Yearly Archives: 2008

We flew from Bagan to Mandalay, checked in to the Sedona Mandalay, (our least favorite hotel on the trip) and immediately headed to a monastery in Amurapura to get a glimpse of monk life.

While there, we were told that we would not be able to visit parts of the monastery, because there was a “Hollywood film crew” on site making a movie. I wondered what kind of a movie would include a Burmese monastery scene? This made me think of a wonderful movie I had seen before featuring footage from exotic places around the globe – Baraka. I asked my guide if he had ever seen this movie, and to my surprise he had! We talked about the film’s beauty for 15 minutes.

Why do I mention this? Well, that’s the subject of a future blog entry!

(By the way, Baraka is a must-see film. Roger Ebert describes the remastered Blu-Ray release as “the finest video disc I have ever viewed or ever imagined.“)

That’s right – we’re only up to day eight of our awesome Burma trip. There are many more pictures to come, so keep checking in!

One of the most revered temples in Bagan, its recently restored dome sparkled against the deep blue sky. Too bad the bottom half was obscured for further restoration work.

We finally closed out day six of our jam-packed adventure on a private boat. We cruised lazily upstream for a few miles, and floated back with the engine off as the sun set. Beautiful.

It’s hard to believe we did all of these things in just one day. We’re STILL on day 6 of the trip.

We visited another Buddha in a cramped temple at the Manu Ha compound, where the closed-in feeling of the place evokes the stress of captivity at the hand of a brutal Burmese king. Later, we paid a visit to the U Ba Nyein Lacquerware Workshop. I never paid much attention to lacquerware before, but now that I know how it is made, I have a much greater respect for it. The finest pieces can take two years to make – drying and applying the lacquer layer after layer – up to 24 deep.

We shot some videos of a bit of the manufacturing process.

Also, if you’d like to see more Burma images, check out my Picasa web album. It contains some images that didn’t quite make the cut on thedude.com, and it’s Cooliris enabled. (Cooliris is a MUST-HAVE plugin.) Also, if you are using the Google Screensaver, you can subscribe to my Burma album’s RSS feed here. If you do, you will automatically see my images on your screen as I update them. How cool is that?!

When we left off, we were floating peacefully above the Bagan plain watching the first of the two balloons land as planned in a field below us. We were too high to land, so our pilot, Ian, sized up the situation and decided to shoot for a sandy spot on an island in the middle of the Irawaddy River. This meant that we’d get a longer balloon ride, and that instead of taking a bus back to the launch area, we’d first have to take a boat. What fun! This unplanned adventure was just fine with us. The champagne tasted all that much better on the sandy beach as we toasted our crew and headed back with our new friends by boat.

At sunrise on our sixth day in Burma, (That’s right – we’re only half way through our amazing trip, folks.) we boarded a hot-air balloon and got a different view of the temples in the Bagan area. Our guide explains that it’s well known when the 1,500+ temples were built, but that it’s not clear exactly why they were built in this spot. What a sight!

Kelly completely overcame her fear of heights and thoroughly enjoyed the balloon ride. Her only wish is that the flight had gone on longer. In my next post, I’ll show why the unplanned can turn out to be the most memorable part of any trip.