Note: Today is March 8. We are in Dublin, having spent the last two days in Dubai, and before that two days in Bangkok after completing our tour of Myanmar. We will spend the next ten days in Ireland and then fly home on Mar. 19. Our internet situation has been woefully inadequate most of the time! Bangkok was excellent--free wireless in the room-- but Dubai, of all places, wanted to charge us $40 a day which we refused to pay. I've got some great stuff about Dubai though--can't wait to get to it. In the meantime, I'm still in Myanmar, blog-wise.
Bagan, situated in east central Myanmar, like Siem Riep, is a one-act town. Like the Angkor Wat complex in Siem Riep where the temples are the main attraction, the pagodas are the whole show in Bagan. But Angkor Wat is why you go to Cambodia, and the pagodas are why you go to Bagan. There are pagodas galore. Conical shaped, they are made of brick or stone or plaster and at one time many were encrusted with solid gold, as the Shwe Dagon in Yangon still is today. We were told that about 3,500 remain in Bagan (of the purported original four million), and it is true that everywhere you look there is a pagoda and often there are pagodas for as far as the eye can see. Each pagoda originally housed its own statue of the Buddha and most of the statues are still there, although many are in serious disrepair, at the very least missing their heads due to thievery. There are large ones and small ones, plain ones and ornate ones, but all have the single purpose of allowing the people a place to pay homage to the Buddha. Some of them have vestiges of painting inside and one can only imagine how beautiful they were in their original glory. Now however, as in Mandalay and Yangon, no one seems to be minding the store.
We visited the Ananda pagoda, which houses the finest mural paintings in Bagan and is its finest architectural example as well. There are four huge intact Buddhas at the north, south, east and west entrances and the entire inside is covered with what remains of murals that depict the stories of the Buddha’s lives in all of his incarnations. They are beautiful and intricate drawings which in their original colors and pristine state must have been stunning. But many of the murals have been whitewashed! Yes, in some earlier time the people painted over the murals out of some mis-guided need to “modernize” the setting. Now the whitewash is wearing off and the murals, damaged beyond repair in many cases, are once again visible.
Outside the pagoda there are stalls and merchants selling, among other things, sand paintings of street scenes or mandalas, lacquerware, textiles, wood carvings, gongs and puppets. You don’t dare show the slightest interest in something because that is the cue for the seller to hang on to you until the bitter end in an effort to sell it to you. The bargaining is a serious game and usually the price will end up less than half of what they originally asked. If you do buy something, word travels fast and you are immediately surrounded by five more selling the same item. I swear they have walkie talkies hidden somewhere where they radio ahead "check out the eight Americans--they're in a spending mood." I just bought one, you say to the next hopeful seller. You need two, they respond. You need one more. We laugh and they laugh too. It's all a game. But a serious one to them because they need the money so badly.
The second day in Bagan we drove about two hours further up into the mountains to visit Mount Popa, an extinct volcano where there is yet another large pagoda and monastery complex sitting majestically on top of the mountain. The only trouble is, in order to see it up close, you have to walk up about 780 steps if memory serves correctly--without shoes or socks. I may have forgotten to mention that Myanmar is even more strict than Bhutan about wearing shoes in temples and pagodas. Shoes and socks are strictly forbidden and usually they must be removed long before you see the inside of a pagoda, that is, at the bottom of the steps or hill leading to the holy place. This may seem like no big deal but the terrain is often uneven, or strewn with stones and other debris or just plain dirty. It freaked me out at first to walk barefoot in such places, but after an attitude adjustment I accepted it as part of the cultural experience.
But here at Mt. Popa, not only were there 700 or more stone steps littered with god-knows-what, there were about seven thousand aggressive monkeys--not the cute, white-faced capuchins we had seen in Costa Rica, but nasty looking lice and vermin infested creatures which could just as easily have been large rats. Of the eight of us, only Kim and Stacey were brave enough to accompany the monkeys up the hill, dodging their droppings and trying to avoid being touched or maybe even bitten by one.
Us older folks were not left twiddling our thumbs while the young’uns climbed Mt. Popa however. The bustling village at the base of Mt. Popa has a small museum with representations of all 37 Burmese “nats” which are shown life-size as they might have looked in their human forms. The nats are very important to the Burmese. There are 37 in all--there will be no more--and each was a live human being who either died a violent death or was punished by a king and then was later declared by one king or another to be a “nat.” Why, remains unclear. This was back in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries I think and they are still revered today. It is a difficult concept for us to understand, but they seem to be almost a Burmese version of Christian saints, except to my knowledge saints don’t take revenge on us mere mortals whereas the nats can and do. Nu Nu called them guardians. They are not divine so they are not worshipped, but they are highly revered, prayed to, and often feared. You will see references in all of Burmese literature to the nats. Offerings of food and money are laid before them and great care is taken not to offend them for an angry nat is fearsome indeed. I should point out that even the Buddha is not divine--he was just a man--but the Buddhists revere him just we revere our God because he shows them how to attain perfection, or nirvana, by practicing the principles he taught.
Nu Nu took us into the nat museum (we had to remove our shoes and socks even though I don’t think it was a temple) and explained much about the lives of the more famous ones. They are dressed to represent how they lived, for example, one nat was a drunkard when alive and is now represented looking tipsy and holding a liquor bottle. Another was a fine lady and is shown in beautiful clothes and adorned with jewels. Two at least were common people and are dressed accordingly. They each have their own territory within Myanmar and apparently do not have “jurisdiction“ outside of it. Seven of the nats are guardians of the Mt. Popa area and our next stop, Inle Lake, has four nats who reside there.
On the way back to Bagan we had lunch at the beautiful Mt. Popa Resort with a view of the hilltop monastery. We were shown a room at the resort which was quite luxurious (and expensive) by Burmese standards but the whole area is so remote I can’t imagine many people stay there. What a shame!
And now on to Inle Lake.
No comments:
Post a Comment