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Slept in late again. Just sleeping off the heat-stroke, I told myself. Missed the free breakfast. Realised I'd had "I Will Always Love You" stuck in my head for a good four days running. In particular the sticky part just before the second chorus. It was like a persistent leech sucking on my pre-frontal cortex, and I had no salt or lighter flame to burn it off with. The night before I'd found a woman selling postcards and renting e-bikes from her roadside shack. "Everyone Rent Bicycles," said the sign hanging off the tree out front. I got there after midday to find her waiting for me. All the e-scooters were rented out and all she had left was one e-bicycle. It's pretty much exactly what it sounds like, a bicycle that happens to have a small electric engine and battery built into the frame. It was red. I'd never been on one of these things before. But what fun. I want to ride one of these things everywhere. Why isn't everyone riding e-bicycles? I thought to myself. Know what can solve all the world's problems in one go? E-bicycles.
I had a hit-list of the main sites all marked out in biro on my print-outs. I was headed right into the s***. All the juiciest temples were on the far side of town from where I was staying, in Old Bagan. The day previous I'd barely made it halfway there. The fun thing about e-bicycles is you can alternate between pedaling and gunning (a little strong a word for the amount of power you actually get) the motor. I pedaled through the sand tracts and over the rocky bits of ground to save the battery and motored up the inclines and along the sealed roads. Many an idiot did I see trying to force their e-bikes and scooters through furrows of sand on the back-roads that link up the various temple sites. The sun burned my face and arms into familiar shades of dull red and sat over my shoulder like an open kiln. One temple in particular took my interest, Dhammayangi Pahto, a squat Mayan-looking thing visible from all over the plain. It has a dark history, according to the guidebooks. Its builder, Narathu, murdered his father, brother, and wife in there and sliced off the arms of any craftsmen who didn't live up to his perfectionist standards. There are even arm-sized grooves cut into the stone where this allegedly took place. You can just imagine heads and excommunicated limbs rolling down the terraced layers of the pyramid. In a Lovecraft-ian twist all the inner passages were bricked up after Narathu's death and to this day nobody knows what lies buried inside. I reached it at the height of the afternoon when many of the whistle-stop tour groups take their tea-break, and while I won't say I had the place to myself, there was ample room to roam in its cool and high-vaulted halls. The light that finds its way into the inner corridors has the haunted tones of Pharaoh ghosts. It's a regal place its massiveness with Dune winds breezing through. A mausoleum of disjointed echoes and time-planed stone underfoot. None of the other sites quite matched up to that one for me. I could have spent hours in there.
Soon the sundown hour was once again upon us extra-terrestrial visitors to this ancient plain of re-arranging stones. The choice sunset spot is Shwesandaw Paya, a fat while bell made of stone that draws tour buses to it like flies to a cow patty. It hogs the best position between the most picturesque of the temples and subsequently I wanted nothing to do with it. Instead I found a less assuming paya nearby I'd scouted out earlier in the day and took up rooftop position, scaling two flights of "secret" stairs and arriving at the base of the bell-shaped stupa in anticipation of the Flood. The flood, that is, of mass tourism. They come out of the woodwork, they come on bicycles, scooters, by bus and by horse and cart, they clamber up any exposed surface to catch the final rays of our beloved amber orb, snatching up its reverent dying moments through electronic lenses and digital light sensors. It's oh-so-easy to miss the real moment if you're once removed lining it up through a viewfinder screen. I may sound cynical, but really I find the whole spectacle quite amusing, and somewhat beautiful. There is a certain magic to sharing in awed silence the day's final moments with a crowd of strangers atop some far-away temple. And the applause that often picks up as the last corner of sun has sunk into the horizon and that one person who always has to pipe up, "There it is." I'll admit it, I am not infrequently that person.
After the sun has gone down, the migration of rented bikes makes its way back to the tourist town in the closing dark. Bagan by night is wandering through dusty back-lanes past sleeping dogs and listening to televisions singing through the thatched walls of wooden houses. It's also candle-lighted restaurants and cheap pizza and Mandalay beer with a fat hardcover and all the time in the world to chew through it until you're ready to wander heavy-legged back to your hotel room bed. I passed a gang of disenchanted youths drag-racing their mopeds down the main street of town. They were two to a bike popping extended wheelies with the person on the back half hanging off with their feet dragging in the dirt in an effort to keep their end down. I stood on the corner watching them circle the roundabout, doings wheelies in turns. Up the street their parents were all at the late-night café crowded around the television on fold-out chairs watching the football.
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