on our first morning at a leisurely pace, our bikes pointed stupa-ward. And we pedal.
The joy of Bagan, I will find, is in its serendipity. As long as you carry enough water (and do make certain to carry enough water; the sun is blistering and the landscape parched), you can take your time, with no tour guides pushing you to the next destination. Hours pass like minutes in the quiet.
For much of the day, we bike in and out of small roads and dirt paths, through scrub brush and across vast fields of reddish-brown dirt. At one point, on an ever-narrowing path lined with cactuses, I wipe out into a wall of jagged plants, drawing blood from scratches on my calves but (barely) escaping serious injury. I dust myself off, mount my bike once more and we proceed to the next stupa, sweat-drenched but happy.
Every kilometer or so reveals a new pagoda, another stupa, a well-cloaked tiny temple. Some are barely large enough for a single person to enter. Others, majestic, tower 20 meters into the sky and can accommodate dozens of people at once (as the biggest of them do every night at sunset). Ornate carvings dot many of them, and you can imagine in your mind’s eye the elaborate ceremonies that once took place. Others are plain, as if more attuned to a quick everyday prayer or moment of solace. They are beautiful in their diversity.
Outside some of the pagodas, artists sell their paintings. This is, as any traveler in Southeast Asia knows, quite common and sometimes quite dull, but the Bagan artisans add their own intriguing twist. Their paint palettes are deeply earth-toned, and they mix their paints on the spot using as ingredients the raw materials at hand — in this case, the reddish dirt from the landscape itself. Thus, if you bargain for a moody, color-saturated painting of the Bagan templescape, as I did, you carry home not only an image of the land you visited but also a sliver of the very place itself. I find that pleasingly symmetrical.
Though Bagan is — for Myanmar, at least — a big-time tourist destination, its spread-out nature prevents many visitors from encountering others for much of the day. Because of that, the sense of abandonment here is palpable still. I feel as if we are a landing party in an old “Star Trek” episode, exploring the remains of a long-dead civilization that offers up only a few hints of what once was.
At the end of two days of exploring, we have removed our shoes in front of dozens of old stone structures. I have started to get a sense of the place, though so much of it remains a mystery.
Some of the structures have been filled with Buddha figures large and small, impressive in their intricacy even these many years after they were carved. Some are simply dark and dusty tunnels where contemplation, prayer and in some cases torture took place. Each contains a tiny thrill of discovery, and we accrue those thrills like small coins. By the end of the second day, we are brimming with experience.
But if the daytime wanderings represent quiet, tiny treasures, it is the experience of taking in a Burmese sunset from atop a Bagan pagoda that, above anything else, will be a memory for your forever bank.
It is the experience of taking in a Burmese sunset from atop a Bagan pagoda that, above anything else, will be a memory for your forever bank.
On our final evening, we stand, chests to the sinking sun, feeling rather small in the grand scheme of things.
The tones of the Burmese language from below and the sounds of some kind of bird — owls? doves? — from above break the silence around us. Everywhere on all sides, to the horizon, are pagodas and stupas built so long ago for powerful purposes I will never really understand. On the east side of town, an unlikely rainbow towers above one pagoda even though there has been no rain on this day.
As the sun dips lower, more people gather, parking their bikes at the bottom of this large temple and scaling uneven stairs to the structure’s apex. More accents join the Burmese — German, Japanese, something I perceive to be some flavor of Scandinavian. The clicks of cameras and smartphones begin to pierce the silence. But they cannot cut through the intensity of the moment.
Even if you are in no way religious, it is easy to feel here, atop this stone obelisk in a remote pocket of Myanmar, that contemplating the infinite is a perfectly natural activity. I have no cellphone signal, no multitasking duties. My to-do list for this moment contains only one thing: to be IN the moment, to absorb what is around me. It is something so difficult today, yet something that Bagan, somehow, encourages.
We, the visitors, see this landscape today drastically differently than others did in the past. We meet it on wholly modern terms, as archaeological dilettantes encountering anecdote and excitement, and I often struggle with the role I play being the visitor — and with what effect I might have on the visited.
When you look at Old Bagan today — a sprawling, haunting and yet somehow reassuring ghost town of the most epic order, stretching to the distant horizon — you can see proof, perhaps, that human beings can indeed build something that is holy, if only because of its capacity to outlast its own makers. So in one way, they succeeded.
But then I think of the men, women and children who moved on from here long ago, and the kings who ruled them. They built their towers to be permanent for their posterity, and yet they themselves proved sadly temporary.
The sun sinks behind the most distant stupa now, and the hushed tones of the dozen or so visitors who have climbed the dark stone steps to the top begin to fade. I find myself considering how small we truly are, as we stand perched upon this sprawling plain that once held tens of thousands of souls. I think of that 1980s song “99 Red Balloons”: “It’s all over and I’m standing pretty/in this dust that was a city…”
Maybe that is, in the end, what the otherworldly landscape of Bagan offers. In the best tradition of travel, it tells us that while we each matter, we really must keep ourselves in perspective.
For in ancient terrain like this, time and place and scale and memory come together with a message that, for me, is one of the more important lessons to carry as I move about the planet: Like those who once lived in Bagan, we are all temporary. And wherever we go, we are all, in the end, only visitors.
IF YOU’RE GOING:
November, December and January are considered the best times to travel to Bagan weather-wise, and by then some of the reconstruction should have taken place. Myanmar requires a visa for citizens of most countries; contact its embassy in Bangkok for more information. Plan to fly into Yangon and book domestic airlines — possibly two flights — to reach Bagan from the capital. A nine-hour bus from Yangon is also an option.
Ted Anthony, a Pittsburgher living in Thailand, is a Baby Boomer by generation and a Gen-Xer by age who has lived nearly eight years abroad in four installments over four decades. He has been dissecting and musing about American culture since Guns N’ Roses was on the charts and “Rain Man” was in the theaters. He is the author of Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song. He tweets here, Instagrams here and collects various fragmentary images and thoughts on Tumblr here.
©2017 | Ted Anthony
