Mount Popa takes its name from the Sanskrit word for flower, and it earns it: more than 200 springs rise on the volcano's slopes and keep them green in the middle of Myanmar's parched central dry zone. The mountain is an extinct volcano of 1,518 metres, silent since roughly 6050 BCE. But the silhouette that made Popa famous is not the mountain at all. It is Taung Kalat — "pedestal hill" — a sheer-sided volcanic plug standing off the volcano's south-western flank: the hardened rock of an old vent, left upright and alone once erosion stripped the softer ground from around it. A monastery of white halls and golden stupas covers its entire summit, reached by a covered stairway of 777 steps that the hermit U Khandi (1868-1949) spent his later years keeping in repair.
You climb barefoot, shoes left at the bottom, past troops of macaques that work the handrails and know exactly which bag holds food. At the foot of the rock stands Myanmar's most important shrine to the nats, the spirits Burmese Buddhists have honoured alongside the Buddha for a thousand years: all 37 of the official pantheon are enshrined here, among them Min Mahagiri and Popa Medaw, the flower-eating ogress of this mountain. From the summit terrace the plain runs out in every direction and the forested cone of Popa proper rises behind you. Reaching it is the hard part now. Since the 2021 coup, fighting has spread across central Myanmar and checkpoints on the roads have cut the shrine off from most of the pilgrims who once filled it. The monastery is still open and the monks still climb the steps, but the stalls at the base sit idle, and the macaques have gone thin on offerings that no longer come.