Travel Day 1148 – Mandalay, MYANMAR
Since riding a bike through Mandalay had been a great experience yesterday, I decided to continue exploring more on two wheels today…
Wooden Shwe In Bin Kyaung Monastery
There were a few listed monasteries and temples further south in Mandalay and it seemed easy enough to visit them while pedaling along some other neighborhoods of this quite unusual city. It was actually quite funny, but for the amount of tourists staying in Mandalay there seemed to be surprisingly few of them on the streets. The result was that Mandalay seemed to have not that many tourist facilities and the local areas one biked through displayed daily life in Myanmar in a surprisingly untouched way…
Intrigued by my experience yesterday, I was quite looking forward to cruising around some different residential and working areas like the gold pounders’ district to finally reach the big Mahamuni Paya temple complex. This temple with its golden terraced roof housed one of Myanmar’s most famous Buddha statues which was allegedly 2000 years old. Over time devotees had added so many thin layers of gold leaf that Buddha actually seemed to be wearing a fuzzy fur coat made out of pure gold…
Golden fuzzy Buddha at Mahamuni Paya
The interesting thing to observe was that devotees were still adding to the gold coat, but only men. Women were allowed in the hall in front of the room with the statue while men could easily access the sanctum, touch Buddha and stick additional layers of gold to his fuzzy form. This was a practice that I had never observed anywhere else so far and I naturally had to sit and observe the scenes for quite a while before I could actually carry on to find the amazingly sculpted Shwe In Bin Kyaung monastery…
This slightly hidden teak wood monastery was absolutely beautiful to look at and it reminded of the great Shwenandaw Kyaung which impressed me already yesterday. Only here the stilted monastery building of Shwe In Bin Kyaung seemed to be slightly bigger and rather frequented as Buddhist monks were walking around and minding their business. Strolling around slowly and sitting down inside on the old teak floor, one could try to imagine once more how impressive the old wooden city of Mandalay must have been before it burned down entirely…
Buddhist Brick Monastery in Mandalay
After some more explorational cruising through smaller streets and an extended lunch, I was then off to follow a suggested biking tour. The guide-book was recommending pedaling a certain route through Mandalay’s back alleys and while I only managed to follow it partially, it still brought me along a lot of wonderful Buddhist monasteries and temples. But it was especially the brick monasteries which looked rather like colonial housing projects or European government buildings that fascinated me on the tour…
The entire tour was supposed to end at a view-point café by the river, but unfortunately that didn’t quite exist. While this confirmed once more how awfully outdated the most recent Myanmar guide-book actually was, it still had been another wonderful and interesting day in a city which was supposed to have no real sights or tourist attractions. Yeah, I actually quite liked Mandalay with its many monasteries and diverse neighborhoods. It was definitely a city that was slowly growing on me…
Find all Mandalay Photos here.
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