Bagan 2012 — Why Myanmar’s Ancient Temple Plain Still Haunts Me

My iPhone surprised me. It created a slideshow from my 2012 Bagan photos — that automatic memory feature phones do now. I watched it on a Thursday afternoon and felt something I did not expect: a quiet sadness that the place I was watching no longer exists in quite the same way.

I went to Bagan for the first time in 2010, then again in 2012. Both times, Myanmar had no ATMs. You had to bring cash like a drug dealer. You planned your budget in Rangoon and hoped you had enough to last the trip. That was part of what made it feel like a different century.

What Bagan Was

Bagan is a plain in central Myanmar covered with more than two thousand Buddhist temples and pagodas, built between the 11th and 13th centuries during the First Burmese Empire. At its peak there were more than ten thousand religious structures here. What remains is still the most concentrated collection of Buddhist monuments in the world.

When I arrived in 2010 — and again in 2012 — you could rent a bicycle and ride through the temples almost alone. Not just at 6 AM. All day. You could climb a temple, sit at the top watching the plains, and not see another tourist for an hour. You could enter buildings that were unlocked, that had no admission fee, that nobody was monitoring. The whole plain felt like it belonged to the crows and the old monks and the few travellers who had found their way there.

I explored Bagan for three days. By bicycle one day, by horse cart another, by hired car on the third. I had an old phone — I think it was a BlackBerry — and the photos I took were grainy and underexposed. They are on Flickr now, a record of a trip that feels two lifetimes ago.

The Balloons

In the mornings, hot air balloons went up from somewhere near the main temple cluster. You could watch them drift over the pagodas in the early light. I did not ride in one — at the time it felt like an unnecessary expense when the ground itself was so extraordinary. I wish now that I had taken a balloon flight. The view from the air must have been incomparable.

The balloon operators were some of the first tourism infrastructure to return when Myanmar reopened. Then the 2021 coup happened and tourism collapsed again. The balloons are up there still, somewhere in that complicated story.

What Changed

Between my 2010 and 2012 visits there were already more tourists. Between 2012 and 2019 — when international arrivals peaked before the pandemic — Bagan became genuinely crowded. A UNESCO World Heritage listing brought global attention and a new airport. Tour groups arrived from China. Hotels multiplied. The temples that had been open and unguarded acquired ticket booths and crowds at sunrise.

The Myanmar authorities also, controversially, restored several pagodas in ways that archaeologists criticised — resurfacing ancient brickwork with modern concrete, rebuilding spires to the wrong proportions. UNESCO threatened to withhold heritage status. The government partially listened.

Then 2021. The military coup. International sanctions. Tourism stopped almost completely. The plain went quiet again, but not in the way it was quiet when I was there. Quietly empty is different from quietly peaceful.

Why I Still Think About It

I have been to a lot of places. I have my ranking. Bagan is near the top. Not because of the quantity of temples — that can become numbing after a while, honestly, temple after temple after temple. But because of the quality of the atmosphere. The silence of the plain. The scale of what human devotion built here and then largely abandoned. You stand in the middle of it and understand something about how civilisations rise and how they end.

My iPhone slideshow lasted two minutes. Old photos of sunrise light on brick, bicycle shadows on dirt tracks, the silhouette of stupas against a pink sky. All of it from an old phone with a bad camera. All of it still somehow capturing something the place actually was.

That trip stays one of the most unexpected and beautiful moments in my life. Not because I planned it carefully. Because I showed up with cash in my pocket and three days and no expectations, and the place did the rest.

Should You Go Now?

This is a complicated question given Myanmar’s current political situation. The military government that took power in the February 2021 coup has been condemned internationally. Tourism revenue, even indirectly, supports the regime. Many travellers are choosing to avoid Myanmar entirely until the political situation changes. That is a legitimate position.

Others argue that local people — the bicycle rental shop owners, the hotel staff, the horse cart drivers — need income and that a blanket boycott harms ordinary people more than the generals. That is also a legitimate position.

I am not going to tell you which position to take. What I will tell you is that Bagan the place — the plain, the temples, the light at dawn — is as real and extraordinary as anything I have written here. Whenever it becomes possible to visit Myanmar again in a way that feels right to you, Bagan is worth going to.