Bagan is an amazing place, I have been there twice, in 1984 and 2012. Those two pictures are from the recent visit, of course. There are now more temples there than before due to restoration efforts to attract tourists. Which has succeeded all too well as you can see from the attached photograph (turning the camera the other way…)
Anyway, I did have some misgivings about showing the "reality check" photos, but sometimes the color manipulations shown here on this site and in this thread are quite extreme. Seems to be the fashion now with too easy saturation and clarity sliders. Even those two pictures of mine were of course slightly adjusted, second somewhat more with clarity and saturation, the first one not all that much (at least compared to most landscape shots shown here). But whatever, go there yourselves to see how bland the reality is, in reality. Still amazing.
Easy enough to do in-camera as well.
The browns/oranges of the first two just involved setting colour temperature to 9900 and could have been done on film by putting a strong warming filter in front of it.
The third could have been accomplished non-digitally using a foliage enhancing filter, a GND and a graduated warming filter.
These methods have been around for as long as colour landscape photography.
Re: the saturation - I'm used to shooting on Velvia and Kodachrome and having images printed on Cibachrome or Fujiflex. To me, anything else looks drab and undersaturated.
The thing is, what the camera sees is not what the eye and brain see. Put a white piece of paper into direct sunlight at sunrise or sunset and I can guarantee you'll see orange or yellow, not white. But the camera's white balance will try to correct for that and make the scene much cooler than you register it to be, in order to correct the white balance. Also, the camera's default curves are optimised for low-dynamic-range, general-purpose shots. Shoot a typical portrait with it and it does well. But put it in front of a high-dynamic-range landscape and the curves fail horribly - skies are well-exposed or even almost blown-out, while the shadows are barely above black. The data is there - just that the typical curves increase the midtone contrast rather than the shadow contrast, pushing the foreground deep into the blacks. Which is not what the eye-brain combination sees at all - when looking at the foreground, we are able to see lots of detail there and don't register it as particularly dark, because our pupils dilate and our retinal sensitivity increases. And the pupil and retina change on the fly as we look from the foreground to the bright background and to the foreground again, putting together an image in our brain with both foreground and background detail, without one or the other being blown out or underexposed.
In short, taking something straight out of camera and shooting at the 'correct' white balance is no more realistic than applying filters and adjusting the bit-toning curves manually (not local contrast enhancement - that's an entirely different matter), and probably less true to what the eye-brain combination see. This is because the camera applies default curves and colour processing anyway, which tend to reflect what the human eye sees in typical family portraits and other low-DR, mid-morning lighting situations much more than what the eye/brain sees in high-DR situations with intense coloured lighting, such as a sunset or a strongly-backlit wedding scene. Change the lighting, change the DR and you have to change the curves and the white balance - but the camera doesn't do that in a way that reflects what the brain sees (not the eye - the eye darts between different parts of the scene, changing its 'exposure' characteristics on the fly, and the brain puts it all together into one large panorama). And, unlike the human brain, the camera only responds to incoming photons, not non-visual senses or mood - people will often 'see' a sunset as warm-toned (because it's warm) and an ice field landscape as cool-toned (because it's cold) but the camera doesn't reflect that without adjustments by the photographer.
