Arriving at 5am on a night bus is disorientating. The bus journey, despite every effort being made to ensure you get some sleep, is very hard to get any meaningful shut eye on. So by the time you arrive, it’s still dark and you’re tired from the journey. The first thing that will happen when you get off the bus is that you’ll be swarmed by taxi drivers. You’ll try and negotiate and realise how extortionate taxis in Bagan were compared to Yangon. Using Grab we paid ~9,000 mkk to get to the bus station from Scott’s @31st St which was an hour and a half ride whereas in Bagan the taxi drivers had formed a syndicate so they offered you a ten minute ride to new Bagan for no less than 5,000 mkk per person. They hold a monopoly particularly for that time in the morning as Grab and Uber doesn’t cover Bagan and there certainly no buses at that time in the morning (I’m not sure about later on) and it’s a bit too far to walk. Once you’re in the taxi, they make a stop at a checkpoint going into Bagan for you to pay the mandatory tourism fee of 22,500 mkk per person. By the time we arrived at the hostel I was already less than impressed with Bagan, it all seemed like a giant tourist trap to me.

In Bagan we stayed in the Ostello Bello Bagan, there is also Ostello Bello Pool down the road which as its name suggests has a small pool. The Bagan one has a bar though which opens until 11pm whereas the pool one does not. The chain also has a hostel in Inle Lake and also in Mandalay so if you end up staying at those you will inevitably bump into people you met earlier on in your journey. Most travellers tend to end up along roughly the same route and with the pool of tourists still relatively small, it’s very easy and quite nice to bump into familiar faces.

Bagan in general is more pricey than other parts of Myanmar like Yangon or Inle Lake. Expect to pay a minimum of 3,000 mkk for a main dish. The food is very delicious everywhere we went though. In particular a vegetarian restaurant called The Moon stood out. Their aubergine salad and glass noodle salads were super tasty and their mango lassi was perfect during the peak heat of the day.

Whilst in Bagan we did tours organised by the hostel. We did the sunrise boat tour which yielded some beautiful photos, we did the mount popa visit (which was climbing up stairs to a temple rather than any actual hiking like we had hoped) and the free Bagan tour which you zipped around Bagan on e-bikes that you rent separately. Our tour guide Christopher was definitely one of the best guides I’ve ever had. He was friendly, open, fiercely intelligent and passionate about what he was talking about.

One of the best things was zipping around on the ebikes. For 3,000 mkk a day you can have the freedom to go explore the area and get lost visiting pagodas.

From Bagan we booked another night bus to Kalaw as well as a 2 day 1 night trek to Inle Lake. We booked this all through the hostel easily for 50,000 mkk in total. The bus was scheduled to arrive at 4am and the trek was scheduled to start at 8.30am… I’ll let you know in the next post how that went.