Mrauk U is Pretty Coo

Way west of Yangon, way up a river, way high on the ridges are planted hundreds of gorgeous pagodas that comprise what’s left of the proud Rakhine Empire. Mrauk U, the ancient capital, lorded over a wide area between the 15^th to 18^th centuries. The port city was one of Asia’s richest, receiving many foreign traders.

This past weekend three of us checked out the remains. We knew it was probably a good time to go to Mrauk U but we didn’t know how good. May Day and a full moon meant several festivals were going on. Carnivals! Boat races! Wrestling matches!

Even en route we could see we had done the right thing. We chugged upstream from Sittwe for five hours along an increasingly enchanted waterway. As the light dimmed and the river narrowed, new colors and subtle movements emerged. Our mental baggage fell overboard.

One friend brought enough camera equipment for all three of us. In fact we needed all three to schlep it up the nearest ridge for our first sunrise. We climbed in the half daylight without knowing exactly what we would find on top, but feeling confident that at that hour anything we saw would be dazzling.

All morning the kingdom’s former grandeur trumpeted from the hilltops. Spires and golden umbrellas atop the stupas glanced down at the town to remind foreign tourists and local shoppers alike of Mrauk U’s gone-by splendor.

Later, a horse cart driver took us to the town’s outskirts to see some larger temples, including the one known as the Temple of 90,000 Buddha Images. Only serious kingdoms build on that scale. At its height the empire controlled half of today's Bangladesh, and half of lower Myanmar, including all of Rakhine (aka Arakan) State.

Now the Rakhine people are waiting for their turn to come around again. It may be a while. Where the former palace stood are several square blocks of vacant ground. We knew some of the history but you can never know enough in a place where past glories conflict with present politics. It was fun to make up our own theories and then try them out on the locals, who are famous for wanting to quarrel. Nobody could agree. It’s a good thing they schedule wrestling matches from time to time.

These grappling contests differed most from anything we had seen elsewhere. Competitors scrap in a large outdoor circle until the red-robed referee calls the match. Then they circulate among the crowd, collecting tips in the form of different colored coupons that members of the audience are encouraged to buy as part of their entrance fee.

We slowly understood that such festivals and other commonplace rhythms in Mrauk U are what separates this attraction from a place like Bagan, where workaday life doesn’t really take place. Here, farmers and plumbers and goat herders all mix casually below and between the ancient structures.

Not that things look today anything like the way they looked five centuries ago. Crude archeological restoration has left some of the ruins looking more like fortresses than religious structures. And small Christmas-tree-like decorations on top of many of the temples told us they had been “Burmanized”—a quasi-colonial calling card

from Myanmar’s currently dominant culture that can be found in many of the country’s ethnic areas.

Most of the temples seemed undervisited, giving us the chance to park and focus and make pictures. The best images here were captured by Charlotte O’Sullivan. She has a small photography business in Yangon.

For the moment Mrauk U tourism will likely remain quiet. Ethnic conflict and a long boat ride remain big obstacles to luring visitors away from Myanmar's more well-known sites. Plans for an airport are on the drawing board but likely years away. We thought our timing was great.