Near the top of the mountain you find two huge lions guarding the entrance to Kyaiktiyo. It's there that all visitors must remove their shoes and socks. In Myanmar shoes and socks must be taken off before entering the temple grounds, not just before entering buildings as in the rest of southeast Asia.

The boulder is about 25 feet high and sits on a natural rock platform that seems to have been built just to act as a pedestal for it. Yet hardly any part of it touches the rock base given its odd shape. It appears ready to crash down the mountain at any second. The entire boulder is plated in gold, and a golden, bell-shaped shrine sits on top. A gold lotus flower is painted on the base just below the rock. After climbing down the stairway you find the main shrine complex. There are several viewing platforms, pagodas, Buddha shrines and nat spirit shrines. Directly in front of the golden rock is the platform where most worshipers make offerings and offer their prayers. Further away there is a circle of eight gongs (one for each day of the Burmese week) with four statues of nats and angels in the center.

As at Shwedagon, the sacred and the festive seem to blend at Kyaiktiyo. The children seemed to be having a good time with the gongs, while the serene look on the adult's faces made it appear that they knew they were engaged in a sacrament. The most important shrine is to a hermit with a head shaped like the boulder. Legend has it that the hermit grew a hair of the Buddha and took it to the king with the instruction that it should be enshrined under a rock shaped like the hermit's head. The king was the son of a Zagwi (see the article on the nats) and a naga (sea dragon) so he had the power to find the rock at the bottom of the ocean. He built a ship that carried the rock from the ocean to the mountain. When he had the rock in place, the boat turned to stone. A stone that looks a bit like a ship is enshrined in the complex and is said to be the actual boat that transported the rock. As for the Buddha hair, it is said that the rock is balanced on the single hair.
Amazingly, there is even a walkway under the boulder. As you pass directly underneath it you couldn't help wondering if, after standing there for thousands of years, the golden rock might decide to come crashing down just then.
Worshipers place gold leaf on the rock as a donation, but only one small part of the rock is accessible. So that portion of the rock is lumpy with gold. Each gold leaf is thinner than the ink on a printed page. While I was there a real hermit was applying gold leaf. He posed for a picture afterward. In most southeast Asian nations, hermits are rare and mostly exist in legend. But in Burma some men continue to live austere lives, often in caves, and are believed to possess magical powers.

I have to say that sitting up on this mountain top on a cool, breazy, moon lit evening listening to the worshippers chanting in rhythm, praying to the magical boulder and pasting small pieces of gold leaf on to it for good luck is about as close to magic as you will find anywhere in this world...

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