Boat ride to Kyun Thiri

A boat ride across the Irrawaddy presents an opportunity to spend the morning with the monks and villagers of Kyun Thiri Island.  Although it’s only a 30 minute boat ride from Bagan itself, fewer tourists visit.

Wandering around the village feels a little like visiting a Saxon recreation village in England: the farming machinery is totally manual and is being used in a way largely unchanged for centuries, from a technological perspective at least. The only clue that we are in the 21^st Century is the glimpse you may get of a villager’s mobile phone. The architecture here is very unique as regular flooding means that everything is built on stilts, including the local monastery.  

You’ll pay a visit to the beautiful old wooden monastery, where the head monk is only the third in 120 years since the monastery was built. The rest of the morning is spent learning about the daily lives of this unique agricultural society, before heading back across the river to Bagan in time for lunch.