We arrived at about 5.30am when we were supposed to get in at around 9/10 am. This bus station was also way out of town and the only way to get in was by horse and carriage that was actually more like a cart with some bedding on top. We met a Burmese girl from London on the coach who actually helped us talk to the men with the horses to get them down from their extortionate prices. And she also rang the hotel for us to see if we would be able to check in so early. We could and so we set off on a horse and cart into the darkness.

Bagan itself is a crazy place there are so many temples of all different sizes as far as your eye can see in every single direction. Because it was so early we actually managed to see the sun rise around all these temples which start from around the 9th century and some are even built today after a massive earthquake flattened many in the 1970s. We got to our hotel which was actually really nice and even had a pool not that we had a chance to go into it. We agreed to hire out the man and his horse for the day as it is so hot and humid there really is no other way of seeing it. Plus there's like over 2000 temples so we would know which are the good ones. We agreed to meet him again at 10 am which gave us a couple of hours sleep in a proper bed and we even managed to have breakfast before we set off.

He was waiting for us at 10am as agreed and we set off for some temples. People here are kind of like Egyptians where they feel if they constantly hassle you you will buy something from them. Unfortunately me and Dan do like to buy things and we bought a lot of stuff in Myanmar! We definitely bought the most by far in this country just because we knew how few tourists come to Myanmar; in the whole year around 1 million foreign visitors came to Myanmar whereas in neighbouring Thailand 22 million people visited.

The cool thing about these temples in Bagan is that there are no tourists anywhere at all. So every temple is by yourself and that makes it feel much nicer than say Angkor wat that is filled with people. Our driver, for want of a better word, suggested a place to eat lunch that was pretty cheap and best of all was local cuisine. It was one of our best meals in Asia. Burmese food consists of curry and rice and lots of other small dishes full of things like veg or spices or Chili. On our table we had about 10 dishes filled with stuff that they refilled if you ran out. Also in Myanmar it is customary to have a soup before your meal that is also included in the price. Burmese curries are different from Indian and Thai curries in that they are very oily on top so that flies and bugs cannot contaminate the food. They were very good as they aren't spicy either as you add your own spices.

After this lunch we continued see all the temples and then at sunset we went to one you can climb up to the top to get a really nice view of all the temples in the sunset. This was the first time we actually saw alot of tourists and there must have been less than 40 people there- I wonder what they'll do when there's too many tourists visiting to all go up one temple? We also bumped into our friend again on top of this temple and chatted to her for quite a while. She was getting the night bus back that evening and we did not envy her!

After sunset the man dropped us back to our hotel and asked if he could keep our water bottle we bought in the airport as it was a 1.5 litre bottle and the only bottles you could buy in Burma were 600ml and 1 litre bottles so we let him keep it. He was also really nice as your meant to pay to get into Bagan I think $20 but because we took the bus rather than flying I think we missed the charge- at the sunset temple there was a guard there who asked us to show our receipt to show we had paid this and obviously we had none. but our driver told the guy that we had paid at the hotel (apparently you can pay at hotels?!) either way he got us off from paying the fee which saved us $40. Although I am notorious for going out of my way to pay for things like trains etc instead of trying to get on for free in Burma that money would go to the government regime (who are corrupt and generally horrible) so I actually felt good about not paying for once!

We ate dinner at the hotel as it had a traditional puppet show any dinner time. But the food was overpriced, not very good or particularly traditional and the puppet show was a bit rubbish. We did get to have an early night though for our flight the next morning.