Hello, again, Blogonauts!

Here's a trick I hadn't considered before: Taxis make great luggage lockers while awaiting your next flight! Plus the driver will take you anywhere locally you might want to visit.

Our plane would not depart until 4 PM, and Zoë had a destination in mind that would precisely fit the time gap between breakfast and "bye-bye Bagan." She wanted to show me Myanmar's version of Shangri-la. Plus monkeys.

Mt. Popa, the vision of utopia, sits atop a ridge about an hour's drive southeast of Bagan. It looks like a large vertical cylinder that rises inexplicably for hundreds of feet above the ridge crest, like a single, oversized birthday candle. A birthday candle populated by monkeys.

In truth, this birthday candle was lit on the bottom, for the formation's origin is volcanic.

The region around Bagan, and indeed much of Myanmar, is still seismically active, and Mt. Popa attained its unusual shape because it developed as a lava-plug following at least one ancient eruption. The plug's top portions cooled and hardened before heat and pressure from beneath diminished, and so the solidified stone was pushed upward, and in that process, it kept its cylindrical shape.

Myanmar's Buddhists never fail to exploit high vistas for architecture and spiritual advantage, so the mountain has been a pilgrimage site for hundreds of years. And where there are Buddhist pilgrims, there are people who want to feed animals. Particularly animals that closely resemble humans: Thus, MONKEYS!!!

As we climbed to the peak, the monkeys joined the vistas and the temples as a part of the fun. While in the village below and along the pathway to the top, we saw some more of the Myanmar spiritual pantheon of nats, the variable lineup of deities whose antics seem just as mischievous as the monkeys. (Photos, of course, continue below.)

We made it back to Bagan to begin the next chapter of this Asian odyssey: A trip to Inle Lake.

Blog to you later!