The plains of Bagan.

My guidebook's description of Bagan sets the scene well:

"Imagine all the cathedrals of Europe sitting on Manhattan Island - and then some - and you start to get a sense of the the ambition of the Bagan kings, who built as many as 4400 temples over a 230-year period on the plain of the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River".

Bagan is somewhere I've always wanted to visit. There are few places in the world like it for the scale and number of important monuments.

Rising in height from a few metres to over sixty, a few of these buildings would be astonishing - but scattered across an area of forty square kilometres are over two and a half thousand of them. To the horizon in all directions, spires punctuate the sky under a hot, hazy sun.

And all around life continues to be lived the way it has been for centuries: the land farmed by hand and cattle, ox carts collecting water from the river and children running barefoot on the dusty tracks.

When built 700-900 years ago a massive city also stood between the temples. Built of timber and bamboo, this has long since disappeared.

Bagan is easily comparable with Cambodia's temples at Angkor and under different circumstances it would be firmly on the tourist map as one of humanity's greatest creations, but thankfully it's not. So, the day I rented a bike and cycled around, I had this fascinating and atmospheric place pretty much to myself; temple after temple, silent and dusty - just me, some bats and nearly a millennium of civilisation.

Bagan is a wondrous place.