Balloon day.
Bagan has 3000 temples in 42 square miles. It used to be 6000 temples, but King Nara Thi Ha Patae (sp?) (as part of his campaign to make Myanmar great again) tore half of them down to build a wall to defend against the mongols in the 13th century.
Bagan has an interesting history. Read a nicely short story here: Bagan Wiki
A 5:00 am start and a 1/2 hour ride to the launch site. There are 3 companies operating 20 balloons daily, weather permitting. If the wind is favourable most of the temples can be seen.
Here’s my poor video.
The team starts putting the balloon together
Cool
The red team in an adjacent field
The green team
Our team taking off
Our pilot, a German, is a great guy. He has predictive software on his iPad
Yay! This is only my second balloon flight. The first was in Edmonton when I was in my early 20’s
Temples
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Towards the end
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Landing spot, a farmer’s field. The flight lasted an hour
Ballooning is an indescribable experience so I won’t bother. But anyone who hasn’t done it should maybe consider it a potentially worthwhile future thing to do.
Our flight was recorded with a sophisticated system mounted to the cage and this version was delivered to the hotel that evening. The system takes a picture periodically so the cage is edited out somehow. I put it at the bottom here because it’s super good quality and I want my lousy version above to get clicks for the 20 minutes I put into it, ykwim.
Speeded up a fair bit though