Cycling around Bagan in the low season is a lark! The reason mid-May is the low season for tourists in Burma is because it’s smack in between the hot season and the rainy season. The weather is supposed to be either very hot or very wet and possibly both. I managed to miss the rain and was lucky enough to have a fair amount of overcast weather to take the edge off the heat. There were about twenty foreign tourists in the area when I was there – half of whom were in a single tour group – which meant that most of the pagodas and temples are entirely deserted. Bagan covers about 42 square kilometres and comprises 2500 temples, pagodas and stupas. That means about sixty buildings per square kilometre. It’s AMAZING. Riding down dirt tracks, avoiding flocks of goats and pot-holes, there are pagodas to go. You can climb to the top terraces through dark passageways and stare out over plains and palm trees trying to count the lotus tips on the near horizon.
Yes, that's me looking slightly windswept and overheated on top of a temple. Note many more in the background. This photo was taken by the keymaster of the temple whose lunch I interrupted. In spite of the bright light outside, you need to take a torch firstly because there are exciting hidden passages and stairways to clamber through and secondly because there are so many paintings inside dark corners of the buildings to see. Although there has been a little reconstruction work done – smoothing out of terraces and repainting of Buddhas – Bagan hasn’t had the full UNESCO treatment. This is undoubtedly a bad thing in terms of cultural preservation (and possibly injury avoidance) but it does mean that you can indulge in nineteenth century explorer fantasies (if you happen to harbour them) and explore and speculate the terrain with very little explanatory infrastructure and few prohibitions. The whole experience - temples, heat, isolation, goats - was a little hallucinatory. Hence, perhaps, the post-colonial nostalgia for nineteenth century nostalgia for ancient civilisations.
This is the tallest temple in Bagan, That Bin Nyu. As far as I know, the Bagan temples have not provided the locations for any adventure films.
Yes, that's me looking slightly windswept and overheated on top of a temple. Note many more in the background. This photo was taken by the keymaster of the temple whose lunch I interrupted. In spite of the bright light outside, you need to take a torch firstly because there are exciting hidden passages and stairways to clamber through and secondly because there are so many paintings inside dark corners of the buildings to see. Although there has been a little reconstruction work done – smoothing out of terraces and repainting of Buddhas – Bagan hasn’t had the full UNESCO treatment. This is undoubtedly a bad thing in terms of cultural preservation (and possibly injury avoidance) but it does mean that you can indulge in nineteenth century explorer fantasies (if you happen to harbour them) and explore and speculate the terrain with very little explanatory infrastructure and few prohibitions. The whole experience - temples, heat, isolation, goats - was a little hallucinatory. Hence, perhaps, the post-colonial nostalgia for nineteenth century nostalgia for ancient civilisations. 
This is the tallest temple in Bagan, That Bin Nyu. As far as I know, the Bagan temples have not provided the locations for any adventure films.
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