[2025 Bagan Attraction] Travel Guide for Bagan Golden Palace (Updated May)

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#0yentripFebruary2025 To get to Bagan from Yangon by night bus, buy a ticket at the bus ticket office in front of Yangon Central Railway Station and depart from Aung Mingla bus station. It takes about an hour by local bus from the ticket office to the bus station, and the bus station is huge and there are a lot of buses, so you need to get there early. As you walk through the bus station, guides will ask you "Which bus company is this?" If you show them your ticket, they will tell you. The sunset was on the riverside at the end of the road next to the Golden Palace in Old Bagan. It was a scorching sunset.

Government mandated reconstruction is everywhere is Bagan and the Golden Palace is a prime example of how things should NOT be done. Opened in 2008 in the heart of old Bagan this wooden monstrosity looks like a Disney world construction rather then a palace of a century old kingdom. It’s architecturally innacurate and excessive in cheaply made wooden decorations and exhibits. Chinese and Korean tourists flock here and you can’t miss it when in Old Bagan but it’s truly an eyesore. A replica of the original palace, the Bagan Golden Palace is a sight to behold for its golden charm and tranquil appeal. It lets the visitors get an insight into how the original palace looked like and how it functioned during ancient times. Several guided tours are available (in English as well), allowing visitors to understand the significance of each and every section of the Golden Palace . It also has a huge collection of artifacts and other items that belong to Royal families of old eras. Location: Bagan, Myanmar Timings: 4:00 am to 6:00 pm

Bagan in central Burma is one of the world’s greatest archeological sites, a sight to rival Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat but – for the time being at least – without the visitors. The setting is sublime – a verdant 26 square-mile plain, part-covered in stands of palm and tamarind caught in a bend of the lazy-flowing Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady) river and framed by the hazy silver-grey of distant mountains. Rising from the plain’s canopy of green are temples, dozens of them, hundreds of them, beautiful, other-worldly silhouettes that were built by the kings of Bagan between 1057 and 1287, when their kingdom was swept away by earthquakes and Kublai Khan and his invading Mongols. Some 2,230 of an original 4,450 temples survive, a legacy of the Buddhist belief that to build a temple was to earn merit. Most are superbly preserved or have been restored by Unesco, among others, and many contain frescoes and carvings and statues of Buddha, big and small. Only a handful are regularly visited, and though tourist numbers are increasing and the hawkers are beginning to appear, this is still, by the standards of sites of a similar beauty and stature, a gloriously unsullied destination.#nationalpark