Word: paganization
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...Pagan is low season for good reason. The relentless sun bakes its temple-strewn plain into a shimmering illusion of a chess game?if chess had 2,217 pieces, rather than 34. At midday even mad dogs take refuge, though not straw-hatted tourists on five-day whirlwind tours of Burma shuttling through their checklists of temples in air-conditioned comfort. The heat has its benefits, however. Summer is the time of flowers: thick bougainvillaea blooms in shockingly bright pink, jacarandas litter the paths with purple petals, and flame trees force starbursts of red against whitewashed temple walls...
Tucked into a crook of the Irrawaddy River, the Pagan Plain covers some 4,000 hectares and is laced with a complex network of sandy trails, which makes reaching the multitude of ancient temples, stupas and monasteries something of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure journey. Getting lost is not a worry. The main road is never far away and even the smaller temples, though identified only by numbers, are gems waiting to be discovered. Some are empty, others merely contain the shattered bases of iconic images long departed for Western living rooms. But occasionally a placid stone Buddha waits...
Once the sun sets, Pagan is transformed. The heat dissipates, replaced by a cool, invigorating breeze that calls out for an evening stroll. The reward is a brilliant display of stars undiminished by city lights. And should disorientation set in, the ever- present hawkers, many of whom live at the temples, are happy to set misguided travelers back on the right path home...
...ROAD Aside from tourism, Pagan's main industry is the confection of jaggery, or palm sugar. Hundreds of small palm plantations crowd the Pagan Plain, each tended by a family that taps its livelihood from high up in the fronds. The thin, sweet sap is boiled down in large vats to make a dark, flavorful sugar sold at roadside stands. But for the real treat, look beyond the woven palm baskets filled with the golden lumps for the flask bottles of potent palm toddy?the sap that is collected in the afternoon, after fermenting all day in the sun. Unrefined...
...don’t want to make it out like it was some kind of perfect transition,” he says. “You know, like once I was the happy pagan and now I’m the perfect, pure saint walking on water…but I’ve beaten a good number of my vices...