There was no way we would have missed out on witnessing the daily handling of the torch from darkness to daylight. The idea was to stand somewhere atop a temple and greet the sunrise with awakened eyes. However, in rare instances where reality overtakes the expectations of imagination, what I saw was more gratifying and romantic—even without reciting a line from a Nicholas Sparks novel. Even if I had nibbled the breakfast of the most obnoxious man in the world that morning, I would still categorize the major part of what I experienced that day as something I should keep in my memory vault.
Bagan’s Temple of the Rising Sun | Myanmar
Notwithstanding forgetting the name of the temple, that moment when the sun rose up over the vast temple-ruin-filled plains of Bagan, each moving still commanded a concentrated stare. Moving images which were then on-call for situations when I found myself blindfolded, just so I could be reminded that a new day started when darkness faded.
A Pre-Dawn Bicycle Ride
It was still dark when we went out on our rented bicycles; while we chose to pedal our way, the others opted to ride a horse-drawn cart to Buledi Temple. The weather was colder than I had expected coming from a day with high thirties Celsius temperature. Our ride was smooth over the asphalted road, with the stillness of a new day hanging around like the quietness of an empty room. I could only hear the cracking sounds of scattered twigs as my bike wheels rolled over them.
Soon our guide, who was commandeering the horse-drawn cart, turned right and onto a sandy terrain; pedaling through it became a bit harder as the thick, soft sands buried our bicycle wheels by a couple of inches, leaving us no choice but to push them along until coming again over flattened soil. Looking around, I saw temples illuminated against a black sky, shining like gold from a distance while still surrounded by darkness.
Ascending Buledi Temple
We reached Buledi Temple by the time the sky started to turn light gray. The slowly seeping daylight exposed the vast light golden color of the Bagan plains. I saw the towering edges of the nearby temples; counting them would distract you further because of their sheer number. We climbed the stairs until we reached the third level of the temple and sat facing the direction of the rising sun.
As I was setting up my tripod, I looked out and saw an unending image of temples and pagodas of all sizes scattered around. It was a scenery similar to being atop Shwesandaw Pagoda, where we saw the setting sun the previous afternoon. Blinking your eyes meant missing out on it by a precious few thousandths of a second.
The Golden Awakening
The sky was foggy and even dusty, which might have been due to the desert-like terrain around Bagan. While it covered the sun, the brightness was enough to make the sun visible. As the Earth slowly turned and the fiery yellow, round sun shot up into the sky, it produced a golden-colored landscape. Soon the whole sky was turned into a high contrast of yellow-red—a dramatic picture which could fill an old man's eyes with drops of tears while recollecting memories of a naked lover lying stretched over a grassy knoll.
I was not that old yet, so my train of thinking was rerouted to how the towering temples silhouetted against the sun weirdly reminded me of Genghis Khan's head. A little over a week before our trip to Myanmar, I had come across many descriptions of Bagan. The word "timeless" was always mentioned. Standing atop the temple, never mind if a heavy DSLR was hanging on my neck, shrugging off the existence of my lightweight tripod and the LED smartphone screens producing shutter sounds, there was this vibe of being captured in time—catapulted back hundreds or thousands of years, and using your imagination, you could almost feel what it was like back in the thirteenth century.
